Three Secrets You Must Know About Teaching Phonics Secret #1: Reduce What the Student Needs to Learn to the Smallest Possible Number of Sounds & Sound Combinations Getting children or adults to attach a sound to a specific symbol or group of symbols is no easy job, but if you do it correctly, you can reduce the task to teaching just 63 soundsContinue reading “Three Secrets You Must Know About Teaching Phonics”
6 Tips for Making Decoding Words Easy Tip #1 – Start with the 1000 Most Common Words There are hundreds of thousands of words in the English language. How do you teach a student all of those words or even most of them? The 1000 most common English Words comprise 85% of everything we read. If you want to be efficient, youContinue reading “6 Tips for Making Decoding Words Easy”
Report: The Economic Impact of Illiteracy on North American Society The Good News Some of us are doing okay. 65% of the kids are at or close to grade level. 50% of secondary school graduates enter post-secondary programs.* College & university graduates earn 33% more than non-graduates. The Cost English speaking North America (Canada and the U.S.A.) spends 500 billion per year on education.***
Ending the Crisis of Illiteracy – What Almost 50 Years in the Special Education Trenches has Taught Me The Crisis of Illiteracy is Real As of today, 15,000,000 school-aged children across North America are behind in literacy skills. 25% of Americans cannot decode words at a Grade 8 level. One-third of North Americans have never read a single book. Almost 50% of North Americans cannot understand information written at a Grade 8 level.Continue reading “Ending the Crisis of Illiteracy – What Almost 50 Years in the Special Education Trenches has Taught Me”
Beginning Reading â Teaching Sounds and Symbols As everyone knows, the first major task in teaching someone of any age to read is to teach them how to match the sounds to the symbols used to depict words in any particular written language.
14 Key Components of Effective Instructional Design in Teaching Now that we are aware that teacher-generated lesson plans are essentially best-guess, unproven entities, in which the children function as guinea pigs, we need to know what alternatives exist and what they have to offer.
Case Study: 2 Grade Levels in 36 Hours Introduction: Working With Foster Children In March, 2008, my learning centre, QLC Educational Services, was contacted by the Highland Shores CAS to determine if we could assist 11 foster children in their care who were thought to have reading problems and as a result, were behind in school.
A More Effective Way to Teach Spelling Most kids have had spelling instruction as part of their language arts curriculum. The most common strategy used by teachers is to provide the student with a list of 20 -25 words, usually each Monday and to ask the students to learn to spell those words for the test on Friday. You probably remember doingContinue reading “A More Effective Way to Teach Spelling”
An Alternative to Teacher-Generated âLesson Plansâ Our garage is full of saved teacher materials. They were lesson plans devised by Lynne, my partner, for her elementary school core French classes. There are lessons, games, tests; all manner of instructional materials. When Madame, as she was lovingly known by her students, retired, a new French program was being introduced and no-one wasContinue reading “An Alternative to Teacher-Generated âLesson Plansâ”
