Have you ever heard of a “wordless picture book”?  Wordless picture books are books without words or very few words, but they are a great way to build critical literacy, listening vocabulary, and comprehension skills.  They also help increase a child’s awareness of how stories are structured. As the school librarian in my district, I...Read More

As our school’s librarian, I hear book requests from kids ALL THE TIME.  The one genre that kids seem to really enjoy is nonfiction.  Kids LOVE to read about real people, animals, places, and events.  Nonfiction texts present real information in captivating and interesting ways.  However, kids spend WAY more time reading fiction books than...Read More

Once children learn to decode and read the words on the page, the next step in this process is comprehension.  If readers can read the words on the page, but do not understand what they are reading, they are not really reading.  Comprehension is the goal of reading.  It is the thinking process that readers...Read More

Vocabulary plays an essential role in the reading process and is critical to reading comprehension. Kids indirectly learn the meaning of most words through everyday experiences with oral and written language.   In last week’s blog, I shared a few ideas to help you increase your child’s vocabulary at home.  Remember that vocabulary development can become...Read More

Building vocabulary is crucial for helping children understand the words they are reading and make sense of the text.  Learning new words begins when children are just young babies and continues throughout life.  Together, along with a formal education, parents’ involvement in developing a child’s vocabulary is critical.  As much as 95% of the words...Read More

Research has proven that reading affects writing and writing affects reading.  But, simply UNDERSTANDING that reading and writing are connected is not enough.  To  help our kids develop these two critical literacy skills,  parents (and teachers) must APPLY this knowledge when working with them.  In this blog, I am going to share a few ideas...Read More

Summer is coming to an end.  No more playing until the street lights come on (Is that still a THING?), catching fireflies at twilight, or just staying up super late.  Now that kids are back in school, we, as parents, need to bring back school year routines and structure.  One way I eased my kids...Read More

If you have been following the blog for the past several weeks, you have learned A LOT  about phonemic awareness.  So far, in this phonemic awareness skills series, we have discussed rhyming, syllables, onset and rime, sound isolation, phonemic blending, and phonemic segmentation.  This final blog is about phoneme manipulation, the most sophisticated of all...Read More

Sound isolation is the ability to isolate a single sound from within a word.  Children usually master initial sound isolation in the middle of kindergarten, and final and medial sound isolation at the end of kindergarten or early first grade.  Phoneme (sound) isolation is a very important step in early literacy development. Kids that have...Read More

Rime or rhyme?  What’s the difference?  Rimes rhyme, but not all rhymes are rimes.  Easy peasy, right?  (See what I did there?) Rimes are word parts that refer to a specific spelling pattern, and rimes of the same word family will rhyme.  Rimes begin with a vowel sound and end before the next vowel sound. ...Read More