At this time of gift-giving, when money is tight, why not give your child a gift that won’t cost you anything but time and love, and will last a lifetime.  Here is a recipe for getting started: There are 18 FREE decodable booklets in pdf form on our website. Print out the first booklet “IS IT A...

“One of the most fundamental flaws found in almost all phonics programs, including traditional ones, is that they teach the code backwards.  That is, they go from letter to sound instead of from sound to letter.” Louisa Moats, 1998 What do you think about this quote from Louisa Moats? How...

This blog post from Imagination Soup suggests as the first of 5 ideas for kids who hate to read: “1. MODEL. Read the page or sentences first.  Have your child repeat.” This strategy may help a child memorize the appearance of the words.  It does not give a child tools to decipher words on his own. Research...

Children sometimes do well on reading tests in first or second grade because they are good at memorizing the visual appearance of words. You think they are doing fine! However, when they get to third grade, they may start experiencing more difficulty because they encounter many more words that begin...

The most common way to introduce children to the alphabet code is to link letters-to-sounds in order to decipher or “decode” words on a page—that is, to read.  Children are shown letters or clusters of letters and are told that those visual squiggles on a page represent sounds or words.  But...

Beware of what you may read in your email. The paragraph below is being passed around the internet with the statement that only great minds can read it (55 out of 100 people), and that spelling isn’t important because you can read any word if the letters are all included and the first and last letter...

If you have been reading this blog, you are aware of the importance of phoneme awareness and phonics to the development of early reading skills. You may already have more knowledge now than your child’s teacher.  Parents can find out whether their children will be taught reading well by asking their...

At the SSSR meeting in Boston, I was fascinated to learn about a new study by Linnea Ehri and Nancy Boyer who taught pre-schoolers to look at themselves in a mirror while pronouncing a word, and then play with mouth pictures that represent the articulation of the same sounds.  When children associated...

It’s always good to see colleagues and friends at these yearly meetings of SSSR. Louisa Moats and I found ourselves commiserating at lunch one day.  Louisa has been teaching the importance of a speech-to-print approach for years.  She has lectured widely, taught professional development courses,...

I’m getting on a plane tomorrow to fly from San Francisco to Boston for a week.  I’m attending a conference where I’ll have a chance to talk to many friends and colleagues who have, like me, decided to spend their lives trying to understand why some children have difficulty learning to read and...