I'd add that if you're "teaching to the test" you're wasting hours of the learner's time. Teach to their potential and the testing will take care of itself.

This was one of our more popular phonics posts last year, so I'm reposting it for those who might be interested. #phonics

It's a real shame that more parents (and teachers too) remain completely unaware of the importance of having a development optometrist evaluate the vision skills of every struggling reader.

Wait 'til people finally figure out the consequences of the 1980's medical advice that pregnant mothers and babies avoid direct sunshine. Vitamin D deficiency, anyone?

This is probably the main reason good schools succeed. They figure out what works and stick with it year after year, allowing their teachers and staff the opportunity to each build their own "outsized competitive advantage."

Most graphemes have only one option that should be taught. It makes no sense to teach the "oe" in "does" (where it's the /u/ sound) or in "shoe" (where it's the /oo/ sound) because that's not useful information when decoding new words. Those pronunciations don't occur often

It's understandable that they don't because they have such easy access to digital clocks today. But educators making the decision to quit teaching how to tell time from an analog clock made the decision to build in ignorance, same as they did when cursive writing was dropped.

Telling b from d: Every elementary teacher has kids who continue to have trouble telling b from d. And most of you have a pet "trick" that you pass on to those kids in the hope it will help them keep them straight. I've worked with a lot of those kids that know one of those

My prediction: the UCSD report is going to go down as a watershed moment in public opinion about K-12 education. This story is reverberating, and it seems to portend a shift. I made a similar call seven years ago. When Emily Hanford’s Hard Words came out in 2018, I sensed

When words become automatic (memorized) using phonics, the left brain is active. When memorized without the code, the right brain is active, something to consider when advocating an approach to automatically recognizing words.

Good discussion about the reasoning behind teaching split digraphs here (instead of magic-e or silent-e). Personally, I think you can pick out an inefficient phonics curriculum by seeing if "silent-e" or "magic-e" appears anywhere in it.

My 5th grade class will read about 10 novels as a class this year. We will also read many texts in science and social studies (Core Knowledge) which aren't short passages. This is how my Ss did on the 5th grade ELA compared to every district in my county. I despise test prep.

Sorry, wrong prescription. If any students are struggling with reading after "plenty of high-quality instruction," they should, at a minimum, be evaluated by a developmental optometrist (orthoptist in the UK) for deficient vision skills. It astonishes me that vision skills are

Serious tip for cleaning up your X feed. (If this makes sense to you after you read it, please repost it so more than a hundred people see it.) I'm posting this again because I'm now convinced it works exceptionally well. If you find yourself scrolling through hundreds of inane

Sadly, social media algorithms work in the opposite direction. They put you in touch with people who will feed your present views, convince you that you are right, and that everyone on the other side of the matter is an idiot. And we let those algorithms get at kids as young as

Reposting this so more than three people see it. People like this do far more to address reading struggles than most parents and teachers realize. Too many kids now suffer because educators remain blissfully unaware of vision therapy and the problems it addresses.

I wonder what a study of the vitamin D levels of kids who struggle with reading would find? Has that question ever been examined, anywhere, by anyone? I think the results might be surprising.

Phonics courses tend to teach 42-45 phonemes. Linguists correctly argue that: 1) there are a lot more English phonemes and, 2) some phonics phonemes are blends of more than one linguistic phonemes. We could clarify the issue with a better name for phonics phonemes, something

The reasons to homeschool keep piling up. Public schools need a reset, and soon. Administrators just find it too difficult to resist trends and stay with what works. Usually, all that would take is some common sense.