Just because a student’s decoding becomes more accurate and their fluency (reading speed & accuracy combined) improves does not mean that the child will magically understand everything they are reading. Read on to see how you can support reading comprehension skills for your students.

Whenever we talk about literacy, we always come back to this literacy processing triangle. Now, many reading intervention programs do a nice job of connecting the bottom points of the triangle by working on the orthography to phonology connection. Much less frequently, we see the third point, semantics, tied into a program

We always knew of the importance of phonological awareness in developing literacy skills and we knew that under-developed phonological awareness skills are a critical factor in students with reading struggles such as dyslexia and are a common issue for students with speech-language disorders.

If you know us at all, you know that we always frame everything from the literacy processing triangle lens.

We wanted to jump in this week because we just wrapped up our Thriving Not Just Surviving in Literacy Intervention training earlier this week and were BLOWN away by the response and the incredible interventionists, SLPs, ELA educators that joined us. There were SO MANY questions that we weren’t able to address them all in the time we had allotted for the LIVE training so we wanted to take this opportunity to answer the questions in more depth because we promised that we would following the online training!

Hopefully, some of these Q & As can help you too as we move into our next academic year!

We know that we have a massive reading gap for so many students…

Knowing what we know - we keep questioning -

Why do we have so many struggling students when the research is clear on what evidence-based practices MUST look like to support our struggling readers?

Ultimately, there are a LOT of potential answers and factors at play when we consider this question but for us, it really comes down to 3 major categories. And…because we always teach our students to use graphic organization strategies to make sense of and organize information, we felt compelled to do the same!

As more and more barriers are put up in education, it makes it harder for our kids to get the help that they need. We want to encourage you to make reading intervention simple. If we overcomplicate things it is only making it harder for our students to access, for us to deliver, and for students to get what they need. It doesn’t have to be hard. Let it be easy! Click through to find out the ACTUAL approach that will make literacy intervention effective for your students and easier for you!

Summer is here and we are seeing that online instruction is becoming more and more “normal.” Schools are saying that they will continue online instruction or hybrid instruction through the fall. The reality is that we don’t know what the future will bring when it comes to school & intervention as we knew it.

While this change can be scary, we want you to know that if you can lean into that discomfort, you can THRIVE in online intervention - not just “survive until this summer.”

How’s it going? Hopefully you’re hanging in there with all the craziness going on in the world recently. Today, we wanted to share a quick tip with you on how you can take your reading intervention to the next level for students who need an extra push.

One of the most important things we’ve learned in our intervention time is that you can use ONE activity in a bunch of different ways to target individual student needs and to uplevel your intervention.

Master morphology in reading intervention! Discover effective strategies to integrate morphological instruction seamlessly into your lessons. Learn from our proven methods and watch the video for intervention insights!

Today, we want to jump in here to walk through how you can instruct students even if you can’t meet with them live. As long as you have had some sort of computer and a program that will let you record your computer screen (we use Zoom to screen share and record videos), you can still create effective reading intervention lessons that allow you to track student progress. Read on for more information.

Discover effective tips for transitioning Kindergarten reading lessons online. Split sessions into manageable pieces for young learners' attention spans. Keep lessons interactive with engaging games and activities. Communicate openly with families about challenges and adjustments. Learn more in our video tutorial!

“Teletherapy,” “online learning,” and “online teaching resources” are just a few of the terms that have been buzzing around the last few days as schools and practices all over the nation have moved to an online space. Today, we wanted to share with you how we teach reading online, and our 3 favorite resources to make it the most effective!

Today, we wanted to share with you our tip on planning out your intervention lessons. We use a curriculum map that helps to outline the target skills we want to make sure we are hitting in each of our lessons.

Phonological awareness is one of those tasks that many feel is a skill that only primary teachers need to address.

However, for many students who struggle to read or spell with accuracy - a phonological processing issue is at the heart of it.

This means that we need to be explicitly teaching phonological awareness skills until they’re mastered. Now that being said - we need to be thoughtful and strategic in HOW we are doing this.

Check out this week’s intervention tip of the week to learn about how we differentiate for

This week we are talking all about how to effectively measure a student’s phonological awareness ability to track growth over time. It is important that we are monitoring a student’s phonological awareness because it is the foundation of the 5 Core Components of Literacy and must be in place before a student can read and spell with ease!

Today we wanted to share a quick intervention tip on using a Phonological Awareness strategy - specifically Phoneme Segmenting (or segmenting words into sounds) and how phoneme segmenting supports spelling.

Today we wanted to share our intervention tip of the week! How to teach syllable division to support decoding skills.

We have a great resource you can use to learn WHY we should teach syllable division patterns!

And today we wanted to walk you through our process and give you some thoughts on why we use the “spot and dot” strategy…

When working with struggling readers, we find it critical to make sure that we are providing frameworks or memory supports wherever possible. Whenever we can lump concepts into bigger picture concepts it really helps our students out! One amazing place to do this is by teaching the six syllable types. We have TONS of information on the six syllable types in our blog post here >>What’s This About Six Syllable Types<<

The great thing about teaching syllable types is that we can lump phonics patterns into their syllable types to provide bigger picture buckets for students.