October is Dyslexia Awareness Month! Do you know that dyslexia is a topic around the globe? It's true! 

Dyslexia impacts people across all languages, races, socio-economic statuses, and genders. While the prevalence rates for dyslexia may vary somewhat across writing systems, there appears to be core deficits across writing systems in the area of phonological deficits (Goswami, 2015). 

I have had conversations with people worldwide regarding dyslexia and its instructional and emotional impacts on our children. We are all seeking the best ways to help close the reading gap and meet student needs in a way that preserves their emotional well-being and sets them up for success.

Unfortunately, there are still people and scholars that think dyslexia does not exist. To that, I say, look at the brain neuroscience, the fMRI, and the years and years of research about dyslexia, and then #saydyslexia because our children deserve to have educators and our society understand their journey. 

My...

*This is an extension of the blog post How to Support Dyslexic Students' Self-Confidence. Read more about dyslexia strengths here.

When the Excitement of the New School Year Wanes

The beginning of the new school year can elicit all kinds of emotions. Do you remember the excitement and nervousness that comes with starting something new? Those butterflies in your stomach flutter between feeling sick to your stomach to a little twinge of adrenaline? For many, the beginning of the school year can feel like this. 

As we move into the daily school routines and schedules, the new school year's excitement may be waning or bringing into light some different emotions. For many students with dyslexia and learning differences, as the newness of school wears off and the lesson pace increases, the academic pressures and demands can leave students feeling more anxious than excited. The feelings of anxiousness and frustration may arise due to academic hurdles, new routines, inappropriate or denied ...

What would happen if we shifted our approach to reading instruction from reactive to proactive?

We need to stop and think about why our students struggle with reading at a national level. According to the last National Report Card, 35% of all 4th-graders and 34% of all 8th graders performed at or above proficiency. That leaves 65-66% of our students reading at the basic level or below. 

The number of students behind in reading requires shifting our approach at the core. All students are at risk of not having until they can read. 

I have always felt that this reactive approach is like a sinking ship where we are working so hard to scoop the water from the boat that we don't analyze why the ship is sinking in the first place. We will never be able to keep the ship afloat this way, and our national reading scores prove this.

So what can we do as educators in the system? Providing core instruction within the general classroom that follows the principles of structured literacy and in...

At a recent training, one of the participants asked me about our students using coding (the diacritical marks used when analyzing words) and was unsure of the benefits. I love that she asked me this because it is also something many parents may find unfamiliar.

Coding words allow students who are learning to read, who have dyslexia, or who may struggle to have a clear strategy for decoding unknown words. The use of set markings is a scaffold within our instruction that helps students focus on key components of a word. Coding removes the guessing of words because students have an explicit and systematic approach to accessing unknown words. Coding is taught systematically and explicitly through multi-sensory learning within a structured literacy approach. 

The goal of coding is to gain reading with accuracy. Accuracy is the ability to decode single words correctly with freedom from mistakes or errors. This scaffold supports students as they learn and practice a new skill - primarily th...

When we think of dyslexic students and struggling readers, we know that academic support is crucial to success. We understand that the science of reading and structured, systematic instruction is essential for students to achieve literacy success. 

We also know that struggling children may be surrounded by feelings of shame, unacceptance, anxiety, and low self-esteem. In fact, research shows that 29% of dyslexic students also have depression and/or anxiety, some of which is heightened by the expectations and struggles that come along with dyslexia. 

We all want our children to feel successful and confident and know the importance of looking at the other components that support student success. But it raises the question of how.

Support For Student Success

How do empathy and understanding of dyslexia support success and self-confidence? 

How does the environment support success? 

What role do mindset and metacognition play? 

How can we build self-advocacy skills, and what is th...

The number of repetitions matter when planning reading instruction for the dyslexic learner, While some may believe that our lessons are filled with constant drilling of skills, this is not the case. Structured literacy is designed to weave in multiple practices within a lesson and review previously learned skills. 

I like to think of it this way: when athletes learn a new skill, they practice the movement repeatedly with the goal of perfection in mind. I was a competitive gymnast, and we would practice our routines to the point of automaticity so that when it was time to perform, it was automatic. It had been practiced over and over again. This repetition made the skills stick. A key thing to remember about repetition is that perfect practice is what makes perfect — not just practice. Performing tasks repetitively and correctly is what helps the skills learned from those tasks set in ("The Power of Repetition," 2016).

Learning happens in a very similar way. With correct repetition o...

The topic of audiobooks comes up often and is an accommodation that I recommend for all of my students. Audiobooks have gained popularity among the general population, with 1.3 billion dollars in 2020. While audiobooks are an excellent tool for anyone, they provide additional benefits for those with dyslexia or other learning differences. We know the importance of becoming literate in our society, but how do audiobooks weigh into our children's reading goals? Let's dig into some of the benefits and possible obstacles.

Benefits of Audiobooks

Audiobooks provide access to grade-level and higher-level text

Why is this important? We need to provide students with the tools to access the curriculum. Audiobooks provide this bridge. Students are given audiobook access for curriculum reading for multiple reasons. 

Audiobooks level the playing field

Audiobooks are an accommodation that helps ensure our dyslexic learners can access the curriculum. It levels the playing field as students work ...

While we think of handwriting skills in school-age children, early development plays a role in children gaining pencil control. There is so much we can do to build those early writing skills before children pick up a pencil! 

Developing large and fine motor skills is the basis for handwriting skills and the proper instruction. Often when working with older or early elementary students who struggle with handwriting, I will embed some work with fine motor skills. 

How Children Use A Pencil

To hold a pencil correctly, a child must have control of hand muscles, especially the pincer grasp. If you look closely at the grip this little two-year-old uses to hold her paintbrush, you can see her use of the pointer finger and her thumb (pincer grasp) to hold the brush. Her pincer grasp is developed enough for her to move toward the five-finger pencil grasp and eventually to the three-finger pencil grasp used for writing. It is important to note that there are stages of development for pencil...

When we think of classrooms, we almost always envision an alphabet with pictures posted somewhere in the room. We may not realize that the keywords or images used in alphabet posters and books matter - a lot more than you may think! Many cute and colorful alphabet posters are available, and we may gravitate toward what is aesthetically pleasing, but these are not the best choices for our students and classrooms. 

Analyzing Our ABC Charts - Why It Matters

Reading is the ability to connect spoken sounds to their letter representations. We want students to elicit the smallest unit of spoken sound, or phoneme, in its purest form. For this reason, being mindful of keywords is essential. 

What does this mean? The ability to segment phonemes (sounds) into their smallest units and then blend those sounds into words is what is needed to read and spell. Keywords or pictures we choose to link to graphemes (letter/s) need to connect directly to the individual phoneme (sound). 

In English, soun...

This is part 2 of the Learning At The Beach series. Click HERE to read part 1. 

We made it back home from our fun-filled week at the beach with buckets of shells and happy hearts. 🌊 While it was a week full of fun, we also snuck in some learning. Last week, I shared how we played activities like "Beat the Wave" and "Sandy Sound Dictation." This week, I'm sharing some more activities that we played in the sand as part 2 of the mini-series, Learning at the beach. 

One of the powerful reminders for us as parents and educators is that it is possible to play with a purpose. Playful learning can set the stage for enjoyable interactions, reduce the stress sometimes associated with reading, and engage students in reading tasks while still focusing on a learning objective. Here are some additional games/activities that we played at the beach. Whether you are headed to the beach this summer or spending it at home or elsewhere, you can certainly bring these activities into your day.  

Learning...