Cozy chats about speech, language and learning

Reading comprehension

Unlock Your Student’s Learning Potential with Story Grammar & Graphic Organizers

Unlock Your Student’s Learning Potential with Story Grammar & Graphic Organizers

Story grammar plays a crucial role in enhancing children’s listening and reading comprehension for several reasons: Incorporating graphic organizers is particularly helpful in this process: Overall, understanding story grammar and using graphic organizers are essential tools in developing children’s listening and reading comprehension skills. They…

Unlock the Power of Rhyming with Word Families

Unlock the Power of Rhyming with Word Families

Do you want to teach your student, child, or client valuable literacy skills? Rhyming is an important skill for children to learn in order to help them become better readers and writers. It can also be a difficult concept for some children to understand. Learning…

What are the Five Essential Components of Reading?

What are the Five Essential Components of Reading?

In 2000, the National Reading Panel (NRP) submitted their final report on the most effective methods for teaching children to read. The NRP’s findings are still used today as the basis for federal literacy policy, including “No Child Left Behind.” So what exactly are the…

How to Teach Narrative Structure

How to Teach Narrative Structure

“Once upon a time” we begin telling stories to our children even before they are born. Nighttime storytelling is part of our culture but do children understand the story structure? Understanding text structure aids in comprehension. It assists in anticipating and determining the information that…

How to Build Background Knowledge for Comprehension

How to Build Background Knowledge for Comprehension

Reading requires us to decode the words, understand the surface code of the words and sentence construction and then use our background knowledge to fill in the picture. But what happens if you don’t know anything about what you are reading? As an adult you…

Understanding the Complexity of Choosing Tier Two Vocabulary

Understanding the Complexity of Choosing Tier Two Vocabulary

It is important to have an understanding of the tiers of vocabulary. Recently I was working with a group of Providence College graduate students as we created a reading lesson plan using the story ‘Caps for Sale’ for students with autism spectrum disorder. As part…

Using Read-Alouds to Teach

Using Read-Alouds to Teach

This semester at Providence College we tried a flip class in the Communication Disorders Class with readings and PowerPoints happening outside of class and during class, we did activities that would support language development. Besides for the reading and response to blog entries students were…

One Way to Up Your Student’s Reading Activity

One Way to Up Your Student’s Reading Activity

Have you been to a movie lately?  What happens before the main movie?  You typically are watching movie previews. Why do movie theaters do this?  They want to entice you to want to see the movie that they are previewing. The same thing should happen…

Finding resources to assist in speech therapy and in the classroom

Finding resources to assist in speech therapy and in the classroom

  The internet has allowed us as clinicians to have research-based resources at our fingertips but sometimes finding these resources can take a treasure map. Here are some great resources: Reading Comprehension: Readworks The nonprofit ReadWorks provides K-12 teachers with what to teach and how…

How do you determine a student’s reading level?

How do you determine a student’s reading level?

When we are working with a child it is important that we are working at their appropriate reading level. How do we determine this?