Category: Reading Science
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What Is Structured Literacy? A Parent-Friendly Guide
Structured literacy is a teaching approach with five specific characteristics, not a single program. Here’s what it actually means, what it isn’t, and how to tell if your kid is getting it.
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Why Timed Reading Tests Aren’t the Enemy, and What They Actually Tell Us About Your Child
Reading Rockets describes fluency as the ability to read text accurately and quickly with appropriate expression. The key word is “quickly,” not in a competitive sense, but in the sense that a truly fluent reader does not have to devote much conscious attention to individual words. The reading feels smooth because the decoding is happening…
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Why Your Struggling Reader Isn’t “Catching Up” (and What the Data Actually Says)
You’re sitting in the classroom or at the kitchen table, watching your second grader stumble through a sentence that’s supposed to be “easy.” You ask the teacher if you should be worried. She smiles and says those words you’ve heard before: “He’ll catch up. Boys are just slower readers.” Maybe you hear it from your…
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Writing Is the Reading Skill Nobody’s Talking About
A landmark meta-analysis from Graham and Hebert (2011) showed something that should have changed every reading curriculum in America but mostly didn’t: writing about what you read significantly improves comprehension. Not a little. Significantly.
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Phonics Fixed Everything… Right? Why Reading Is Bigger Than Decoding
Over the past five years, we’ve heard a lot about the “science of reading” and phonics. It’s been the big fix, the magic bullet, the thing that was going to transform struggling readers everywhere. And phonics absolutely matters. But here’s what nobody told you: phonics is necessary but it’s not sufficient.
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Where Did All the Books Go? What’s Actually in Your Kid’s Reading Curriculum
Remember when reading class meant reading a book? Not a two-page excerpt with a worksheet stapled to it. Not a passage pulled from some basal reader anthology. A book. A whole book. Something with a spine and pages you could turn and a story that unfolded over time. If you’re feeling nostalgic about that right…
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Why Dyslexic Readers Stumble Over Simple Words Like ‘the,’ ‘of,’ and ‘by’
You’ve watched your child read “caterpillar” out loud without skipping a beat. You felt that little swell of pride. Then two words later: “of.” A pause. A substitution. They say “or” instead, or just barrel past it and hope you didn’t notice. How does that happen? How can a kid decode a six-syllable word and…
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The Reading Strategy You’ve Never Heard Of (But Should Absolutely Be Using)
If you’ve watched your child decode a word perfectly during flashcard-style practice and then completely fall apart when that same word shows up in a sentence, you are not imagining things. And you’ve probably been told the same thing over and over: just have them read more. More books. More time. More practice. Here’s the…
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Your Kid Doesn’t Read for Fun Anymore (and It’s Not Just Screens)
You used to read to them every single night. They used to beg for “one more chapter” when you said it was bedtime. They had favorite series. They knew authors’ names. They wanted to read. Now? Kids reading for fun feels like a distant memory. The books sit on the shelf gathering dust. The tablet…
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Not All Reading Mistakes Are the Same. Here’s What to Look For
Reading errors are not just mistakes. They’re information. The specific shape of an error, not just that an error happened, tells you something meaningful about what’s happening inside your child’s reading system. And once you know how to look at errors differently, you become a much better advocate for your child.