Recently, I discovered a free visual and hands-on math curriculum from The Math Learning Center, a non-profit organization that grew out of a National Science Foundation project. The curriculum is for Pre-K through 5th grade and it may be helpful as an addition to...
Question: Keeping Up with Wilson at School [Premium]
Question: I have a third grade student who attends a school that used Wilson Fundations in the earlier grades. The problem is that even though my daughter did some summer work, she’s been having trouble keeping up. She’s dropped down a level from her peers so that she’s just repeating what she had been taught […]
How Not to Learn to Read aka Death by Worksheets [Premium]
Daniel Shanahan recently recounted his discussion with a principal about his school curriculum. His students were under-performing and he assured Daniel that students were receiving plenty of instruction in phonics and fluency. When he looked at the teacher’s curricular plan, it looked as if plenty of reading instruction was given every day, but his […]
I Never Thought I’d Be Homeschooling… [Premium]
We never thought we would be homeschooling when we started almost 2 decades ago. What our family can say today, is that looking back, we’re so grateful for our entire homeschooling journey – even though initially homeschooling chose us rather than the other way around. Today there are so many reasons to homeschool […]
Homeschooling or Modified Schooling?
As vaccines roll out and schools head back for at least part-time in-person learning, many families will be thinking carefully about whether homeschooling will be the best choice for them in the coming year. NOTHING WILL BE PERFECT First off, it's best to be...
Real World Learning with Dr. Glenn Sterner
In our interview with CEO Brett Kopf, he told us that the experience of being part of the Bailey Scholar program at Michigan State University was life changing in terms of finding a positive future for himself. He told me that his advisor was a really inspirational...
Schooling From Home, Can You Do It?
Like it or not, when Fall rolls around, many of us may need to school from home whether it's our first choice or not. What if your student is dyslexic? Can it possibly work? There are a lot of people who can't see schooling from home working for their student, but...
READING FLUENCY: Phrase Cueing [Premium]
Once students have made significant progress with single word decoding, reading fluency practice can be rolled into reading practice with phrase cueing. HERE is a nice review of reading fluency approaches that includes a discussion of phrased reading. Phrase scooping or cueing involved the drawing of scoops underneath groups of words that go together in […]
The Remediated Student – WHAT TO EXPECT [PREMIUM]
For the overwhelming majority of dyslexics, early intervention helps with the decoding step of reading. Usually 2-3 months of intervention is enough to see a measurable difference, and at least in our experience, 1-3 years to bring most children from failing their grade to being able to keep up in diverse subjects at grade-level with appropriate […]
[PREMIUM] TEST-TAKING: DYSLEXIA and MULTIPLE CHOICE
At the secondary and university level, many students with dyslexia may prefer short answer questions to multiple choice. There are many reasons why the multiple choice question format may not be a good estimator of a student’s knowledge. It is very common for the questions and choice answers to be ambiguous. From Biochemical Education: “Writing […]
[PREMIUM] Reading and Spelling: When Sights and Sounds Don’t Match
TRICKY WORDS: WHEN SIGHTS AND SOUNDS DON’T MATCH Spotlight: Inflectional Suffixes Because many dyslexic students don’t have a visual imprint of words, there are common spelling or pronunciation errors that occur when word endings seem to vary. In most cases, being explicitly taught the different patterns can reduce a great deal of distress later. The […]
This Secondary School Developed a Comprehensive Plan to Help All DYSLEXIC Students
Here's one remarkable school decided to go 'all in' to help a dyslexic high school student who seemed to be slipping away. Matthew was a rising 10th grader at a non-selective high school. The majority of students at the school were described as being of low...