Demystifying Literacy Instruction to Maximize Students' Skills, Confidence, & Joy   By Putting Research and Theory into Practice

Practice

Workshops and Instructional Materials for Teachers & Tutors

Are you interested in helping students of any age learn or develop better reading skills, spelling skills, writing skills, and confidence?

Whether you are a seasoned teacher, beginning teacher, retired teacher, or just interested in becoming a tutor, our workshops and materials will help you maximize your students' literacy skills.

Consultation & Assessment for Schools & Individuals

Are you unsure what direction to go in terms of literacy instruction or assessment?  Our approach to assessment is brief, informative, and even pleasant for both the students and the assessors.

Whether you would like to understand and help one person, or you are eager to make your whole organization's literacy instruction more consistent and effective, or anything in between, we would like to help you.

Theory:

The Acquisition of Language and Literacy Model

This graphic organizer is a way to help teachers organize their thoughts and make decisions regarding literacy instruction and development.

Whether you want to plan for the school year, improve a lesson, incorporate writing into other subjects, evaluate instructional approaches or programs, or just make sense of literacy-related articles, this model will help you.   We use it as a framework in all of our workshops, spending a brief time helping participants' become familiar enough with it to use it themselves.

Research:

The Brain and Reading

Human brains have parts that are specialized for processing what we perceive through our senses, and also for processing speech and language. There is not a particular part of the brain that is specialized for reading.

Neuroscience research has shown that skilled readers rely heavily on the speech processing parts of the brain for reading, and that instructional methods can help students to reorganize their neurological processing while reading.  Our materials are designed to encourage this helpful reorganization.