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…

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, project, or problem that can be done in several…

Phonemic Awareness and Reading

What is Phonemic Awareness? 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/, and /s/ in the words bat, cat, and sat. Phonemic awareness is critical to reading 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…

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.…

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