Summer offers parents a unique opportunity to provide educational growth or setbacks. In my research, most parents have never even heard that there is a summer reading loss unless they heard it from their child's teacher or school administration. I hope to end that by sharing it, talking about it, providing resources, tips, tools, and workshops for parents to feel encouraged and empowered. I truly believe that God gave PARENTS the prime responsibility of educating their child

Consider the similarities between reading and math skills to exercise. What happens when you stop for a considerable amount of time? Those g

I read Elizabeth Bartholet’s attack of homeschooling on Harvard Magazines website, a day after I began writing a four-part blog series...

As parents, we are ALL in a unique position to offer our students the very best education possible. Parents are primarily responsible for

Sight words are the words that a reader should identify by sight. High-Frequency words are the words that appear most often in literature.

The world of curriculum is overwhelming? How a curriculum writer advises curriculum choices.

Think about how you learn a new word and apply those same principles to your instruction. That is one way I think about instruction, the second (and more important) is through research (more on that later). When it comes to vocabulary, I learn best when I have a dictionary and thesaurus present, find the clues in the surrounding sentences and paragraphs, read an example given to me, break it down into different parts, and then have a variety of opportunities to use it in my d

I created a video about this topic on IGTV as well (you can watch it by clicking here) and I basically took said there and wrote it here. You can either watch the twelve-minute video that has some additional information, or you can take three minutes and read this post. Either way, I hope it helps you understand my answer to this popular question! I get asked all the time, "What curriculum do you use?" My answer usually produces a frowny face because, I don't. I don't use any

There are reasons why it's necessary to differentiate between the genres. But I will focus on three main concepts teachers and parents must teach: text features, purpose for reading, how we process and share what we read. Text Features Nonfiction text is typically arranged differently than fiction. You'll find graphs, charts, main idea headings and subheadings, index, table of contents, maps, bullets, timelines and diagrams. All of which provide information related to the top

Seasoned, independent readers automatically process text by predicting, asking questions, connecting, visualizing, fixing mistakes, making inferences, analyzing, comparing, and responding to their own evaluation. These tasks are done without thinking, okay - now I'm going to connect this part of the story to my own life. This process is done because the story reminds you of an experience or something you once read elsewhere. You do not necessarily have to force yourself to vi