Celebrate!

By Marilee Senior | DOWN SYNDROME & SPECIAL NEEDS

On Tuesday, we gathered to celebrate “Nana’s” 98th birthday. She fell a week and a half ago and is currently in rehab. But that doesn’t stop her partying! In addition to celebrating this remarkable woman and being grateful for the years I have been her daughter-in-law, it also reminded me to celebrate Casey’s participation. (click title to read more)

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Could Conventional Reading Methods Cause Children to Struggle?

By Marilee Senior | DYSLEXIA & STRUGGLING READERS

​Could Conventional Reading Methods Cause Children to Struggle Teaching Sight Words Conventional methods have children memorize sight words. That’s because conventional thinking believes, like Dolchsightwords.org, “Many of the 220 words in the Dolch list, can not be “sounded out”, and hence must be learned by sight”.The Dolch Sight Words, commonly used by parents and teachers, […]

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The Magic of Reading

By Marilee Senior | Uncategorized

​​​​​ This 4 minute video from The Children of the Code Project contains a couple of movie clips with American Indians.  It really demonstrates the magic of reading.  Children of the Code has over 70 videos and interviews from leaders in the  fields of neuroscience, cognitive psychology, linguistics, orthography and many other fields related to understanding the code.  Visit […]

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Is E-Reading to Your Toddler Story Time, or Simply Screen Time

By Marilee Senior | DOWN SYNDROME & SPECIAL NEEDS

I read with great interest this article in my Sunday (paper) issue of the New York Times. I think you will enjoy it also. It does give a look at both sides of the issue stating recent, and slightly older, research. One that particularly caught my attention is that several studies found that young children “whose parents read to them from an electronic book had lower reading comprehension than children whose parents used traditional books.”

In addition to this, I think we parents of children with Down syndrome recognize the need to encourage as much speech as possible. (click on title to read more)

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Teaching Preschoolers Phonograms

By Marilee Senior | BUILDING PRE-READING SKILLS

Teaching Pre-schoolers Phonogram Sounds Not surprisingly, my daughter-in-law, Mandy, teaches my four-year-old granddaughter phonograms.  She embraces “Wordy’s Way” by teaching Carley phonograms here and there throughout the day.  In fact, Mandy started by just singing the jingles to her when Carley was around 6 months old.  She did the gestures with the jingles, and Carley […]

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