Category Archives: Phonics
Using an Orton Gillingham Approach in the Home
If you have a child who struggles with reading you will do everything you can to understand the reasons for your child’s difficulties. You have seen your child’s frustration and have suffered alongside them as you yourself struggle to understand …
YouTube Videos that Instruct & Inspire!
A good majority of us would say that we are visual people. It is a safe assumption to make when statistics say that on average you will spend 2 minutes longer on this post because it has viewable video on …
When to “Sound the Word Out” and When to Try a Different Approach to Reading with Your Child
Parents everywhere know that children are naturally-curious creatures. It could be an infant who discovers that pots and pans make noise when you bang them together, a toddler who learns (the hard way) that grown-up scissors will cut hair, or …
How Children Make the Reading Connection and Become Expert Readers
Learning to read is like…digging through an old coat closet and finding Narnia. Children enter the wardrobe and start hanging up all the skills they acquire without realizing that with each step deeper into the closet, they are on the …
Why Should Parents Care About Phonics Instruction?
Experience teaches us to be skeptical when things seem too good to be true, and it seems like 98% of the time an opportunity appears too amazing, something surely is amiss. But sometimes you find a wonderful thing that doesn’t …
How to Help A Deaf Child Become a Successful Reader
New parents are always such an endearing and amusing sight. They cannot yet look at their babies without an Olympic-sized grin and a monumental show of pride as if their child just became the only infant in history to win …
Take a Bite Out of Evertaster: A Brand New Book Series for Picky Eaters…I Mean Kids
Are you looking for something yummy…to read? A new novel by up-and-coming author Adam Glendon Sidwell will give you just that – a tasty treat for your imagination. Evertaster is set to be released on June 14, 2012, so kids …
Inventive Spelling – Does it help or hurt?
Inventive spelling (also called invented spelling) is the practice of spelling unfamiliar words by making a guess as to the correct spelling based on the writer’s existing knowledge. An example of this would be spelling “is” as “iz” or “flowers” …
At What Age Should Your Child Be Able To Read?
Are you wondering if your child is “on time” when it comes to reading? According to the U.S. Department of Education, here are the language milestones your child should reach at each age: CHILDREN AGES 0-3: Imitate some of the sounds …
Boys – A Literacy Crisis
Academic underachievement for boys is gaining significant attention in the media lately. Boys are underperforming girls on benchmark and standardized tests, and this is a major concern for both educators and parents. Following the wave of the women’s rights movement in the late …
How to Prepare Your Child for Kindergarten and Reading Success
A recent nationwide study asked kindergarten teachers how prepared they felt their students were when entering kindergarten. 66% of teachers reported that their students were only somewhat prepared or not at all prepared. Only 6% of teachers felt their students were very well prepared for …
Charlotte Lockhart – Creator of Discover Intensive Phonics for Yourself
The roots of Discover Intensive Phonics for Yourself are grounded in an intensive, explicit, systematic phonics program crafted in the early 1970′s by educational professional Charlotte Lockhart. Ms. Lockhart, a former elementary instructor and principal, created the original Discover Intensive Phonics for Yourself curriculum …
Does Your Child Correctly Sound Out Words When Reading?
Have you ever listened to your child read out loud? Did he sound out each word correctly? Or did he ask how to say a lot of the words? This may be a sign that your child needs to work …
Dear Parent: Why your Dyslexic Child Struggles with Reading
Recently, I came across a wonderfully compassionate, yet sensible article on children struggling with dyslexia and why they struggle. Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Director of the Center for Reading …
The Academic Gender Gap
You may or may not be aware of the ever-increasing academic gap between girls and boys. In the last thirty years, female students have not only caught up to the male students, but have even surpassed them in academic achievement. More …
5 Skills to Help Your Child Improve Spelling
Worried about your child’s spelling skills? Your concern might be easier to resolve than you think! One teacher, Penelope Steward, recently let us in on her secret to eliminating spelling errors: teaching Reading Horizons five phonetic skills. When Steward taught these five …
The Metamorphosis of Reading
It is so easy to feel frustrated while learning to read. This includes even those children in K-3 who would normally be excited about the prospect of reading all by themselves. This enthusiasm wanes quickly with repeated, unsuccessful attempts at …
Homeschool and Intensive Phonics
Here are a few ways our program fits into a homeschool curriculum, as outlined on The HomeSchool Mom website: The program needs to be simple. Our program starts with simple concepts and moves to more-complex ones in an explicit, systematic way that …
Adult Illiteracy by the Numbers
To fully participate in society and the workplace in 2020, Americans will need powerful literacy abilities that until now have been achieved by only a small percentage of the population. Clearly, this should be a top priority for education and …
May is Get Caught Reading Month!
What do Olivia the Pig, and others know that you might not? They know that May is Get Caught Reading month. Get Caught Reading is a nationwide public service campaign designed to remind all of us how much fun it is to …
