You can’t do it for them

I’m very lucky to be stepmom to two gorgeous young adults. The thing about parenting young adults is that it’s fraught with worry and anxiety. You’re NOT worried about them falling off the kitchen counter and splitting their heads open or getting lost in the grocery store. You’re not worried about them breaking a leg …

Sabre Toothed Tiger or Cuddly Teddy?

I worked with A on a weekly volunteer basis. She and two others came out of their classroom to settle into school on Monday mornings and participate in intentional reading instruction with me. One morning, D, an educational assistant, (who I had assumed was her grandmother) was working with other students in the library at …

Miss Youngberg, How do bees lay honey?

C was in my most difficult grade one/two class ever. The group had quite a few students who struggled with language skills. Many spoke a language other than English at home or came from disadvantaged backgrounds where they did not have many rich language and background information building experiences to draw upon. Because of this, …

Why Girls don’t ‘Read their way’ into Technical Fields

Last night we had some good friends over for dinner. To my poor husband’s chagrin, the discussion turned to education and reading, as it usually does when I’m around. They told me about their daughter. She reads well at year 4. She’s really into science and finding out the way things work, and she’s got …

The right books in the hands of the right kids

There are multiple marvellous modes of reading and heaps of purposes for reading. Once children start to see these purposes, they get a better sense of why they would want to learn how to read. They also then start reading with more purpose and engagement. I was once delivering a workshop for a group of …

The nuts and bolts of it all… Strategies

This is where we get into the meat of how we learn to read. There are many important precursory skills children require to begin to learn to read (book knowledge, understanding the alphabetic principal, one to one correspondence, directionality of text, etc). Strategies are what bring it all together. I have heard so many parents …

So, it’s 3 Days into Christmas Holidays… NOW WHAT???

Or, How not to kill your children when they’re cooped up over the holidays Most of my career has been teaching grade one and it always amazes me how much children of that age can grow and develop over a two week Christmas break in Canada, especially considering  they’re cooped up inside because it’s -30C? …

Gamey Gamer 2012… Just who is it who’s learning to read now?

Learning to read is hard and Gamers have skills after all Working with parents and teachers for the last 20 years, it’s always the same lament: “School will never be like a video game”“These kids nowadays, they’re so… (insert insult here)”“All this texting is ruining their ability to write”“They don’t have any social skills because …