I hear it all the time: Johnny is really struggling with his reading. He's smart - this shouldn't be something that is so tough for him. He just needs to try a bit harder.
Let's stop right there because there are SO many myths about reading and writing difficulties, and so many of them are in that first paragraph. If you have or teach young children and don't feel you have all of that information, I highly recommend checking out my blog series on literacy which you can start at here.
Since I wrote that series, I started a parent handout series called InFORParent. This series is dedicated to topics that: (1) people often have misconceptions about rather than being aware of the research, and (2) are not always easy to find a quality answer with a quick Google search. The inaugural blog and accompanying handout was on pacifiers which you can hop to here. If you want to make sure you don't miss future InFORParent handouts, scroll to the bottom of the page, pop in your email address and click 'Sign me up!'. I only send out emails about 1-2 times per month, and I promise they always have nuggets of knowledge worth knowing about.
For this InFORParent handout all about literacy, I teamed up with my colleagues Mikayla and Corey from Ascend SMARTER Intervention in Colorado. They created a structured literacy program, which I am proud to be trained in, and they constantly work to provide strong evidence-based information to their trained educators and their students along with the rest of their team.
You can download this free handout with all of the information here.