Stop the Guessing

posted in: Reading | 0

The ‘go to’ strategy for many poor readers is to guess unknown words, often based on the first few letters of the word. For example, they may read ‘super’ instead of ‘surprise’ or ‘purpose’ instead of ‘pursue’. The substitute words … Continued

Decoding Vowels

posted in: Reading, Syllabification | 4

The vowels are ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’, ‘o’, ‘u’ and sometimes ‘y’ acts as a vowel (‘y’ acts as a vowel when it sounds like a vowel – sunny, sky, pyramid).  A short vowel is the basic common sound given to … Continued

The Power of Poems

posted in: Reading | 0

Word recognition and reading fluency are essential skills for reading competency and both of these factors influence comprehension.  Poetry is a writing form that is infrequently used in the teaching of reading and yet it is well suited for teaching … Continued

Reading Difficult Text: It’s OK to struggle

posted in: Reading | 0

How do you help students who are struggling to read classroom texts while preventing them from becoming disengaged? Should we be providing these students with easier texts to facilitate comprehension and learning or should we be helping students read these … Continued

Brain Development and Reading Instruction

posted in: Reading | 0

This post is a summary of Van de Walle de Gheicke, Rossion and Lochy’s (2018) study investigating the impact of different approaches to teaching reading on the development of neural circuits. Background It is known that adult expert readers have … Continued