Dear Parents:
L to the Third Power!!!

The new school year is now pretty well underway, so many students have been screened, tested, assessed–whatever your child(ren)’s school(s) wish to call it. Getting the results, as well as the ‘plans’ for literacy instruction can be confusing–if not a bit overwhelming. You will likely receive, or have received, paperwork with these terms, as well as numbers. And it is the time of year when many schools are holding Parent-Teacher Conferences. So, let me pave the road to make these terms easier for you to understand and help your child(ren)’s teacher(s) to navigate. Read on. Image by Adii from…

Image by Lori Josephson “Dyslexia is not contagious. I go to tutoring. I love to read, write and draw. I am a normal kid like you.” This is what one of my former students wrote and shared with me perhaps in late second grade or early third grade, but certainly once I had taught her how to write in cursive. That was likely back in the early 2000s. This statement is as true today as it was over 20 years ago. THE STORY I love telling stories. I so love telling stories that I, on more than one occasion,…

It’s All About YOUR Perspective… Image on Facebook by Thinking Art Are you the giraffe looking down on your primary age kiddos? You then might see the top of this model’s hat, although I doubt it very highly. Are you looking at your students from all dimensions? Are you looking at your child(ren) face to face, especially if you are a parent or teach middle school and/or high school students? Or…are you the child looking their parent or caregiver…or seeing a large school bus, an enormous school building, crowds in the halls, and what seems to be very tall…

What’s Important to Know Today’s students achieve the most important task of schooling, that is, developing skilled literacy (reading and spelling) over the course of several years. It is often said that grades Kindergarten through Grade 3 are the years students “learn to read”, with the years from Grades 4+ the years students “read to learn.” In fact, in several states, something exists called ‘The 3rd Grade Guarantee’. The idea is that students who cannot read proficiently need to either have intensive intervention and/or possibly be retained in Grade 3. As we all are aware, many students who are not…

What is “Summer Slide”? Have you ever even heard of this term before?? I just finished a Zoom meeting with a gal who has three adult children and nine grands–I asked her if she had ever heard of the term….guess what, she had not! So you are not alone. According to Scholastic, a whopping 48% of parents (who have children ages 6-17) have heard of “Summer Slide”. Image from Pexels Should you worry if your child takes the entire time ‘off’ during the months of June, July, and August?   Short Answer: There is no short answer! A Little…

While my intent is to help my readers learn, let me share what I have learned along the way in the long and winding road leading to a book’s publication. Getting a book into the hands of the intended audiences turned out to be far harder than I could ever have imagined. Writing the manuscript was the easy part. I’ve had the concept of this book in my head for quite a  long time, in fact, over 20 years! I hope the book entitled Calling All Neurons! will eventually be in your hands and the concepts explained in it…