Visual Discrimination Visual discrimination is the ability to discern subtle similarities and differences visually. This is the process of seeing the details of what we are looking at. What is the same? What is different? Shapes, sizes, and colors are details to be looked at. In regard to reading, when you see the details and…
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Auditory Processing Activities
Auditory processing is one of the three ways we learn. We learn by hearing (auditory processing), seeing (visual processing), and doing (tactile-kinesthetic processing). Good listening skills are needed for ease in learning. Many of you may have heard of auditory processing disorder (CAPD or APD). The following behaviors are symptoms of APD: difficulty hearing speech…
Executive Function and Reading
“If You Fail to Plan, You Plan to Fail.”– Benjamin Franklin Executive function is all about planning and organizing. It’s also your ability to strategize and pay attention to and remember details. Executive function also involves flexible thinking. This is used when you have an assignment or project, or a problem that can be done…
4th of July Family Activities
The 4th of July is perfect for outside activities in your backyard, like a BBQ. Some of our favorite activities include relay races and obstacle courses. You might not realize it, but obstacle courses and relay races improve several areas of learning, including laterality, directionality, visual memory, and auditory memory. These family activities target the mind-body connection, which…
Vocabulary and Reading Comprehension
Reading Comprehension and Vocabulary are Connected Going back to my first year of teaching, I found that reading comprehension was impacted directly by vocabulary. I had a student that could read beautifully and fluently, but when asked what it was that she read, she went blank. When you don’t understand a word, how it is…
The Visual Processing System: How Does it Impact Learning?
Visual processing often means how well you discriminate between one letter and another or one word and another. This is prominent with kids who confuse letters, also known as letter reversals. Below are some examples of letters and words that kids mix up…
6 Benefits of Summer Reading Programs
The benefits of summer reading programs are well documented. In fact, summer reading programs have been around for more than a century, and they continue on because of their great benefits. There are many shapes and sizes of summer reading programs, from online reading and answering questions to reading library books, to 4-hour per day…
Summer Learning Loss: How to Prevent the Summer Slide
4 Steps to Stop Summer Learning Loss Kids often lose much of what they learned from the school year over the summer. This is because most of the time, during the summer, we don’t spend much time stimulating the brain and keeping them active. It’s typical for kids to lose between two and four months…
Best Practices for Teaching Phonics
What is phonics? Phonics is the ability to pair individual sounds with a visual symbol (letters). This method is frequently used to teach reading. Phonics teaches the sounds that letters or groups of letters make when spoken. Phonics is the process of matching sounds to letters. Reading experts refer to this as the alphabetic principle.…
Phonemic Awareness and Reading
What is Phonemic Awareness? Phonemic awareness is critical to reading and is the first of the five principles of reading. Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds – phonemes – in spoken words. A phoneme is a unit of sound that distinguishes one word from another, for example, /b/, /k/,…