We always knew of the importance of phonological awareness in developing literacy skills and we knew that under-developed phonological awareness skills are a critical factor in students with reading struggles such as dyslexia and are a common issue for students with speech-language disorders.

If you know us at all, you know that we always frame everything from the literacy processing triangle lens.

We wanted to jump in this week because we just wrapped up our Thriving Not Just Surviving in Literacy Intervention training earlier this week and were BLOWN away by the response and the incredible interventionists, SLPs, ELA educators that joined us. There were SO MANY questions that we weren’t able to address them all in the time we had allotted for the LIVE training so we wanted to take this opportunity to answer the questions in more depth because we promised that we would following the online training!

Hopefully, some of these Q & As can help you too as we move into our next academic year!

We know that we have a massive reading gap for so many students…

Knowing what we know - we keep questioning -

Why do we have so many struggling students when the research is clear on what evidence-based practices MUST look like to support our struggling readers?

Ultimately, there are a LOT of potential answers and factors at play when we consider this question but for us, it really comes down to 3 major categories. And…because we always teach our students to use graphic organization strategies to make sense of and organize information, we felt compelled to do the same!

As more and more barriers are put up in education, it makes it harder for our kids to get the help that they need. We want to encourage you to make reading intervention simple. If we overcomplicate things it is only making it harder for our students to access, for us to deliver, and for students to get what they need. It doesn’t have to be hard. Let it be easy! Click through to find out the ACTUAL approach that will make literacy intervention effective for your students and easier for you!

Summer is here and we are seeing that online instruction is becoming more and more “normal.” Schools are saying that they will continue online instruction or hybrid instruction through the fall. The reality is that we don’t know what the future will bring when it comes to school & intervention as we knew it.

While this change can be scary, we want you to know that if you can lean into that discomfort, you can THRIVE in online intervention - not just “survive until this summer.”

How’s it going? Hopefully you’re hanging in there with all the craziness going on in the world recently. Today, we wanted to share a quick tip with you on how you can take your reading intervention to the next level for students who need an extra push.

One of the most important things we’ve learned in our intervention time is that you can use ONE activity in a bunch of different ways to target individual student needs and to uplevel your intervention.

If you have been following us for a while, you know that we are super passionate about SLPs being a perfect fit to deliver literacy instruction. Their unique background lends itself so well to supporting students when it comes to reading and writing support. This week we want to spotlight an incredible SLP who has also been serving students through literacy instruction. Open to watch our video interview!

Master morphology in reading intervention! Discover effective strategies to integrate morphological instruction seamlessly into your lessons. Learn from our proven methods and watch the video for intervention insights!

Today, we want to jump in here to walk through how you can instruct students even if you can’t meet with them live. As long as you have had some sort of computer and a program that will let you record your computer screen (we use Zoom to screen share and record videos), you can still create effective reading intervention lessons that allow you to track student progress. Read on for more information.

Today we wanted to talk about how to teach reading to students who are not able to interact on the screen with you. Our goal is always to have engaging and interactive sessions for our reading intervention students. However, there may be times where that just isn’t possible because they may be using a device that doesn’t have that functionality (such as a Google Chromebook), or you may be working from a system (such as Google Hangouts) that doesn’t allow students to control your screen.

Discover effective tips for transitioning Kindergarten reading lessons online. Split sessions into manageable pieces for young learners' attention spans. Keep lessons interactive with engaging games and activities. Communicate openly with families about challenges and adjustments. Learn more in our video tutorial!

In online sessions, it is even more essential to review previously learned concepts in case any of the skills weren’t cemented completely. Week to week, we continue to track errors and look for error patterns. If specific skills need to be worked on, we note them and include them in upcoming lessons. One of our favorite ways to do this is playing games. Open to grab one of our free digital games!

How are your online lessons going? When we realized we would be seeing students exclusively online for the time being, we became determined to make our games digitally compatible. This week, we are bringing you one of our favorites and talking about how we can use screen control to keep students engaged in their sessions!

For our intervention tip of the week, we wanted to make sure to bring you all something really valuable and actionable because we know how hard this can be right now to figure out how to keep your students engaged! In our small group and 1:1 sessions - we’re trying to leverage interactive games as much as possible.

“Teletherapy,” “online learning,” and “online teaching resources” are just a few of the terms that have been buzzing around the last few days as schools and practices all over the nation have moved to an online space. Today, we wanted to share with you how we teach reading online, and our 3 favorite resources to make it the most effective!

One of the most important things you can do for your students is to make sure to have a solid outline for what you will be covering and the order in which you will be covering these patterns.

This ensures that they are getting ALL the skills they need and that they can get used to the lesson format and structure - goodbye negative behaviors!

Today, we wanted to share with you our tip on planning out your intervention lessons. We use a curriculum map that helps to outline the target skills we want to make sure we are hitting in each of our lessons.

Today we wanted to take a little time to discuss how to interpret evaluation results, specifically how to determine whether a students standardized, norm-referenced test scores fall within the average range.

When we look at interpreting evaluation results, there are a number of things we need to consider but the first thing we absolutely must consider is whether scores are falling into an expected area or not. This requires that we go back to our statistics class in understanding the standard bell curve.