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…
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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, pay attention to, and remember details. Executive function also involves flexible thinking. This is used when you have an assignment, project, or problem that can be done in several ways.…
Brain-Body Connection: Movement and Learning
How does the brain-body connection affect overall learning skills? Most of us don’t think about learning skills in conjunction with the brain-body connection and movement. However, the brain-body connection and movement are very important to your ability to learn and master reading skills. The brain and body work together as a machine, one designed to…
Vocabulary and Reading Comprehension
Reading Comprehension and Vocabulary are Connected Going back to my first year of teaching, I found that vocabulary directly impacts reading comprehension. I had a student who could read beautifully and fluently, but when asked what she read, she went blank. When you don’t understand a word or how it is connected or associated with…
10 Best Practices to Improve Reading Comprehension
When you use best practices for improving reading comprehension, it is easier to understand what you have read. Reading comprehension is the ability to understand, analyze, synthesize, and use what you have read. Continue reading to discover 10 best practices to improve reading comprehension.
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…
What Causes Problems with Spelling?
Many children and even adults have problems with spelling. Spell check can often only get you so far. Sometimes spell check cannot even tell what word it is you are trying to spell. You may have even written a word that is a word but not the word you intended to write. Poor spelling abilities…
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…
Auditory Processing and Spelling
What is Auditory Processing? Have you ever heard a new word and tried to spell it? Doing this helps you to remember the new word. The process of reading new words is much easier than spelling new words. Reading is the process of decoding. Spelling is the process of encoding. These are two sides of…
Visual Discrimination and Reading
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…
