by Jan and Kari | Apr 26, 2026 | Strategy Instruction
In the last few years, much of the national conversation about reading has focused, appropriately, on word recognition: phonemic awareness, decoding, and fluency. But as foundational skills instruction has grown stronger and more aligned with the science of reading,...
by Jan and Kari | Mar 8, 2026 | Knowledge Building, Language Comprehension, Strategy Instruction
Much of the current conversation around the science of reading rightly emphasizes foundational skills—phonemic awareness, phonics, and decoding—but what about reading comprehension difficulties? Yes, foundational skills are essential building blocks for proficient...
by Jan and Kari | Jun 13, 2025 | Language Comprehension
It’s surprisingly common to find upper elementary students who still need help with foundational spelling patterns, like short vowel sounds in closed syllable (CVC) words. But with older kids, not only is time of the essence—they need to catch up without missing out...
by Jan and Kari | Oct 14, 2023 | Literacy Leadership
Over the past two years, we’ve been touched and humbled by your overwhelming response to our first Shifting the Balance book, which we wrote to support those of you who work with beginning readers. After it was published, we quickly realized that educators were also...
by Jan and Kari | Jul 20, 2023 | Prompting & Feedback
This is the fifth part of our series exploring how some of the ways we’ve been prompting readers can actually send them on unnecessary detours – or even worse, down dead-end roads – when it comes to developing reading fluency. If you’ve traveled with us...
