The report explains that when young children were being read a story, a number of regions in the left part of the brain became active...

There are a number of key changes in the new law. Here at Keys to Literacy we are most interested in the LEARN part of the legislation: Literacy Education For All, Results for the Nation.

The program addresses reading and writing instruction across ALL grades and ages – i.e., birth through grade 12...

Hoeft and her colleagues have been conducting longitudinal studies looking at the basic neuroscience of reading development. They have found that the one thing that consistently predicted how well a child would learn to read was the growth of white matter in one specific area of the brain – the left temporoparietal region. The amount of white matter that a child arrived with in kindergarten didn’t make a difference, but the change in volume between kindergarten and third grade did....

W#4: Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.....

I decided to start with the work of Jan Hasbrouck, a friend and colleague who I believe knows more about fluency than any other educator in the country. Together with her colleague, Gerald Tindal, Jan developed the first set of national norms for oral reading fluency performance in 1992. They updated and presented the norms in 2006 in an article: Oral Reading Fluency Norms: A Valuable Assessment Tool for Reading Teachers...

I just added this new word: “jonesing”, which means “craving, wanting really badly” (InternetSlang.com) and “to have a strong need or desire for something” (urbandictionary.com). I met the word via a friend who has used it several times in writing and conversation, as in an email message that noted “I am jonesing to go skiing in the mountains.”....

Seeding Reading offers a series of articles and analysis aimed at answering this question: Given that today’s children are surrounded by digital media of all kinds, how will they learn to read?

Here are two of the articles posted on the site which is hosted by New America’s Education Policy Program and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop...

Here is a link to my archived webinar titled “A Best-Practices Instructional Routine for Writing in the Content Areas”...

Here’s what you will find at the Looking at Writing section of the Reading Rockets website:

• Writing samples from real kids
• Advice about instruction based on samples
• Guidance on writing assessment
• Writing resources
• Videos of nationally recognized experts on writing instruction

The information is organized by grade level, starting with PreK and ending with grade 3....

If so, you will want to review the Institute of Education Science’s practice guide, Teaching Academic Content and Literacy to English Learners in Elementary and Middle School (Baker et al, 2014).

The guide is IES’s first upgrade for ELLs since 2007 and it is aligned to the Common Core literacy standards. It expands the scope to middle school and shifts the focus away from “beginning reading” and early reading intervention to academic language and academic vocabulary......

Books for babies and toddlers are the only gift I consider giving at new baby celebrations because reading to young children is more valuable than anything else you might buy in a baby store.....

Whether you believe the Common Core Standards are “sloppy” or “intentional and nuanced”, I ask you to consider if this insertion makes sense. As an experienced educator, having worked with primary level students as a classroom teacher, special educator, and reading specialist, I believe that the movement from supplying a retell to producing a summary is much more of a leap than a step. When students must transition from “tell me everything you can remember about a story” to- “the main ideas, in order, with transition words” it involves an increased demand on, as well as a command and control of, both language and thinking skills. It also explains why teaches so often lament about their students’ lack of success with making this transition.....