Tips for Preventing the Summer Slide
Months away from school can lead to measurable learning loss in skills like reading. Teachers know all about “the summer slide”— students come back to school out of practise, maybe forgetting some of what they learned. For this reason, your child’s teacher may have encouraged families to make reading a summer priority. We’ve gathered a…
New Research on Struggling Readers Published in Nature
Exciting new research, titled “Rapid and widespread white matter plasticity during an intensive reading intervention”, has been published in the journal Nature. The study, from the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, University of Washington (UW), examined growth in reading skills and white matter in school-aged, struggling readers. Diffusion MRI data collected during 8…
What May be Missing When Your Reader Struggles?
When a student struggles with reading, extra help typically focuses on sounding out words and spelling rules. Unfortunately, after months of hard work and frustration, many students continue to struggle with year-level text. Perhaps they can sound out words, but it is slow and laboured. They may take so long to sound out…
Report Cards: A-Z
You may find your child’s report card crumpled up in the bottom of her backpack or hidden in the back of her dresser drawers. She may not even understand what the letters or numbers stand for — she just knows she’s seen a lot of angry red marks on her test papers. Or maybe…
[Podcast Episode] Guinevere Eden, Ph.D. Director of the Center for the Study of Learning at Georgetown University
Dr. Eden discusses her work as a neurologist and a reading researcher. She talks about the dyslexic brain, the evolution of fMRI brain scans, and her current research initiatives.
[Podcast Episode] Patrick Laird, University of California Berkeley Football Player and Literacy Champion
University of California Berkeley’s Patrick Laird is a running back on the Golden Bears football team. He joined us to talk about one of his great passions in life—reading! A scholar and an athlete, Patrick is giving back to the community in an extraordinary way. We discuss how he is using football to get kids…
4 Signs Your Child Needs Reading Help
It is only natural for parents to wonder how their child’s reading stacks up next to peers. This is especially the case when there is an older sibling or friend in the picture who seemed to breeze through the process. It is not always clear whether a child has a weakness that needs to be…
What May be Missing When Your Reader Struggles?
When a student struggles with reading, extra help typically focuses on sounding out words and spelling rules. Unfortunately, after months of hard work and frustration, many students continue to struggle with year-level text. Perhaps they can sound out words, but it is slow and laboured. They may take so long to sound out the…
How to Nurture Your Reluctant Reader
While you’d like your son or daughter to disappear into the land of Narnia or be swept up in a Harry Potter spell while reading, the reality may be the opposite of this for your child. In fact, they might even say they hate reading and when they finally sit down with a book, you…
Visualise Better Reading Comprehension
Most reading experts agree on one thing: In order to comprehend what they read, students must have strong decoding skills and adequate oral vocabulary. In other words, a child must be able to accurately decode every word on the page, and know what each of the words mean. Unfortunately, many students who can decode…