Reading Ranch Blog
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Understanding Cognitive Assessments and Their Usefulness
Parents may ask themselves why cognitive assessments are necessary or even useful. The short answer is that such assessments provide a detailed profile of a child’s learning needs and potential.
What is NVLD?
This week I wanted to examine another learning disability that is sometimes overlooked, misunderstood, and many times misdiagnosed. Nonverbal learning disorder (NVLD) is a condition that is based in the brain that presents symptomatically as poor visual/spatial/organizational skills, difficulty recognizing and processing non-verbal communications.
An Overview of ADHD
As a parent of two children, I know that one of the most heart-breaking experiences is seeing your child struggle. When it comes to academic struggles, we often think that the problem is caused by the child not working hard enough.
The Benefits of Having Your Child Assessed
Over the years, I have engaged in many conversations with parents regarding their child’s academic performance. As a parent and grandparent, I understand the interest and concerns that parents experience. We all want to ensure we are doing all we can for our children to be successful.
Critical Thinking
Critical thinking skills are used constantly in all facets of life. They are the essence of how we process information, prioritize and eventually make decisions. Yet it seems the trend in today’s education is lacking a focus on these key skills.
What is Dysgraphia
While there is a significant amount of information about the learning disability dyslexia, another condition starting with the letter d is also significant. Dysgraphia is another disorder that affects a large number of children and adults.
10 Telltale Signs Of Learning Disabilities in Children Who Struggle To Read
If you’re a parent who often wonders why your child continues to struggle so much with reading, you’re not alone. According to several sources, roughly 10 million children around the world have difficulties learning to read…
Summer Reading – Build Your Child’s Reading
ummertime ‘21’ is finally here! The last 15 months have been an experience and are finally behind us. Summer for our children means more time to play, go on a family vacation (after the shutdowns of last year), or to a summer camp., schedule a few sleepovers at a friend’s house, play some summertime sports, swim, and get back to some normalcy!
Reading – The Key to Success
In today’s society we all have an “instant” expectation for almost everything, including our kids education. In sports we see kids as young as 10-11 years old “focusing” on baseball or softball, soccer, etc. We all want our kids to succeed in but we need to make sure they build a solid educational foundation in fundamentals and that means reading!
What is reading fluency?
We often refer to reading as a single skill and subject that our children are taught and must master to succeed. However, reading is an incredibly complex process that is a confluence of many different skills. Each of these skills must be mastered before reading will become “effortless.” A few of these separate skills include phonemic awareness…
The Magical Method
I get asked frequently by parents wanting to know how to help improve their kid’s grades, get their toddler reading or simply have a better relationship with books. Guess what, it’s not hard, and can be great fun! It will entertain and delight them. It will strengthen the bonds between both of you! And all it takes is 15 minutes a day!
Motivation and Reading Achievement and 7 Ways You Can Motivate YOUR Child to Read This Summer
Several studies have found that motivation in the early years has a pronounced effect on students years later.
Reading Practice Growth Factors
In this blog, I talk about reading growth factors that attribute to students reading scores and grades. Quality and diversity of reading materials, and effort. While these studies’ results are not surprising, they are so basic and vital to reading performance, that sometimes we tend to overlook them!
Literal Comprehension and ZPD
Last time I wrote about the different levels of comprehension in reading performance. Today I’m going into a little deeper discussion of how we can use one of the early comprehension levels (Literal Comprehension) to help understand our kids reading growth.
Reading Comprehension
I wanted to take a moment and discuss the concept of reading comprehension. What exactly does “comprehension” mean? How do you measure and what are the different levels a reader progresses through? Comprehension is a very broad term and I hope to refine the term for you and help you understand…
Scope and Sequence
Scope and sequence is a structure of teaching a subject (the scope) in a specific sequence. The proper usage of scope and sequence in education allows students to maximize their learning and sets them up for further learning opportunities in the future.
Some Literacy “How To’s”
In my last blog, we discussed the meaning of literacy and how it means much more than just “reading and writing”. Literacy also includes communication skills and how we use them. The ability to analyze and discuss topics is a crucial part of any student’s academic and life skills!
What is Literacy?
We all have a fundamental understanding of what literacy means. Webster’s defines literacy or literate to mean 1) Educated, cultured 2) able to read and write 3) versed in literature 4) having knowledge or competence…..
A Couple of Keys to Master Literacy
I’ve never been a massive fan of working out, but I do know that with any training program, consistency is key. Think about it: if you start a workout routine at the gym for a couple of weeks but then take a few months off before starting up again, out of sheer guilt, you’ll never see the results you were hoping for. Persistence and consistency will always prevail!
