Since the start of the 2021-22 school year, I have had the honor of acting as district literacy consultant for the Lynbrook School District on Long Island, which took the brave step of completely overhauling its Tier 1 reading instruction to align with evidence-based practices, starting with the district’s Kindergarten Center. Read about it here. This school year, the first-grade teachers are continuing the transition by implementing the Sounds-Write program with the same cohort of children. For the first time, the district will be using decodable books for all emergent readers instead of leve ..read more

I regularly stay in touch with former clients, wanting to know how they are doing after we finish our tutoring partnership. Six years ago, I tutored a boy, Matthew, when he was in second grade. Now in eighth grade, his mother, Keri, and I recently talked about how far he has come. A few years ago, Keri was kind enough to allow me to interview her for one of my blogs entitled “An Interview with a Teacher Whose Child Has Dyslexia.” Matthew was in fifth grade when I interviewed Keri, and she told me how frustrated she was that her teaching degree had not prepared her to help her own child. Balan ..read more

The Orton-Gillingham (OG) approach is considered the “Gold Standard” for teaching children to read, especially children with language-based learning difficulties such as dyslexia.  Parents clamor for OG or OG-based programs, and many spend significant amounts of money on private tutoring to remedy reading problems. There are, however, promising intervention programs available that can achieve the same results at a fraction of the cost. The Word Wasp: Word Articulation Spelling & Pronunciation One such program is Word Wasp (WW), a reading intervention program created in the U ..read more

https://www.thedyslexiainitiative.org/post/time-to-burn-the-boat The post Time to Burn the Boat appeared first on High Five Literacy ..read more

How is this reading program different from all other reading programs? It’s not Passover yet, but we should be asking the following four questions: Do the 60% or more of students across the country not meeting grade level proficiency in reading all have learning disabilities?  Why is student growth stagnant even though so many children receive reading pullout services?  Why do so many students have IEPs?  Why is the importance of “fundamental” skills recognized in all disciplines and endeavors but literacy education? To answer these four questions, I can’t help but use metaphor ..read more

What if we could demonstrate the positive effects of getting parents and community members involved in changing inadequate instructional practices?   High Five Literacy and Academic Coaching, in partnership with the Norristown Men of Excellence (Norristown, Pennsylvania), sponsored a child from the area to be part of a pilot for the Teach My Kid to Read (TMKTR) Train the Trainer model. A second-grader named TJ was chosen based on the recommendation of a community leader, Courtney Jackson, who mentors families through her organization, Misfit Heroes. Courtney volunteered to sit ..read more

Facts Tell, Stories Sell: Teach My Kid to Read One of my favorite books on scientific reading research, Language at The Speed of Sight, by Dr. Mark S. Seidenberg makes the strongest argument I have seen for why American schools must revamp their reading curricula and embrace a phonics-first teaching approach.  Dr. Seidenberg, renowned research professor, puts to rest the notion that there is any other way for the human brain to learn how to read.  His interpretation of MRI results identifying&nb ..read more

Shortly after famed and beloved actor Sidney Poitier passed away earlier this month, excerpts from an interview he gave on CBS Sunday Morning many years ago went viral. Poitier told CBS’s Lesley Stahl that one of his primary regrets was that he never got a chance to thank a man who had helped him learn to read when he was a teenager.  He described the man simply as a “kind, elderly, Jewish waiter” who worked with him when he was a dishwasher in a restaurant.  The waiter, apparently recognizing that Poitier avoided reading, asked him one day, “What’s new in the pap ..read more

Soundbites and Slogans Despite billions of dollars having been spent over the years trying to fix the literacy crisis in this country and the growing number of parents demanding a transition away from an unproven Balanced Literacy philosophy to a scientifically-based Structured Literacy approach, the education establishment continues to fail children.  Over the past couple of years, finding themselves unable to continue denying the growing evidence and demands for change, those institutions, such as Columbia University’s Teachers College Reading and Writing Project (TCRWP), that stan ..read more

https://www.thedyslexiainitiative.org/post/six-decades-later-why-we-can-t-wait The post Six Decades Later: Why We Can’t Wait! appeared first on High Five Literacy ..read more