Still enrolling for 2023-2024 school year. Next start date is January 2. Dismiss
I get a fair number of email questions and I spend a lot of time in these one-on-one messages crafting a meaningful response. I like being helpful, but the big downside is that only one person ever sees the response, even though many people may have the same question. I’ve gathered up some of the…
The names of letters are just a way for us to talk about letters. They are not related to the core skills of reading (decoding) or spelling (encoding), they are only used for talking about letters in isolation.
Do you have any suggestions on how to curate literature for children? And how to build literacy through them? Do you use reading comprehension questions/writing exercises?
What are your thoughts about movies in the classroom?
Is your reading program is suitable for parents with children in conventional school? Would this be conflicting or confusing for the child?
How do you use the Geography Charts?
Resources related to literature education:
I was sent a great question on Instagram: Why do you use the Moveable Alphabet during “sound games?” In my training, I was told not to introduce the Moveable Alphabet until the child had mastered several of the Sandpaper Letters. This question is referring to the phonemic awareness, “sound games,” lessons I have in my…
One of the things I do as a materials creator is consider storage options as part of my initial design. I think about how the materials will be used my students and how much space I’m going to need. I designed these to work in hardware storage drawers, but there are other options! Before we…
This Montessori reading program is much more than a set of card materials. In my opinion, the program IS the book and the materials support the book. The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 is theory and science, its what justifies my subtitle “Evidence-Based Reading Instruction for the Montessori Classroom.” I show the…
After my review of Reading Programs last month, I received several requests to compare my program to the others mentioned. That’s fair. My intention for the previous article was merely to explain why I didn’t use those programs, but I understand how an article like this one might help folks make their own assessments. Dwyer…
By the age of six, children know around 15,000 words; that’s the same number of words Shakespeare used in all of his collected works. Let’s take a moment to really appreciate this achievement. Each of these words is just a different combination of 44 individual sounds with such subtle differences as ‘pen’ and ‘pin’. The…
She cried a lot. Reading was a major struggle for this second grader. She would do just about anything to avoid reading. Whenever she was confronted with the written word, she would get upset, cry, and sometimes even throw a tantrum. At the beginning of each year, I give all of my students a DIBELS…
Maria Montessori developed a revolutionary way to teach very young children to read, it is this aspect of her method that initially brought her to fame. Her method aligned with the now-studied science of reading so well, that modern research cites her as a pioneer in the field. An impressive legacy. Her reading program used…
