Parents who have a child they suspect has a disability are likely to have many questions about special education. Find answers to commonly asked questions about special education eligibility, IEP’s, and re-evaluation in this guide for parents.
As students grow older, they are asked by their teachers to do more and more with the information they have stored in their brains. These types of requests require accessing higher order thinking (HOT).
To help students become comfortable with multimedia, it is useful to incorporate it into your instruction wherever possible. Providing varied means of representing information (Universal Design for Learning) can help improve your students’ access to complex texts.
With the range and variety of commercial software products on the shelves today, how can an educator or parent choose a program that will most benefit a particular student? Where are product reviews that can inform the decision?
The goal of phonics instruction is to help children learn the alphabetic principle — the idea that letters represent the sounds of spoken language — and that there is an organized, logical, and predictable relationship between written letters and spoken sounds.
Reading Rockets has packed a “virtual beach bag” of activities for teachers to help families get ready for summer and to launch students to fun, enriching summertime experiences. Educators will find materials to download and distribute as well as ideas and resources to offer to students and parents to help ensure summer learning gain rather than loss.
National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Gene Luen Yang calls us all to read Without Walls, exploring books about characters who look or live differently than you, topics you haven’t discovered, or formats that you haven’t tried.
Writing instruction is an essential component of literacy in K-5 classrooms. Children who practice daily writing strengthen phonemic awareness, spelling, vocabulary, comprehension, critical thinking, and communication skills.
Wordless picture books may be better defined by what they do contain — visually rendered narratives — rather than what they do not contain. This article challenges traditional ways of looking at wordless picturebooks and offers a few approaches for integrating wordless picturebooks into a wider range of classrooms, preschool through middle school.
The NICHD Early Interventions Project was designed to increase reading achievement in nine low-performing schools in the District of Columbia. This article describes the experience of one researcher working with these schools, and makes recommendations for policymakers and administrators.
Many texts contain language (figurative and literal) that can be a barrier to comprehension. We need to see those language walls and teach students how to scale them so their reading has meaning.
Here are a dozen simple strategies to help your children keep the academic skills they learned during the school year. Support them as they read. Give them material that is motivating — and some of it should be easy. Help them enjoy books and feel pleasure — not pressure — from reading. The summer should be a relaxed time where their love of learning can flower.
Social English, or the language of conversation, may develop very quickly, but mastering academic English, the language of school, can take years. Use these tips to lead students toward full language proficiency.
We thank our teachers every day for the important work they do in our classrooms — especially for sharing their love of books, reading, writing, and creating a vibrant literacy community.
Motivation is key to school success. Just as the actor asks a director, “What is my motivation, for this scene?,” the child turns to teachers, parents, and peers to discover the “why” of learning. Motivation is often defined as a need or drive that energizes behavior toward a goal.
The number of children in child care is quickly increasing. Early childcare can lay the foundations for reading, and help prevent reading problems from developing. This article describes the current state of child care, and the challenges we face in improving its quality.
With careful and creative planning, literacy instruction can be adapted to meet the needs of every student in the classroom. Five ways teachers can provide a literacy education for all learners are offered here.
Language learning offers a unique and exciting opportunity to integrate music. Many people have had the experience of learning a world language and singing simple, silly songs in class. The introduction of music provides a light-hearted and fun way to interact with another language and culture.
