October is, among other things, National Dyslexia Awareness Month. But today’s blog post is timely no matter the date, because a delayed diagnosis of a child’s learning difference exhausts every resource a parent might have. If have a concern about dyslexia, we strongly encourage you to have your child tested. This is a service schools must provide if you request it. You can also do a relatively quick, at-home dyslexia screener, or find a child psychologist who can do a full evaluation.   Nancy Weinstein, the founder of Mindprint, starts us off with a brief introduction, followed by our Q&A. Nancy: Although each family’s situation is unique, this story is all too familiar. Parents know they have a bright child but something feels “wrong”…. Read More

Summer Reading: Why It Matters Thanks to a few tips from the National Summer Learning Association summer reading can be a bit less stressful and a lot more effective. If there is one tip I inferred from looking at their 2009 Research Brief, “How to Make Summer Reading Effective” it is this. If you want to increase your child’s reading comprehension, spend less time on quantity and more time on quality. The quality of the book (is it a right fit) and your discussions afterwards count most. While it’s true that low-income students lose two months in reading achievement over the summer, all students regress if they don’t read. According to the NSLA, students “typically score lower on standardized tests at the… Read More

By Sarah Vander Schaaff Sitting in the examining room during my eight-year-old daughter’s recent visit to the optometrist, I had a rare insight into how she sees the world. For the most part, it seemed, as I looked at the chart she viewed, “D’s” looked liked “O’s”. In fact, anytime a letter was difficult for her to see, she called it an “O”. I was proud of her poise, sitting in the big chair in the darkened room, with instruments set before her eyes, the doctor flipping the slats, asking again, and then again, for her to read a line of letters. And I was struck my how narrow my own understanding of her eyesight has been. As her mother,… Read More

By Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaaff “To know a poem by heart is to own a great work of art forever.” That’s what England’s Education Secretary Michael Gove said last month when promoting his country’s new competition, “Poetry by Heart,” according to a story in England’s Telegraph. The country is investing a half million pounds in the program run by the Poetry Archive. We Americans aren’t eligible, but the site’s timeline and collection of poems is worth taking a look at, especially if your brain is abuzz with the un-poetic noise the rest of the internet sends our way. Poetry. Memorization. Are these words or art forms we give much thought to in 2013? It’s true the gadgets at our fingertips… Read More