My eighth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Tony, was hell-bent on teaching me to diagram sentences and memorize parts of speech. I was an epic failure at both. Fast forward a zillion years… Read more
My eighth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Tony, was hell-bent on teaching me to diagram sentences and memorize parts of speech. I was an epic failure at both. Fast forward a zillion years… Read more
Patterns. They’re everywhere. In our decorating, in our favorite song, in our behavior, and, perhaps most importantly, in our language.But what exactly ARE patterns? And what would happen if we didn’t have them or couldn’t recognize them? Read more
If you teach language and literacy for a living, I bet you had at least one moment recently where you thought you’d be put out of work by a bot.I did, too. But only one. (Okay, maybe two.)For sure, bots are here to stay. Educators are using AI to… Read more
The first rule of Brain Frames is you don’t teach Brain Frames. You teach… Read more
Some sentences are harder than others to understand, especially for students with developmental language disorders (DLD). Comprehension suffers when meaning doesn’t follow the order of the words or sentences are dense with details. For example:… Read more
Classrooms are orderly because chaos does awful things to students. Everything is coming at them at once, and they can’t sort it or make sense of it. They don’t know what to do next. Bombarded by what feels random and confusing, they become… Read more
I’m noticing a new language trend lately that is, admittedly, driving me slightly batty: use of the word “issues” as a substitute for the word disorder or disability – as in, “reading issues” or “language issues” or “attention issues.” Hello…these are not ISSUES!… Read more
This past weekend, I had the honor of officiating the wedding of two of my dearest friends, Chris and Andrea. It was a thrilling experience for a whole host of reasons, but one of them continues to resonate with me days later. It has to do with language (one of my favorite subjects)… Read more