English orthography, or the English spelling system, may not be as transparent or easy to spell as Spanish, Italian, or Serbo-Croatian, but it’s not crazy! Most English word spellings can be explained and most English words do follow spelling patterns.
If your child has a learning disability, they may benefit from assistive technology tools that play to their strengths and work around their challenges.
Play is the work of children — through play and interaction, children learn how to talk, listen, read, and write. Read about typical behaviors of emergent and beginning readers, and how each of these behaviors relate to reading and writing.
Here are some ideas to keep children engaged and learning throughout the summer, whether they’re interested in reading, science, art, nature, history, current events, or almost anything else.
Children with print awareness can begin to understand that written language is related to oral language. Children who lack print awareness are unlikely to become successful readers. Indeed, children’s performance on print awareness tasks is a very reliable predictor of their future reading achievement.
Have you ever heard of “assumicide”? For generations, too many people assumed that children with disabilities couldn’t learn to read — so they never gave them a chance. Hosted by Molly Ringwald, A Chance to Read looks at the reading challenges facing kids with disabilities, and what schools across the country are doing to help them find success.
The Committee for the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children has compiled detailed lists of literacy accomplishments for children of different ages. Find out what the typical child can do in first grade.
Almost every interaction in a child’s world is preparing them to become a reader and writer. This page outlines the stages of writing development, and tips for adults to help along the way.
Reading expert Linda Farrell works with Aiko on a common letter reversal — confusing the letters ‘b’ and ‘d’. Ms. Farrell coaches Aiko to look at the letters during b/d practice and to look at the words while she works with Aiko to read short vowel words accurately.
If you suspect that your child would benefit from using AT at school, it’s important to discuss your observations, suggestions, and questions with your child’s teachers. Make time to speak in person. In this article, you’ll find tips for opening the conversation with example conversation starters.
Although we may not be aware of it, we do not skip over words, read print selectively, or recognize words by sampling a few letters of the print, as whole language theorists proposed in the 1970s. Reading is accomplished with letter-by-letter processing of the word.
Joanne Meier has more than 20 years of experience in the field of education, including serving on the faculty at the University of Virginia for six years where she trained reading specialists and future classroom teachers. Dr. Meier was Reading Rockets’ research-to-practice consultant from 2002 to 2014, where she wrote the Page by Page blog — sharing best practices in supporting young readers at home and in the classroom.
Marcia Invernizzi is a professor of education at the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia and director of UVA’s McGuffey Reading Center. She is also one of the creators of the Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening tool (PALS) and the co-founder of the Book Buddies community tutoring program.
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!
