Expert tips and guides to help you teach your child to read
Your kid mastered short vowels, nailed the silent-e, and now they're staring at the word 'boil' like it's written in ancient Greek. Welcome to diphthongs — the vowel sounds that slide, and the phonics milestone most parents have never even heard of.
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Your kid can read 'cat' but freezes at 'catnap'? The difference between closed and open syllables is the single biggest unlock for multisyllabic word decoding — and most parents have never heard of either one.
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Your child has dyslexia and the school's 'wait and see' approach is burning months you don't have. Here are 7 Orton-Gillingham-based reading curriculum programs for dyslexia compared head-to-head for 2026 — by a homeschooling mom who's actually used them.
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Parents constantly ask me if they should correct their kid's reading mistakes or stay quiet to protect their confidence. The answer is clear: correct every single time. Here's the science behind why — and the exact method I use with my own kids.
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Writing and reading aren't separate skills — they're the same skill running in opposite directions. Here's exactly how to use spelling, dictation, and journaling to turn your child into a stronger, faster reader.
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Your kid reads every sentence like a robot on fast-forward, blowing past periods and commas like they don't exist. Here's why punctuation marks are the missing piece of reading fluency — and exactly how to fix it.
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If your kindergartner can't read yet, don't panic — but don't wait either. Here's a specific, research-backed catch-up plan that uses the hidden advantage of starting later, plus the phonics methodology that actually works.
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If your kid can 'read' a book but can't tell you what happened, you've got a comprehension problem hiding behind decoding. Here's how to teach story retelling — the single most underrated reading skill — using strategies that actually work.
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Your kid can finally decode words. Now what? Here are 50 easy reader books our kids have actually loved — plus the one strategy that matters more than any list.
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Fourth grade is where reading shifts from 'learning to read' to 'reading to learn' — and kids who aren't ready get buried. Here's the honest checklist of what a fourth grade reading level actually looks like, plus the exact steps to close the gap before middle school.
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Context clues are a powerful comprehension tool — but only AFTER your child can decode. Here's how to teach context clues the right way, without letting your kid fall into the guessing trap that destroys reading skills.
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Your kid doesn't need to memorize 50,000 words — they need to crack the code that builds them. Here's how teaching morphology (prefixes, suffixes, and root words) can explode your child's vocabulary and reading comprehension, and why most schools skip it entirely.
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