Informative Links
Effective Reading Instruction is a Human Right
Schools in Ontario Not Meeting Student Literacy Needs – The Ontario Human Rights Commission declared access to effective reading instruction to be a basic human right and determined that schools in the province were not adequately meeting the needs of students. Recommendations include early screening of all students as early as Kindergarten to identify reading struggles, immediate evidence-based interventions, removal of “balanced literacy” and “three-cueing strategies” in schools, systematic and direct evidence-based instruction for all students, and training for teachers in the body of research known as “The Science of Reading.”
Schools in Saskatchewan Not Meeting Student Literacy Needs – The Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission has also declared that current reading instruction is not meeting the needs of students, especially those with learning disabilities such as dyslexia. Some recommendations include early and frequent testing for learning disabilities, science-based methods of reading instruction, more consistent intervention, and professional development for teachers in reading instruction.
Other provinces are also failing students in the same ways. Change is long overdue!
“We need to be less tolerant, we need to be outraged, we need to put our foot down. We need to have a coordinated campaign to change it. It’s time to change it.“
Dr. Louisa Moats, discussing non-evidence based approaches to early literacy instruction
Helpful Links for Parents
How to Help a Child Read Better – Tips from the reading experts at the University of Alberta
Decoding Tips for Parents: 5 Common Errors and How to Help – Advice for reading with your child and how to address errors they might make.
Seven Sins of Spelling – Does your child bring home rainbow spelling homework?
Spelling Activities: From Toxic to Helpful – Better strategies to help your child practice spelling words.
The Need for Change in Reading Instruction
PODCAST – Sold a Story: How teaching kids to read went so wrong – Is your school using Reading Recovery, Leveled Literacy Intervention (LLI), Fountas and Pinnell, or Lucy Calkins products? (2022)
At a Loss For Words: How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers Are your children bringing home leveled books and cute “reading strategies” such as Skippy Dolphin and Lips the Fish? Are they truly reading? Or being taught to guess? (2019)
Hard Words: Why aren’t kids being taught to read? (2018)
Hard to Read: How American Schools Fail Kids with Dyslexia (2017)
Influential authors Fountas and Pinnell stand behind disproven reading theory (2021)
10 Reasons the Three-Cueing system (MSV) Is Ineffective
Clarity about Fountas and Pinnell
Negative Impact of Reading Recovery Program
Teaching Reading to African American Children – Linguistic Variety and Dialects: Difference, not Error
Many Kids Can’t Read, Even in High School – How ALL teachers need to be reading teachers (2024)
“Educational leaders at all levels and in all settings have a responsibility to put aside personal philosophies and build bridges between the science of reading and the classroom.”
Nancy Hennessy, The Reading Comprehension Blueprint
Understanding the Science of Reading
The Role of Orthographic Mapping in Learning to Read
Why Schools Should Use Structured Literacy
Structured Word Inquiry – Curious about why I have such a big emphasis with having kids make word matrices, write out word sums, and learn morphology and etymology? Check out this video and see why phonetically *pleese* is an acceptable way to spell the word “please” but when you consider the whole morphological family, there is actually only one possible grapheme to choose from.
“Explicit teaching of alphabetic decoding skills is helpful for all children, harmful for none, and crucial for some.”
Dr. Catherine E. Snow and Dr. Connie Juel
