Dear Parents:
L to the Third Power!!!

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…

Nursery Rhymes, sometimes called Mother Goose Rhymes, have been in existence as early as the 14th century. They were sung and repeated to young children, even before much of the population was literate. And many of the authors of these rhymes are unknown. So what gives? WHAT ABOUT NURSERY RHYMES? Human beings, in many if not all cultures, have passed along stories from generation to generation as part of  oral tradition likely since the beginning of time. Some of what are considered nursery rhymes were never intended for the young, but were simply part of an oral folklore tradition…

Since it is November with the holidays upon us all, a nod to cooking seemed appropriate to me.  What does cooking have to do with literacy development?  What can YOU do to ‘whip up’ successful literacy instruction whether you are a parent or a teacher or a teacher of teachers? Let’s start with this… Created by Lori Josephson I read this poem to each and every teacher I taught throughout my long tenure as a trainer of teachers once it was placed in my hands. Why? IT ALL ‘BOILS DOWN’ TO ‘FIDELITY OF IMPLEMENTATION’ What is ‘fidelity of implementation’…