This stream in my Reading Rockets’ feed caught my attention today: Sound It Out Along with her background as a researcher, writer, and teacher, Joanne Meier is a mom. Join Joanne every week as she shares her experiences raising her own young readers, and guides parents and teachers on the best practices in reading. Monitoring ...

Edward Nygma – Enigma, get it? I will stay married to my husband for as long as we both shall live. Yes, we made altar-born promises, but what gives us the stamina is really this:  no one is as interesting or as insightful as I find him to be. He is inquisitive, and questions/seeks answers. [...]

Metacognition is the mind-map that is the survival tool in reading comprehension. Anagnorisis is the moment in the story where the character, usually the protagonist, says, “Uh-oh.” According to Merriam-Webster, it is: Main Entry: an·ag·no·ri·sis Pronunciation: \ˌa-ˌnag-ˈnȯr-ə-səs\ Function: noun Inflected Form(s): plural an·ag·no·ri·ses ...

Every teacher worth his salt knows about Piaget and Vygotsky. And I am not going to pretend or fake that I understand everything about their theories on cognitive development. When I was studying their work, it just made so much clear sense, that I embedded a golden nugget into my own brain, and that was this: [...]

I think if I say it publicly, I’ll have to honor the promise to myself to write about reading. Disclosure statement: This is not everything I know about teaching reading, and I don’t know much, paradoxically! My experience is with “average” middle school-aged students, 11 to 15, with a large population of diverse languages, backgrounds, [...]

Wonderful colleague posts this question to the universe: Calling ALL opinions: students are reading below grade level (anywhere from 5 to 1 year behind) and I want to do a book study to meet some CORE standards. Can I use one that isn’t at grade level? Or is that just making it too easy? Is it [...]

Excerpt: Chapter 20: Dying Languages Speaking, writing, and signing are the three ways in which a language lives and breathes. They are the three mediums through which a language is passed on from one generation to the next. If a language is a healthy language, this is happening all the time. Parents pass their language on [...]

No matter who you are, your ability to read is so important to making who you are. I have spent hours myself, reading about my burning question of “Why should we read?” and its sister question, “How do we read?” So, why should you? The reasons for reading are as many as there are words on a [...]

This is every teachers’ dream (or it should be): a student comes up to me this morning, and hands me back my copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, telling me it “won.” He couldn’t finish it. He said he had to keep flipping back to the beginning to remember what was going on. He wasn’t [...]

Cheating: In order to get the grade for the “reading,” kids cheat. Inauthenticity: Is a student really reading something they love? Does counting pages read mean there’s a true connection? Competition: Measuring students’ success by minutes read=factory-made, robotic readers Parent accountability: Reading logs put a lot of the responsibility on ...