Dear Parents:
L to the Third Power!!!

I’m going to respond to a question posed by a parent recently on a Facebook Group. Parents and teachers repeatedly pose this same question concerning the sounds and spellings of suffix -ed. All stakeholders (children, parents, teachers) need to understand that the English language is a ‘morphophonemic language’. What’s that??? It’s a pretty long word, made up of 3 parts, which all carry meaning: Morph: meaning ‘form or change’ originally from Greek word roots Phoneme: meaning the smallest unit of sound in a language, from the Greek root ‘phon’ meaning ‘sound’ -ic: an adjective suffix, referring to “having the…

I would like to share the story of Ashley, now a young woman who I’ve known for about twenty years. She has had a ‘long road’ marked by academic challenges and personal successes. Ashley, a student with severe dyslexia, was able to experience educational, vocational, and social-emotional success because she had the following important supports: intensive appropriate instruction and remediation using a Structured Literacy Code Based Approach to develop reading, spelling, and written language skillsengaging in read alouds and discussions (live or recorded) to foster vocabulary and comprehension growthcaring teachers implementing appropriate student accommodations  These supports allowed Ashely to…

“Dyslexia is not contagious. I go to tutoring. I love to read, write and draw. I am a normal kid like you.” WHERE ARE YOUR CHILD(REN)/YOU IN TERMS OF LANGUAGE AND LITERACY DEVELOPMENT RIGHT NOW?  Many parents whose child(ren) experience difficulty learning to ‘crack the code’ of the English language for reading and/or spelling may begin to think a problem exists. These parents might wonder if there is something they can do to ease their child(ren)’s path to literacy. These parents may even recognize some of the same characteristics in their children’s literacy development they themselves experienced long ago—and…

I don’t have enough fingers and toes to count how many times I received a phone call from a caring, and simultaneously frustrated parent with some variant of these words: “I know something is going on with my child. My child is not reading as easily as other kids and my child cannot spell. The teachers at his school say everything is fine, but I know it is not. Can you help me?”  I routinely ask parents to sent me a sample of their child’s writing and typically receive something like this: Of course, the parent was correct! There…

PART 1 RECAP If you did not read my last blog post (9/1/21), I shared why traditional Word Walls may not be optimal for children these days–these Word Walls can be confusing (‘the’ under the <t> column when clearly ‘the’ does not begin with /t/, but rather /th/), words which are outlined in ‘frames’ promote visual learning rather than attending to the sounds in words, and are sometimes used instructionally in less than valuable ways. So, what’s a better alternative? Let’s unpack the notion of a Sound Wall. Strap in, it’s a bit more complicated, but unpackable. A ‘SOUND…