Our library provides effective, research-based classroom strategies to help strengthen your students’ skills in phonological awareness, decoding, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and writing.
Children may struggle with reading for a variety of reasons, including limited experience with books, speech and hearing problems, and poor phonemic awareness.
Pre-correcting and prompting remind students of behavior expectations before potential behavior problems occur. Learn how to use this behavior strategy in your classroom, using gestures, visual or verbal cues and supports, or modeling.
This article discusses one component of writing mechanics — finesse with sound/symbol correspondence. It describes a method, called Memory Foundations for Reading, that can be used by a parent with a single child or a teacher with a group and which helps children use many senses to recall letter sounds.
This article describes research-based principles and best practices for reading to deaf children. The underlying principle is a positive belief in the children’s ability to become strong, enthusiastic readers.
Play with letters, words, and sounds. Hosted by Annette Bening, this episode focuses on how children learn the relationship between sounds, letters, and words as an initial step before being able to decode the printed word. Features children’s book author and illustrator Norman Bridwell (Clifford the Big Red Dog).
Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR) teaches students to use comprehension strategies while working cooperatively. Student strategies include previewing the text; giving ongoing feedback by deciding “click” (I get it) or “clunk” (I don’t get it) at the end of each paragraph; “getting the gist” of the most important parts of the text; and “wrapping up” key ideas. Find out how to help students of mixed achievement levels apply comprehension strategies while reading content area text in small groups.
Find out how to help your students improve their writing through activities and tools that support the drafting stage. Show your students how to use technology tools to create, revise, and store their drafts in a digital writing portfolio.
Applaud your budding story writer. Hosted by Vivica A. Fox, this episode examines the connection between reading and writing and between spelling and composition. The program features successful methods for encouraging children to write and build their vocabularies.
Brenda Smith Myles, Ph.D., is currently a researcher, consultant, and author of many books on autism spectrum disorder, including The Hidden Curriculum, Asperger Syndrome and Difficult Moments, and Simple Strategies That Work! Helpful Hints for All Educators of Students With Asperger Syndrome, High-Functioning Autism, and Related Disabilities.
When students practice observing in science, they use their senses to collect information about objects and events related to a question, topic, or problem to solve in science. Learn some strategies to help students organize and analyze their data through presentations, sharing, and discussion.
Learn about specific strategies you can use to differentiate instruction to help your students overcome fluency problems, as well technology tools that can support development of fluency skills.
This study of first and second graders looked at teacher-led read alouds as a way to introduce science concepts. Results suggest that multiple exposures to a related concept across different stories gave students more time to build a mental representation of important ideas. This evidence suggests that moving beyond a single text as a source for building students’ understanding is an important instructional approach.
Respectful redirection is a quick, in-the-moment classroom strategy to give corrective, clear feedback to students in a neutral way. Learn how to use this strategy, why it works, and see it in action.
When schools screen large numbers of students, they may under- or over-identify students with disabilities. Find out how school-based screening can be used effectively.
Discover ways to support literacy skills such as predicting, inference, cause and effect, and categorizing, as well as build STEM vocabulary and background knowledge, at home and in the classroom.
You may have children in your life who aren’t as successful with reading as they could be. The challenge is that not all reading difficulties look the same, and not all reading difficulties should be addressed in the same way.
Reading in the “comfort zone” means that students read well enough to understand the text. Here’s a simple technique that students can use to determine if a book is right for them.
Phonological awareness is critical for learning to read any alphabetic writing system. And research shows that difficulty with phoneme awareness and other phonological skills is a predictor of poor reading and spelling development.
Learning a second language for school is not simply a linguistic challenge; it poses social, cultural, academic, and cognitive challenges as well. This article describes a conceptual model for acquiring a second language for school that reflects all these challenges, and makes recommendations for instruction stemming from this model.
