Many children, especially those with learning difficulties, don’t instinctively know how to study, rather it is a skill that needs to be explicitly taught. Initially, you would work together with your child to develop study habit and techniques, but over time, as your child becomes more competent, you would gradually reduce the scaffolding you provide. […]
The best way to improve children’s writing skills is, like any skill, to practise. However, children who are not particularly good at writing are reluctant to write. So, it’s a ‘chicken and egg’ problem. Here are five easy strategies for encouraging reluctant writers to put pen to paper. The trick is to keep the writing […]
I had a long discussion with a classroom teacher who was frustrated with the lack of depth in the spelling program that she was mandated by the school to use. We brainstormed strategies that she could use to stay true to the program and at the same time add in the elements she saw […]
It can be very difficult to improve the reading skills of older students. The general trend is that with intervention these students make slow, incremental improvements, but the gap between them and their peers typically stays the same, or widens. Kilpatrick (2021) discusses research by Torgensen et al. (2001) whose aim was to discover if […]
Good reading comprehension requires firstly that you can actually decode the words in the text. Then you need to be able to make sense of each individual word, the sentences and the paragraphs. Making sense of individual words requires good oral vocabulary. Making sense of sentences and paragraphs often requires good background knowledge about the topic […]