1) Top Ten Reading Apps for Children My little six-year-old grandson was playing on my iPhone the other day and asked me to download some new game applications -  for the uninitiated - apps are smart phone, eReader and iPad applications. That's when I realized that I’ve been missing the boat. Although we love Doodle Jump and Angry Birds, new apps mean new opportunities to find something educational... something that could provide my grandson with some reading help. Genius! Read complete post here ›

2) Five Sneaky Ways to Get Reluctant Readers Excited About Reading As a parent whose youngest (and only 6-years-old!) is already attempting to spend every waking hour in front of a screen, I thought I'd suggest some ideas for getting reluctant readers excited about reading in the vein of "if you can't beat them, join them." Or a corollary: "Let's be sneaky and use electronics as a Trojan horse to present reading in a different light." I've been blogging about these ideas that I've discovered over the past year and I'm pretty excited about them. Let me know what you think and if they work for you. Read complete post here ›

3) Visualization as a Reading Strategy Visualization is a very important reading strategy. Visualizing brings joy to what we read and allows us to create pictures in our minds that belong only to us. We can, in essence, create a movie in our mind. Everyone’s “movie” is different, even when reading the same book, because of each person’s unique background knowledge developed by his/her individual schema (schema—includes our feelings, attitudes, beliefs and experiences that we store and become part of us because of our life situations). Read complete post here ›

4) Teaching Reading Strategies to Adults It’s not the first thing that you bring up in a conversation. “By the way, I can’t read.” Who would? But did you know that there are more than 32 million adults in the U.S. who by definition lack basic literacy skills? ProLiteracy which promotes reading programs for the disadvantaged estimates that illiteracy costs American businesses more than $60 billion each year in lost productivity, health, and safety concerns. Read complete post here ›

5) Echo Reading – Reluctant Reader Tips Echo Reading encourages children to begin to understand that what is written on the page matches the words that are produced orally. This strategy is most effective for children who have learned the basic fundamentals of phonemic awareness. Read complete post here ›

Help us help you! Take advantage of the many free reading resources at Reading Horizons, including the Parent Phonics Training workshop.