Summertime brings with it long lazy days at the beach, hot fudge sundaes and ice cream cones, baseball games and BBQs. Forgotten are the days of getting up early, studying for tests, writing papers, and for many children, reading. As books and writing settle naturally to the back of children’s minds over vacation, so too does their education
Reading Support
Babble to Books: Reading with Your Very Young Child
The value of reading to infants and toddlers has been well documented by recent research studies. Reading aloud with young children, talking about the pictures on a page or even paraphrasing words expands children’s imaginations and encourages language development. Reading aloud allows infants and young children to hear the sounds of our language combined in words and sentences.
Create a Reading Habit
Bedtime stories are a long-standing family tradition in my family. Growing up I was read to every night before bed, a chapter here, a story there, and now do the same for my two boys who are three and five. Each night after brushing their teeth, my boys pick a couple of books off the bookshelf and the three of us hunker down in one of the big beanbag chairs we have sitting on the floor.
10 Great Books That Help Promote Phonological Awareness
Reading aloud with your children is one of the best ways to prepare them for future reading success. Shared Book Reading helps your child develop language, build comprehension and learn more about print (see our Top 10 List of Books to Read Aloud with Your Young Child through Shared Book Reading).
Cool Literacy and Learning Links
Do we all have “attention deficits”? Or is there something else going on? Let’s try this little experiment, conceived by Simons and Chabris for their classic study on sustained inattentional blindness (1999).
Dyslexia: Failure is Not an Option
I wish I would have known what was going on when my eldest daughter, Madeline, started learning to read. She hated it. She loved all of her other subjects but reading was painful. She used to hide under the table to avoid it. The most frustrating thing about this was that the school kept telling me that Madeline was fine.