Category: Special Needs

Right now during distance learning or a hybrid teaching approach, families need some social-emotional supports to help them. This post provides a few tips to help you with online teaching and providing those supports.

Social-Emotional Supports for Families During Online Learning

The words “back to school” bring a lot of anxiety to our students and their families. Students will look to you to provide them support.

Every classroom has reluctant readers - probably a few of them! This blog post shares four tips to motivate reluctant readers, including tips like going digital and comparing books and movies. Click through to read all of the suggestions in more detail!

4 Tips to Motivate Reluctant Readers

The best way to improve reading skills is by doing just that…reading. However, what can we do for children who are resistant to reading? How

As I've written previously, scaffolding your instruction can feel daunting and overwhelming. However, in this post I provide a list of authentic scaffolding strategies that you can start using immediately to help you meet the needs of all of your learners!

Scaffolding Strategies for Any Content Area

Not too long ago I discussed the difference between scaffolding and rescuing. I mentioned my struggles and how I was rescuing my students without even

Scaffolding instruction for struggling students is an important step that many teachers need to be taking - and sometimes, teachers are rescuing students rather than scaffolding instruction for them. This post helps identify the difference between scaffolding and rescuing and helps you better understand what scaffolding instruction looks like.

Are You Scaffolding or Rescuing?

When I first started teaching, I avoided the students who were low. Not because I was afraid of them or because they were difficult but

I know you have students with short attention spans in your class, so how are you supporting them? Our students with ADD or ADHD need special support to help them succeed, so this post outlines five ways that you can help meet the needs of your students who have short attention spans.

5 Ideas to Help Students with Short Attention Spans

I don’t recall growing up hearing so much about children with ADD or ADHD. Perhaps it was around, but I just didn’t notice. I do

Reading fluency is about more than just pace, accuracy, and smoothness. It is also about expression! I share my process for teaching expression in fluency in this blog post, which includes a discussion of how punctuation marks influence expression and fluency. Get all of the tips in this post!

Teaching Expression in Fluency

Recently I posted 8 Ideas to Build Fluency, but there is so much more to fluency than just reading at a good pace and accurately.

Although it may not seem like it, reading fluency is incredibly important for comprehension. If students cannot read fluently, then their ability to comprehend what they read is impeded. This blog post shares eight ideas to help build fluency in your students, so click through to get all eight of them!

8 Ideas to Help Build Fluency

Fluency is extremely important because it takes students a step beyond word recognition and into the land of comprehension. Once students are no longer focusing