...because every child deserves reading success.
A true understanding of letter names and sounds is much more than just singing the alphabet. Students must recognize both capital and lower case letters shown in any sequence. Students must also be able to associate and articulate the sound that the letters represent. Our Free Letter Name and Sound Assessment includes an in-depth analysis…
Why Calculating Correct Words Per Minute Matters We often find ourselves discussing fluency rate and the proper way to score fluency assessments. Some people are in the camp of counting ‘words per minute’. Others hold the stance of scoring ‘correct words per minute’. We firmly believe in scoring ‘correct words per minute’ because fluency is not just…
A Cornerstone for Reading Success What is the Alphabetic Principle? Along with phonemic awareness (the ability to blend and segment the sounds in words), the alphabetic principle is essential for reading success. The alphabetic principle is the understanding that letters and letter patterns represent sounds in the spoken language.
Phonemic Awareness: A Prerequisite for Reading Success What is phonemic awareness and why do young readers need to develop it? It is important to develop phonemic awareness in emergent readers because it is an oral language skill that includes a number of discrete skills: rhyming isolating beginning, middle, and ending sounds segmenting and blending phonemes…
Using the Components of Literacy as a Guide The framework for our blog is based upon The Cognitive Model created by Michael C. McKenna and Katherine A. Dougherty Stahl (2009). McKenna’s Cognitive Model provides a framework for targeted reading intervention that leads to stronger readers. The ultimate goal of reading is comprehension. However, comprehension is…
Nature vs. Nurture What is the difference between a learning disability, a curriculum disability, and instructional confusion? Some of these terms may be familiar to you, while others may not. This was one of our very first blog posts. It is still quite relevant today, which is why we’d like to revisit the term curriculum…