A mother describes the warning signs for dyslexia in her daughter that she didn’t see clearly. She also shares the life-changing resources that helped her understand what dyslexia is and how to get her daughter the support she needed to thrive.
Reading ability is determined by many factors, and requires the development of certain skills through early reading instruction to attain initial success and build on it.
Familiarity with the five essential components (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension) in core, comprehensive reading programs is necessary for all teachers of reading. Although all components are needed at all levels, different skills and activities are emphasized at different stages of reading development.
This article offers some ideas on how to introduce poetry to ELLs and integrate it with reading instruction, as well as some ideas for reading poetry aloud in a way that will encourage oral language development.
Discover the typical literacy milestones for your second grader, and how to support your child’s developing skills in reading and writing. Use the links on the left to find activities, videos, and other resources to build skills in these key areas: recognizing the sounds in speech, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and writing.
Dialogic reading involves an adult and child having a dialogue around the text they are reading aloud together. Learn how to use this strategy effectively to help kids build vocabulary and verbal fluency skills and understand story structure and meaning. Downloadable handouts to help guide parents in using dialogic reading are available in English and 17 other languages.
Learn how to write Individualized Education Plan (IEP) goals that are SMART (specific, measurable, use action words, realistic, and time-limited) and based on research-based educational practice.
Children’s knowledge of letter names and shapes is a strong predictor of their success in learning to read. Knowing letter names is strongly related to children’s ability to remember the forms of written words and their ability to treat words as sequences of letters.
Reading expert Linda Farrell shows Xavier how to read and spell unfamiliar multisyllable words with one vowel letter in each syllable. First she makes sure that Xavier has three prerequisite skills: being able to read one-syllable nonsense words, knowing how to count syllables in spoken words, and naming the vowel letters. Xavier learns that every syllable has a vowel, and that he can count the vowel letters to break a long word into syllables to make it easy to read. To figure out how many syllables are in a word, Ms. Farrell teaches Xavier to ask two questions: How many vowels are in the word? Are the vowels together or apart? In a separate video below, Ms. Farrell listens to Xavier read aloud to help him read with accuracy.
Nursery rhymes are important for young children because they help develop an ear for our language. Both rhyme and rhythm help kids hear the sounds and syllables in words, which helps kids learn to read! Here are some activities and recommended poetry books to aid your child’s developing poetry, rhyming, and rhythm skills.
What are some ways that we can gauge vocabulary development in the content areas? In this article, the authors explain how the intricacies of word knowledge make assessment difficult, particularly with content area vocabulary. They suggest ways to improve assessments that more precisely track students’ vocabulary growth across the curriculum, including English language learners.
