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…
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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…
Choosing the Best Dictionary for Students
Selecting the best dictionary for your students can make all the difference. As parents and teachers, we know the value of reference books like the dictionary and the thesaurus. These reference books help us to understand what we read, build our vocabulary, and improve our writing skills. As a teacher, I have a variety of…
Vocabulary and Reading: The Connection
How are vocabulary and reading connected? To understand what you have read, you need to know the meaning of the words you are reading. Research tells us that vocabulary knowledge, including both oral and written vocabulary, is critically important for a child’s success in school (Kamil et al., 2008). That being said, each person has…
