by Jan and Kari | May 19, 2024 | Blog, Strategy Instruction
It’s discouraging to work hard and continue to see some students struggle to comprehend despite hours and hours of strategy instruction year after year after year. You might wonder: Am I missing something? Am I teaching the “right strategies”? Are there some...
by Jan and Kari | Apr 21, 2024 | Blog, Language Comprehension
Reading Comprehension Can’t Happen Without Language Comprehension Lately, we’ve noticed that some small but mighty practices for supporting language development aren’t showing up so much in classrooms. These instructional moves are ways to teach vocabulary or language...
by Jan and Kari | Apr 13, 2024 | Blog, Phonics
Systematic and Explicit Phonics Instruction is a big deal, but . . . Everywhere we go these days, teachers are working hard to provide more explicit and systematic phonics and word study instruction. This is part of an effort to ensure that the students get...
by Jan and Kari | Mar 9, 2024 | Blog, Prompting & Feedback
Talk of decodable texts is everywhere these days. And if you’re like many educators we know, you might be working to sort through the hype to make sense of it all. We’ve written a lot about decodable texts—exploring their significance, selection criteria, creative...
by Jan and Kari | Mar 2, 2024 | Blog, Literacy Leadership
We all know that teachers, not programs, make the difference when it comes to effective instruction. Scientific research bears out this idea that teachers matter more than programs, especially when it comes to beginning reading (Bond 1966; Readence & Barone 1997)....
by Jan and Kari | Feb 4, 2024 | Blog
Elkonin Sound Boxes: What They Are & How to Use Them Phonemic awareness serves as the foundation for a child’s journey into the world of literacy, and Elkonin boxes offer a powerful tool for nurturing this crucial skill. In this post, we will explore Elkonin...
by Jan and Kari | Jan 27, 2024 | Blog, High-Frequency Words, Vocabulary
In this post, we offer a simple Morphology Lesson Planning Template that provides a systematic approach to integrating morphology instruction into your classroom. When you consider vocabulary instruction, probably the first thing that comes to mind is teaching...
by Jan and Kari | Jan 21, 2024 | Blog, High-Frequency Words
Do We Really Have to Know the Difference Between Sight Words and High-Frequency Words? If you’re like us, you’ve likely used these two terms – high-frequency words and sight words – interchangeably. But to really understand the brain science of word...
by Katie Egan Cunningham, Jan Burkins, Kari Yates | Dec 10, 2023 | Blog
Last week, we shared the first part of our two-part Q&A series about how the newest Shifting the Balance 3-5 book that we wrote with Katie Egan Cunningham came to be. Today, we will continue to explore common questions readers have about the newest Shifting the...
by Katie Egan Cunningham, Jan Burkins, Kari Yates | Dec 3, 2023 | Blog
Q: Want to learn more about the newest Shifting the Balance book, which explores 6 Ways to Bring the Science of Reading into the Upper Elementary Classroom? A: Keep reading because today’s blog is Part 1 of a 2-part Q&A series that answers some common questions...
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