Introducing elementary-aged students to local and community news through the newspaper can help them strengthen comprehension and research skills. Community news keeps it relevant to the kids, enhancing motivation to discuss and learn more about what they are reading. Classroom activities are included in this article.
For young children, their home is the best place to begin learning about math, science, and social studies, build early reading and writing skills, and to stretch their creativity. Get practical tips on how to look at your home through the lens of “learning through experiences.” You’ll also find ways to connect learning from school-to-home and home-to-school.
Libraries are great resources for families with young children; you can find books, entertainment, educational and cultural enrichment, literacy tips, and other valuable information. Here are nine reasons to visit your public library!
Identifying a reading problem is a challenge without a sense for what typical literacy development looks like. Find out what language accomplishments are typical for most children from birth to age three.
Reading fluency is a child’s ability to read a book or other text accurately, with reasonable speed, and with appropriate expression. A fluent reader doesn’t have to stop and “decode” each word and can focus attention on what the story or text means. Fluency is the bridge between decoding words and understanding what has been read!
A simple trip to the grocery store can turn into a real learning experience for your preschooler. Here are some tips to build literacy and math skills while shopping.
STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) learning includes efforts to get kids involved in computer programming. Coding builds logical thinking and problem-solving skills. It’s also creative and collaborative! Find out how you can introduce your child to the basic concepts of programming.
The social curriculum conveys the values, belief systems, and expectations of behavior in school. It is just as important as the academic curriculum, but is often “hidden” for children with learning challenges. Here you’ll find some effective strategies to intentionally facilitate social inclusion in your classroom and school-wide.
The holiday season is a time for family togetherness, fun, and friendship. But children who struggle with social and behavioral problems can feel lonely and excluded during this happy time. This article gives you a dozen ways to help your child join the fun.
A psychologist specializing in language-based learning disabilities explains how to talk to children about their LD: All the parts you need to be smart are in your brain. Nothing is missing or broken. The difference between your brain and one that doesn’t have an LD is that your brain gets “traffic jams” on certain highways.
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!
Get an overview of developmentally appropriate teaching practices recommended by the International Literacy Association (ILA) and the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC).
Research-based reading instruction allows children opportunities to both understand the building blocks and expand their use of language, oral and written. These opportunities are illustrated by classroom activities in these twelve components of reading instruction for grades one through three.
Helping kids learn to read is a great goal for community groups. An important step for all groups is to not only define how to help, but also to identify the children in the community who could must benefit from what you do. This article provides tips for finding and serving these children.
Inferences are what we figure out based on an experience. Helping your child understand when information is implied (or not directly stated) will improve her skill in drawing conclusions and making inferences. These skills will be needed for all sorts of school assignments, including reading, science and social studies.
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a way of thinking about teaching and learning that helps give all students an equal opportunity to succeed. This approach offers flexibility in the ways students access material, engage with it and show what they know. Developing lesson plans this way helps all kids, but it may be especially helpful for kids with learning and attention issues.
Phonological awareness is a set of critical pre-reading skills: the ability to hear, identify, and play with the sounds in spoken language — including rhymes, syllables, and phonemes. Children with strong phonological awareness skills are ready to become readers.
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.
How can we supplement the limited time available for vocabulary instruction while motivating students to attend to the words they are learning? As a part of an academic word vocabulary intervention, the authors challenged sixth-grade students to find their words in the world around them.
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.
A word wall is a visible display in a classroom that features a collection of words students are studying. Word walls can focus on high-frequency words, word study examples, academic language, and words that are introduced in the content areas. They can be used to support phonics, spelling, vocabulary, comprehension, and writing.
