From Our Experts

By Elizabeth Redhead Kriston No more pencils. No more books. No more teachers Dirty looks. School is over. School is done. We can stop learning And start having fun. This was the spring time schoolhouse mantra of my youth. The sounds and sightings of song birds along with the slowly lengthening and warming days always got me riled up and ready for that final bell of the school year. I could hardly wait for the long lazy days of summer. As a parent, the onset of summer has a much different feeling. It is more foreboding than fun. With the...

By Elizabeth Redhead Kriston, MS/CCC-SLP Why don’t we give ourselves more credit in the role we play in teaching our children all they know? So many of us have been convinced by the relentless advertising of toy companies that market their products as “learning toys” that we are not equipped to teach our kids the skills they need to succeed. Trust me when I say that your child or student is not really learning her colors and numbers from a talking robot toy or an electronic book. How could they? The concept of “blue,” for example, goes so far beyond...

“Carter won’t sit for stories. He just wants to turn the pages and toss the book. I don’t even leave books out for him because he rips them when I am not looking.” This lament is heard over and over from the parents of reluctant toddlers. They want to share books with their tots but struggle with making story time productive. Having worked with this age group for over fifteen years I have devised some strategies that really work. We know how important it is to read to our young kids. Some research even supports starting to read to them while they are in the womb. However, knowing that we should read and making reading time enjoyable and productive can be two very different things.

I never know what will inspire me to write a story. Sometimes it can be a need that I feel should be fulfilled as when I wrote Pants on Ants. Sometimes it is a something a child says. Or, in the case of Raincoats and Rainbows it is a real life experience. Several years ago my girls were still little and riding their bicycles up and down the street wearing their bathing suits. After a while they had to add raincoats to their attire as it started to sprinkle and then rain heavily. It was a typical summer shower which...

In 2000, the National Reading Panel, based on a comprehensive review of the relevant literature, issued a report that identified 5 skills that were found to be most critical to reading success. In other words, “what works” in teaching children to read.These five skills are: Phonemic Awareness: the ability to identify and manipulate the SOUNDS in spoken language Phonics: The ability to match a sound with a symbol Reading Fluency: Reading aloud with appropriate speed, accuracy, and prosody Vocabulary: the body of words an individual can identify and use Text Comprehension: the ability to understand the material being read There are...