The Train Track: A Comprehensive Educational Pathway for Neurodivergent Students
Discover a powerful, two-track approach to dyslexia support with our individualized learning plans. This model combines targeted intervention and assistive technology, helping neurodivergent students thrive in reading, writing, and beyond.
Three Things I’ll Never Say to My Dyslexic Child
If your child was just diagnosed with dyslexia, take a deep breath—you are not alone. Dyslexia affects one in five kids ‚Äì that’s millions of families navigating this journey, a vast network of parents, caregivers, and teachers who know what you’re experiencing right now. We parents are in a powerful position to shape how our children see themselves and their future. The support you and your child need is out there. As a dyslexia specialist and a mom of a dyslexic learner, I want to share three things I will never say to my child—and what I say instead. These are hard-earned lessons, and they’ve had a profound influence on the way we’ve navigated this journey together.
Does Virtual Instruction Actually Work for Students with IEPs?
I was recently having an email conversation with an educational lawyer in Chicago whom I deeply respect. We’ve collaborated in the past, and I always learn so much from her. I’d read a piece she wrote about stagnant literacy growth in Illinois, and teacher shortages were one of the main issues she addressed. Redwood’s whole school collaboration model is built to address this problem, so I was excited to engage with her about this. She had a lot of positive feedback about this model, but she also had concerns about the fruitfulness of virtual instruction. Redwood is constantly learning and growing, so this kind of direct feedback is golden.
Orthographic Mapping: The Key to Reading Fluency
When you, as a skilled reader see a word, you can’t suppress what feels like a natural instinct to read it. STOP READING THIS. You can’t, right? (it is also so fascinating you want to find out more, #amiright?) The words just pop out at you. Even though the human brain wasn’t wired for reading, through proper instruction, it can become so skilled and fast at reading that reading can’t be suppressed. This is the product of a process called orthographic mapping. This process enables the brain to store tens of thousands of words in long-term memory. This storage of words enables reading fluency and reading comprehension. Once you can access words without effort, you can read fluently; every word becomes a “sight word”—a word recognized upon sight. For many years, we thought that to learn words you simply had to make an association between the verbal word and its visual form. Thousands of scientific studies have demonstrated this is not the case. Although we look at print with our eyes, reading actually starts with our ears; with the internal sound structure of oral language.
Learning to Heart Irregular Words and Ditch Your Flashcards
Readers of last week’s blog have been on a cliff hanger—waiting in eager anticipation to find out how to teach irregular words through orthographic mapping. The wait it over! If you need a refresher on orthographic mapping, read all about it here.
Multi-Sensory Reading Instruction
Most proponents of Structured Literacy have heard that reading instruction must be multi-sensory to be effective. We teachers have engaged our creative (and resourceful!) sprits, finding economical and fun ways of engaging the senses. Shaving cream, sandpaper, sidewalk chalk, magnetic letters in bins of rice, rainbow writing—on my! Nothing will stop us from empowering our students with the ability to read and write. If we have to clean lima beans and shaving cream up for days, so be it. Anyone who has worked with children knows that engagement is key. But, does this mean we need to dazzle our students with arts and crafts and sensory bins in order to teach them to be strong readers and writers?
Creating Word Wizards Through Morphology
One of the greatest misconceptions about structured literacy is that it is all about phonics. We have become hooked on the idea that teaching letter-sound correspondences is all there is. Science tells a more complex story, reflecting the many components that make up the process of learning to read. In previous posts, we have covered various critical elements of reading, such as orthographic mapping and vocabulary. There is still more to review. Skilled readers take for granted a host of things that happen without conscious effort.
Give them Something to Talk About
Thankfully, over the past few years there has been a tremendous focus on the critical importance of phonics and phonemic awareness in building the foundational literacy skills children need to be successful readers. I’m going to touch on a subject that has gotten a lot of press recently (well, for those of us who like to read nerdy publications about reading) but that hasn’t been completely assimilated into practice in the elementary grades; building background knowledge. Have you heard the saying that up until 3rd grade children are learning to read and after 3rd grade they read to learn?
Integration of the Reading Brain
Redwood Literacy gave me the amazing opportunity of attending a Language & Literacy conference hosted by the Haskins Lab, a research lab that is a joint collaboration between Yale and UCONN. There was a lot of happy dancing going on for this nerdy girl, because this kind of conference is totally my jam. Haskins does all kinds of amazing neuroscience research that gives us incredible insight into the brain and what happens in the brain when we read.
Integrated Literacy Practice
Last week on the blog I nerded out about how the human brain accomplishes an incredible feat every time a person learns to read; it creates new connections between regions of the brain that were never intended to be connected. These new neural connections become the brain’s “reading circuit.” The instruction the learner receives determines, to a certain extent, how strong and efficient those neural connections will be.