This is a video recording of the lunch and learn session from October 21st, 2021 on how the brain learns to read. Session Description: Do you wonder how our students brains learn to read? Join this session for an overview of what the scientific field has discovered and uncovered about our brains and the process the brain goes through to learn how to read. This will have a significant impact on how we plan to teach reading, writing, and spelling in the future.

This guide covers the age range 6 years to 18 years. It also encompasses all students with reading difficulties, including those who have specific learning difficulties (dyslexia) as well as those who have made generally poor progress in reading and may or may not have additional general learning difficulties. Information here can be applied to students from disadvantaged backgrounds, minority groups and to students with reading difficulties for whom English is not a first language. While the full range of literacy involves more than just reading, the focus here is particularly on reading skills: the ability to decode and understand text.

Percussionist Steven Angel has developed an innovative program that uses rhythm to help struggling students improve their reading fluency and comprehension. Deceptively simple -- a facilitator taps out a basic rhythm while students read aloud -- the method relaxes students, helps them focus, and is effective in after-school intervention programs as well as traditional classrooms.

Teaching our students how to use a variety of reading strategies is essential whether you teach in a face to face environment or remotely.  This webinar will showcase the top reading strategies and supporting resources. In addition to sharing resources that can be used with your students, we will also share how these strategies can be used as reading interventions for students who are struggling (behind grade levels & EAL)  during distance learning.  

Word Connections is a supplemental reading intervention program.

It includes 40 lessons (40 min each), divided into four units of instruction.

Developed for students in third grade and above who continue to experience challenges with word reading even though they have developed foundational decoding skills.

The lessons focus on promoting automaticity with reading “big words.”