Eli, a young boy, tells us what it is like to have dysgraphia. Regina Richards, a well-known expert on dysgraphia (and Eli's mom), explains how to help children who struggle with the challenges Eli describes. Practical techniques discussed include POWER: Prepare, Organize, Write, Edit, Revise.

The National Center on Student Progress Monitoring has created a chart of scientifically based tools to measure students' progress. Determine which one best fits your school's needs.

Teaching vocabulary is complex. What words are important for a child to know and in what context? In this excerpt from Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction, the authors consider what principles might be used for selecting which words to explicitly teach.

What is Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI) and how does it work? Find out more about CORI and how it helps children's comprehension and motivation through science inquiry.

Concerns about how to build academic vocabulary and weave its instruction into curricula are common among classroom teachers. This article reviews the research and offers some practical suggestions for teachers.

What should fluency instruction look like? And, what can teachers do to help students whose fluency is far behind their peers'? This article should help practitioners use of fluency-based assessments and select instructional practices.

Writing is a terrific way for children to express their thoughts, creativity, and uniqueness. It is also a fundamental way in which children learn to organize ideas and helps them to be better readers. Here are some suggestions that engage your child in the writing process.

Letters are all around us! Here are some ideas to use print found in your everyday environment to help develop your child's reading skills.

The best strategy for developing reading fluency is to provide your students with many opportunities to read the same passage orally several times. To do this, you should first know what to have your students read. Second, you should know how to have your students read aloud repeatedly.

Every child is unique and has an individual rate of development. This chart represents, on average, the age by which most children will accomplish skills in hearing, understanding, and talking.

Many young readers are puzzled by the rules and exceptions of spelling. Research has shown, however, that learning to spell and learning to read rely on much of the same underlying knowledge. Read this article to learn more about the relationships between letters and sounds and how a proper understanding of spelling mechanics can lead to improved reading.

Parents and teachers can do a lot to encourage higher order thinking. Here are some strategies to help foster children's complex thinking.

Almost every interaction in a child's world is preparing them to become a reader and writer. This article outlines the stages of writing development, and tips for adults to help along the way.

These six short video clips give you the chance to watch and learn effective classroom-based assessment strategies. The video clips are from Reading Rockets' PBS television series Launching Young Readers.

The following are sample charts you can use when assessing students informally in the classroom. Most of the assessments here should be given one-on-one.

Is your school planning to implement student progress monitoring (SPM)? Are you thinking of using it in your classroom? If so, consider a number of factors to make SPM an integral part of classroom activities, rather than a series of isolated assessments unconnected to other parts of the learning experience. This brief offers some suggestions on how to use SPM in an integrated way.

Learning happens when we connect new information to what we already know. When children have limited knowledge about the world, they have a smaller capacity to learn more about it. Here are four ways teachers can build content knowledge that will expand the opportunity for students to forge new connections — and make them better independent readers and learners.

Rather than introducing a new word in isolation, teachers should introduce students to a rich variety of words that share the same root. This approach should help diverse learners including English language learners, make important connections among vocabulary words within the same family, and transfer core ideas across content areas.

Creating a word family chart with the whole class or a small group builds phonemic awareness, a key to success in reading. Students will see how words look alike at the end if they sound alike at the end — a valuable discovery about our alphabetic writing system. They'll also see that one little chunk (in this case "-an") can unlock lots of words!

Activities that stimulate phonemic awareness in preschool and elementary school children are one sure way to get a child ready for reading! Here are eight of them from expert Marilyn Jager Adams.

Alphabetics is a term for the letter-sound elements of learning to read, including phonemic awareness and phonics. In this summary, find out what practices for teaching alphabetics have been proven effective by research.

These short video clips give you the chance to watch and learn effective phonemic awareness activities. Many of the video clips are from Reading Rockets' PBS television series Launching Young Readers.

Many teachers will be using supplemental phonics and word-recognition materials to enhance reading instruction for their students. In this article, the authors provide guidelines for determining the accessibility of these phonics and word recognition programs.

Phonics instruction is a way of teaching reading that stresses the acquisition of letter-sound correspondences and their use in reading and spelling.

These six short video clips give you the chance to watch and learn effective phonics activities. The video clips are from Reading Rockets' PBS television series Launching Young Readers.

One way to help a child comprehend what he is reading is to encourage him to visualize parts of the story in his mind. These "mind movies" help clarify information, increase understanding, and can include any of the five senses. Try these practices below when reading with your child.

How can you help kids develop print awareness? Here are some sample questions and prompts you can use before, during, and after a read aloud activity to help children activate basic knowledge about print and books.