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Writing Guest User Writing Guest User

4 Ways to Support Visual-Motor Skills

Discover how to nurture visual-motor skills in students effectively! Learn the signs of poor visual-motor skills, from handwriting issues to challenges with hand-eye coordination. Explore practical strategies for the classroom, including handwriting tasks, visual scanning activities, and more. Early intervention is key—empower your students with strong foundational skills!

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Phonics, Helping My Child At Home Guest User Phonics, Helping My Child At Home Guest User

3 Tips For Teaching Your Child The Alphabet At Home

If you have a Pre-School or Kindergarten aged child, then you are aware that a large part of their reading readiness instruction at school is focused on the alphabet. The alphabetic principle is one of the first, and most important, skills a student needs to learn in order to be a successful reader. 

The alphabetic principle means developing the understanding that letters are symbols that have a specific sound or sounds.

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Parents, IEP/504 Plan Corey Pollard Parents, IEP/504 Plan Corey Pollard

Better Reading Goals for Your Child's IEP

After you have fought long and hard for your child's IEP - you want to make sure that the goals your child's intervention team are working on actually make sense. It's easy to fall into the trap thinking that once your child's IEP is in place everything will be taken care of, but unfortunately, more often than not - it just isn't the case. In case you missed it - we talked about 3 Reasons Your Child Isn't Understanding What She Reads.

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Helping My Child At Home Corey Pollard Helping My Child At Home Corey Pollard

5 Things to Keep in Mind as You Support Comprehension for Your Teenager

All things change right...from having your little one on your lap to having a moody teenager that believes nothing you do is good or right. Well just as they change - the strategies we use to help them must also change. Unfortunately for many readers, especially struggling readers - the struggle to fly under the radar and just keep up in the classroom, came at the cost of actually developing strategies and supports that would help them really understand their reading.

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Helping My Child At Home Corey Pollard Helping My Child At Home Corey Pollard

5 Things to Keep In Mind as You Read to Your Little Ones

Bed time stories can be such a treasured part of the family routine for young children. The ability to listen to stories and imagine and learn new words is truly magical. However, sometimes as parents, we may find ourselves going through the motions and missing out on some of the deeper level connections and meaning we could begin modeling for our children.

Here are a few strategies and things you can be thinking about as you are reading with your child. Keep in mind, you don't have to be presenting ALL of the strategies EVERY time you read. Pick and choose so it doesn't feel like it has become a school lesson :)

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Comprehension Guest User Comprehension Guest User

Comprehension Strategy Instruction Should be a Spiral

Discover effective comprehension strategies! Learn how explicit instruction enhances understanding through direct explanation, modeling, guided practice, and application. Explore our grade-based strategies to empower students at every level. Download our free guide aligned with Common Core State Standards for targeted instruction.

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Helping My Child At Home, Comprehension Corey Pollard Helping My Child At Home, Comprehension Corey Pollard

3 Reasons Your Child Isn't Understanding What She Reads

We know that comprehending what we read is the sole purpose of learning HOW to read. But surprisingly schools have placed a heavy emphasis on how quickly children read instead of how effectively they are comprehending the material they are reading. While your child may awe you with their oral language abilities (their ability to tell you about complex things going on in the world) you might be surprised to find that your child's reading comprehension skills are breaking down. :

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A Fun Way to Support Phonological Awareness at Home

Research is very clear that Phonological Awareness is a foundational strategy for students to obtain the necessary literacy skills to read and spell effectively and efficiently. However, teaching older students phonological awareness skills can be difficult because many of the resources out there are geared towards younger students and the images, worksheets, and resources can be insulting to older students.

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Spelling Corey Pollard Spelling Corey Pollard

The Best Strategy When Spelling Words Aren't Sticking...

As a parent, it can be incredibly frustrating to watch your child struggle through the weekly spelling word lists. Depending on what type of list is coming home this can be pure torture.

Hopefully your child is receiving a patterned list that follows one concrete pattern like "Magic E" in which you might get a list including words such as take, home, sale, date, note, etc. or words that follow more complex patterns like night, sight, sleigh, neighbor in which "igh" says I and "eigh" says A.

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5 Signs the Homework Battle is Actually Something More

If you are fighting over homework every night - it's time to figure out what is going on. Often well meaning parents and teachers attribute a student's difficulty finishing or completing work to laziness, but the reality is that is just rarely ever the case. It's important that parents don't lose out on a more positive relationship with their child and get to the bottom of the homework struggle as quickly as possible. Often this struggle is caused by an unidentified learning disability - by identifying the core cause of the difficulties and outlining a plan you could change the future for your child.

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Parents, Dyslexia, Comprehension Corey Pollard Parents, Dyslexia, Comprehension Corey Pollard

Is Ear Reading Really a Thing?

A hallmark of dyslexia is an inconsistency between a child’s reading level and oral language level. Often, dyslexic students are highly verbal; talkative, inquisitive, articulate, and have amazing vocabularies!

One of my all-time favorite students who happened to be dyslexic had the most amazing vocabulary as a young student, he still does today! He would hear a new word used in the context of a book or adult conversation and immediately add it to his repertoire.

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