Dear Parents:
L to the Third Power!!!

Have you heard about one newest and one of the biggest video crazes to hit the airwaves for the younger set? Well, it’s Songs for Littles featuring Ms. Rachel and her cast. You can find it here–just go to YouTube–everyone knows how to find things on YouTube these days! I didn’t know about Ms. Rachel’s videos until a couple of months ago as I witnessed my two grandkids, ages 2 ½ and 14 months, literally mesmerized by the up close and personal way Ms. Rachel models and teaches language skills to littles.  These kiddos do not have much screen…

Do you have a child and/or a student who appears to be able to read and  complete homework adequately? How about one who gets decent grades the majority of the time? Or are you dealing with  a child and/or a student who completely shuts down and has trouble with academics in many arenas?  THE PASSIVE LEARNER Your child and/or student may be a passive learner.  What’s that? Do I need to be concerned? I’d say, “yes”– because these are the children who may “fall through the cracks” and/or suffer from poor self-esteem unbeknownst to you.  Everything may appear as…

I listened to Dr. Tiffany Hogan speak… …at the annual AIM Institute Symposium last month. Her area of expertise is language comprehension, as she is currently the Director of Speech and Language (SAiL) Literacy Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital Institute of Health Professionals in Boston. Image by Lori Josephson She discussed catching students who experience both decoding AND language comprehension issues–these are called comorbid conditions. Although many students eventually crack the decoding debacle over time, their language comprehension issues often go unnoticed. Here is the culprit: in the primary grades (K-2 or so), the language children practice when learning…

HELP ME PROCESS..TOUCH MY HAND My friend and colleague, Pam Kanfer, recently passed away after a long illness. I took Pam’s passing very hard—and still do. She was so important to so many people, especially to children, whether her own, her relatives, her children’s friends, or her students.  Pam’s friend (and now colleague–keep reading), Holly Christensen, wrote a piece appearing in the Akron Beacon Journal about Pam’s work with her children (two of whom have dyslexia) this past week. I want to share some highlights. Holly states that she is “starting to wonder if the purpose of my column…

I came across a question posed this past week to the increasingly popular FaceBook Group called Science of Reading–What I Should Have Learned In College (SORWISHLIC): What is the history of Science of Reading (SoR)?  A poster’s question from Science of Reading-What I Should Have Learned in College First, a little about the FaceBook Group My friend and colleague, Donna Hejtmanek, a retired teacher, started this group in August 2019 out of frustration with what she experienced, heard, and saw over her many years in the classroom (Donna’s own words).  Today, not even 3 years later, the group’s numbers…

I recently read a novel entitled The Measure by Nikki Erlick. This quote resonated with me for many reasons: “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. That makes it hard to plan the day.” ― Nikki Erlick, The Measure Image from pubic domain from Pixabay A DELICATE BALANCE For many decades, I arose in the morning with a passion to ‘save the world’ in terms of assessing students for dyslexia and other learning disabilities, teaching students literacy skills, and later teaching teachers how to teach their…