Early Reading

Here’s one for the books (pun intended) My “significant other” seriously disliked reading as a child. He avoided it. Then in third grade, he discovered Mad Magazine. OMG! The [...]

CUT THEM OFF AT THE PASS… I recently got a wistful email from a mom that said, “He really wants to read, but I know he’s just pretending.” This mom was talking about a [...]

What Really Matters No matter which reading method you follow, if you keep these 3 BASICS in mind, you’re off to the best start. Drop any one of these three, and you’ll be looking at [...]

Aside from being loved and given a means of communicating, verbal or otherwise, being able to read is arguably the greatest gift you can give your child-who-will-one-day-be-an-adult. I’ve [...]

Learning can stall for many reasons, or maybe it hasn’t even begun yet; here’s a list of 5 solutions to get you started. Solution #1: Reduce the task size What does it mean when your [...]

Blessing or Addiction? Remember when I wrote about my son’s wonderful ability to message me and everyone else through FB? Jonathan is 32, has Down syndrome, reads and spells like a champ, [...]

WHAT DO THEY SEE? Much of the difficulty our children have with learning to read has to do with how that material LOOKS to them. But how do we know how it looks to them? Doesn’t it look the [...]

After I posted the “Christmas at Eleven” article, about Jonathan’s dictated contribution to the family Christmas newsletter, I realized what a huge part of Jonathan’s day [...]

PERSONAL PAGES You know I’m a serious soap-box champion of personal books, right? Yes. Forever. But here’s an alternative I use at nearly all of my teaching sessions: PERSONAL PAGES. [...]

As most of you know, I teach reading to our learners with Down syndrome, inspired forever by the quick success my son Jonathan (now 31) had at age 5 when I first taught him. Reading changed [...]