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Main Ideas and Supporting Details Instruction, Activities and Games

Strong reading comprehension is a key to academic success, and one of the most essential skills within that process is the ability to identify main ideas and supporting details. When students ma...

An Easy Way to Teach Main Ideas and Details

Understanding main ideas and supporting details is an essential part of any elementary language arts curriculum. This skill helps students read with comprehension, organize information effective...

8 Powerful Strategies for Teaching Main Ideas and Details

Main ideas and details are fundamental, core concepts every elementary student needs to master. It is the foundation of reading comprehension, writing, and the organization of ideas. In fact, mast...

Strategies that Help Students to Organize Ideas, Build Paragraphs, and Implement Transitions in Their Writing

Organizing ideas and building paragraphs can be a taxing and complicated process for beginning writers. Writing requires multitasking. When some of these tasks are challenging, they can become ov...

Student Mind Maps: Revealing the Remedial Needs of Struggling Writers

Understanding how each student processes information and conceptualizes ideas is at the heart of the remedial writing process. No two learners think in exactly the same way—some visualize a sequenc...

11 End of the Year Activities Using Balls and Balloons

Balls and balloons offer a cheap and fun way to complete your school year. What’s more, integrating balls and balloons brings a tactile, playful, and kinesthetic modality into the classroom. Balls...

Developing Writing Skills for Students with Dyslexia

Do some of your students struggle with subtle linguistic cues, tricky wording, and following both oral and written directions?  Difficulties in these areas can make it challenging to comple...

7 Free Activities that Sharpen and Strengthen Language Skills

 Welcome to our exploration of language processing, a topic that deeply influences how we learn, communicate, and connect with others. In this blog, we will investigate language processing, uncover...

Teaching Metacognitive Skills: A Fun, Free Illustration

Many students plod through schooling as passive learners, and they rarely learn to take control of their own cognition. In contrast, others learn to be active participants in the learning process a...

5 Fun Games and Activities to Strengthen Listening Skills

I'm happy to continue a discussion on listening skills from my prior blog post, "What are the 7 Root Origins of Poor Listening Skills?"  This past blog reviewed the cognitive skills behind listenin...

What are the Best Strategies For Reading Comprehension?

Helping your students to develop excellent reading comprehension skills can help them to succeed in academics as well as life. However, simply learning to decode words is not enough.    How Can Re...

Fun, Free Activities That Strengthen Language Processing During School Breaks

The old saying - If you don't use it, you lose it - often describes the cognitive setbacks that many students experience over the summer months. Exercising children's brains with engaging and fun a...

Exposing Students to the 12 Ways of Learning

Many know of the four common ways of learning: visual, auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic. But did you know that students need to be exposed to even more ways of processing information, too? Going...

How to Inspire Kids that Hate to Write

I love to get challenging students, because they always help me to grow and find new, exciting pathways to learning. For the past few months, I have been working with a discouraged and easily agita...

Higher Order Language Skills: A Bundle of Remedial Tools

Some students struggle academically for the first time when concepts move from concrete ideas to abstract ways of thinking. This happens because they have weaknesses in higher-order language skill...

How Can I Improve My Higher Order Language Skills?

When concepts shift from concrete ideas to abstract thinking, some students begin to struggle for the first time. This can happen because of weaknesses in higher-order language skills. Higher-orde...

10 Great Games for Students with Dyslexia

With the holiday season almost upon us, finding fun and beneficial educational materials can be key for keeping students with dyslexia busy over the break. What's more, you can continue to use the...

How are Knowledge and Comprehension Different?

Although many people use the terms knowledge and comprehension interchangeably, they actually represent two distinct—yet interconnected—cognitive processes. Comprehension is the act of understandi...

Exposing Teachers to the 12 Ways of Learning

Many teachers are aware of the four basic learning styles: visual, auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic. But did you know that there are eight more common ways that the brain processes information? A...

What are the Signs of Dysgraphia and Solutions for Success?

Dysgraphia is a learning disability that affects written language: spelling, capturing ideas on paper, visual-spatial skills, and fine motor skills such as handwriting. Different terms are used to...

Slow and Labored Reading: Causes and Solutions for Dyslexia and More

Slow and labored reading can make schooling a drag for many bright students, and to truly help these struggling learners, teachers and support personnel need to understand the root causes. The prob...

The Best Reading Remediation: Tackling the 3 Core Cognitive Skills

There are a plethora of reading programs that walk students through the rules, patterns, and irregularities of our complicated English language; however, many students need to begin their remedial...

Do Learning Styles Exist?

I think everyone will agree that no two people have the same strengths and weaknesses. But because we cannot observe each student’s brain behavior, it’s easy to blindly assume that what helps us l...

Language Processing Disorder - 12 Easy Steps to Boost Receptive Language

The spoken word gives humans an incredible advantage over other species, but for those who struggle with language processing, this “invisible difficulty” can create countless challenges. What’s ...

Multisensory Teaching Accommodates the 12 Ways of Learning

To be a true multisensory teacher, it is important to be aware of all 12 Ways of Learning.  It merges the theories of cognitive styles, multiple intelligences, information processing, and multisens...

The Best Educational Games for Family Fun |Good Sensory Learning

With kids and many parents at home, it's an ideal time to play some fun, educational games and connect with your loved ones.    What are the Different Types of Educational Games? Some games reinfo...

Powerful Orton-Gillingham Friendly Games that Bring Delight to Learning

About 20 years ago, when I first began offering students one-to-one Orton-Gillingham-based reading remediation, I was having to bribe my students to read long lists of words, word parts, and nonse...

What Resources are the Best for Online Tutoring?

Finding online learning and tutor resources can be a challenge. There is an overwhelming number of sites, apps, and products, and locating the best ones to help you create lesson plans or a tutorin...

Teaching Inference Skills Can Be Fun

Teaching students about how to make inferences can be challenging. Unlike most of the concrete learning that they encounter, this is an abstract notion. However, most students love the idea of fi...

Why MPower Games Transform Struggling Learners

I am so excited to tell you about my publication, MPower: Cognitive Remedial Card Games! MPower offers a selection of multisensory sorting games that improve memory, processing speed, and multiple ...

Understanding Executive Functions and Processing Speed: A Deep Dive into Cognitive Dynamics

Processing speed and executive functions play pivotal roles in learning, productivity, and overall cognitive performance. For many students, processing speed can be a major factor in academic succe...

Reasonable Accommodations for Students with Executive Functioning Challenges

Unlock student success with practical accommodations for executive functioning challenges. Explore strategies to boost focus, organization, planning, and adaptability!

Reaching All Types of Learners With Multisensory Teaching

One of the most common issues teachers struggle with is how to accommodate the multiple intelligences and diverse learning needs of their students. With as many as 12 different ways of processin...

Improving Spelling for Students with Dyslexia

Not all students require the same remedial process even though they struggle with the same academic difficulties. Diverse combinations of cognitive processing weaknesses and deficits can unite to c...