Raising Readers, Writers, and Spellers

E-mailers, text messengers, and skeptics be damned. Handwriting—American style—is born again! Read More

Flash from the pages of The Boston Globe: Spelling is making a comeback! Reporter Linda Matchan chronicles a surge in spelling bees, spelling clubs, and even spelling books in schools. Could this trend lead to better readers and writers in American schools? Read More

Read how a world-class editor, a Pulitzer Prize winning poet, and a motivational speaker/reading researcher/writer struggled through child- and adulthood dyslexia and rose to the top. Can kids and adults who can’t find words become champions at the very thing that smacked them down? You bet. Read on. Read More

Common Core State Standards are the new hot topic in American education, perhaps as important in shaping what happens in America’s classrooms as No Child Left Behind. Some interpretations of the Common Core State Standards seem to call for yet another assault on teachers and their current practices. Read More

Here's a misleading statement: "Language is acquired quite well before the age of 6, but trying to force your children to read before the age of 4 is an effort that doesn't work very well because the brain is not very well equipped to tell the letter 'b' from the letter 'd' and so on," Read More

The current political climate in America highlights the need for a stronger emphasis on critical thinking and problem solving in American schools. Wouldn’t our political culture be more civil if we were taught to examine competing ideas and work together toward solutions? Read More

For the first time in history, a generation of American students will be less well educated than their parents. Teachers are getting the blame. While teachers have become the scapegoats for America’s failing schools, maybe it’s time to shine the light on parents. Read More

The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) is taking a sensible lead for the 21st century and updating its policy on technology and screen time from birth to age 3. This is a wise and bold move, but guess who objects to this timely and prudent 21st-century stance. Read More

A standing–room–-only crowd packed the aisles, and people sat sprawled on the carpet in front of room W208b of the Orlando Convention Center, hungry for an alternative to twenty years of dumbed-down spelling instruction. I threw out fresh steak—Bring back spelling!—to a ravenous audience. Here’s the meat of what I had to say: Read More

This week the Campaign for Commercial-Free Childhood and NBC's Today Show presented what seems to be a biased smear campaign against a product called "Your Baby Can Read." While no one wants babies spending too much time in front of screen media, do we really want to tout anti-reading toddlerhood? Read More

A TV report from Solon City Schools presented an inaccurate and damaging retrograde view of spelling tests and made claims that Solon had found the silver bullet for effective spelling instruction in a new policy called “word study.” I presented a contrarian view. The community responded. Read More

Two billion people use the internet on a regular basis. Five billion text messages are sent out every day. What impact is new technology having on your child's reading brain? Read More

Parents are children's first reading teachers. As such, parents have wonderful opportunities to prevent their preschoolers from developing reading problems.   Read More

 There is a controversy brewing over the definition of reading and whether babies and toddlers can learn to read. Are too many child development experts from prestigious universities getting it wrong? Read More