Getting Ready for the New School Year - A Webinar

Last week, Dr. Paul Yellin and Susan Yellin, Esq. presented a webinar for ADDitude Magazine on “9 Ways to Prime Your Child for a Positive School Year." The discussion, with slides and a Q&A session at the end, focused on using the remainder of the summer to prepare for a return to what for most students will be in-person learning this fall. More than 700 attendees watched live and over 6,000 more  signed up to watch it later

The Yellins' recommendations included both steps that parents should take and those that were more focused on student readiness - all keeping in mind that it's been a rough year and a half and that students and their families need a chance to engage in summer activities that are enjoyable and that build social as well as educational skills.

Parents were reminded that this summer would be a good time to review their child's IEP or 504 Plan, and seek to make changes to it, if needed, before school begins in the fall. For children who are taking ADHD medication, Dr. Yellin discussed the importance of working with your child's doctor to monitor the effectiveness and side effects, if any, of medication and to keep a "medication diary" to share with your child's prescribing physician. Dr. Yellin spoke about the importance of frontloading and having a "growth mindset'" as discussed by Dr. Carol Dweck in her book, Mindset.

Both speakers mentioned a number of tools, apps, and websites that could build skills that may be needed to begin the next school year primed for success. These included those that were free and fun, like Bedtime Math to others that are more focused in their approach, such as IXL 

You can access this presentation as a video replay, listen to the podcast episode (#363), and download the slide presentation, with numerous slides and suggestions, from ADDitude, all at no charge.

LitCharts Are Excellent Tools for Pre-Reading

At The Yellin Center, one of our favorite strategies is called “frontloading.” Useful for all students, frontloading is particularly good for those who struggle to identify the most important ideas in a lecture, lesson, or text. The principle is very simple: Students prepare themselves for learning with a preview of the lesson, concept, or reading. Examples include watching a Khan Academy video; a short introduction from an instructor; or a walk-through of a textbook chapter, focusing on the headings, captions, and images, before reading the whole thing. We find that students who frontload are more prepared to learn because they can more easily identify the most important information.

Literature can be difficult to frontload, however. Unlike textbooks, novels don’t have headings, diagrams, and images that can be previewed. Luckily, though, students who struggle with reading comprehension can prepare themselves to take on literature in a number of ways. One is to watch a movie version of the book* if one exists (keeping in mind that these versions often differ from the original book). Another is to use summaries like CliffsNotes or SparkNotes. For students who struggle with reading, though, these summaries can seem intimidating because they take the form of long blocks of text. So the original editors of SparkNotes have created a thoughtful, innovative, and free resource called LitCharts.

LitCharts provides resources for getting the most out of more than 250 plays, novels, and short stories, ranging from contemporary works like A Long Way Gone and The Fault in Our Stars to classics like Henry V and The Great Gatsby. The site (and its accompanying, free app) is interactive, so students can choose the format and content that will help them most. The “front page” for each book is called the Chart Board, which provides a visual representation of the whole book. Themes in each chapter are represented by color-coded rectangles, and by hovering over one of them the user can read a relevant, thematic summary snippet from that part of the book.

Its visual presentation is probably the best feature of LitCharts, but all of the other good stuff we’ve come to expect from literature companion sites is there, too: background information about the author and the story; a plot overview; and analysis of key characters, themes, symbols, and quotes. There is even information about how to cite LitCharts if a student references it in an essay. We also like the chart available for each book, which, once downloaded, presents key information about the author, context, and plot all in one document for easy reference.

LitCharts is not a substitute for the rich experience of reading a wonderful piece of literature, but it can help make that experience both more pleasant and more valuable to students who need support.



*Lots of parents and teachers may bristle at this idea, and we can understand why. A large part of the joy of reading is turning the pages in breathless anticipation of what will happen next. Many people feel that previewing a book in such a way “gives away” the story. For typically developing readers, we agree; we’d much rather read a book first, too! However, for students who struggle mightily with decoding, comprehension, or attention, advance knowledge of how the plot will unfold can actually help them build important reading skills.

Literacy Lessons from Teachers College – Part III Reading Comprehension

I recently attended an exciting two-day conference on literacy in the elementary and middle grades hosted by faculty from Columbia University’s Teachers College. Through lectures, readings, discussions, and collaborative group work, I learned a great deal about the implications of current research on literacy assessment and instruction. In this four part series, I am sharing what I learned about phonics, vocabulary, reading comprehension, and writing with readers of the Yellin Center’s blog!

Nearly every teacher, and many parents, would like to help their students improve their reading comprehension. Making meaning from the words on a page is critical for success in all content areas in school and in nearly every career after graduation. Here is some compelling information about reading comprehension from the literacy conference at Teachers College:

Background Knowledge

Alongside vocabulary knowledge, background knowledge is the biggest factor that influences reading comprehension for readers who don’t have trouble decoding (i.e. sounding out the words). Background knowledge allows readers make meaning from what they read by connecting incoming information with their own understanding of the world.

It’s helpful if teachers provide students with background knowledge but this is not always possible. Luckily, it’s not always necessary, either. Good instructors will help students activate relevant background knowledge, no matter what it is, prior to reading. For example, a text about the hardships of farm life may not resonate with inner city teenagers who have never plowed a field or fed a cow. But those teenagers probably have knowledge that can help them contextualize the passage anyway. For example, those who have kept pets understand the work that goes into caring for an animal, and kids who balance schoolwork with an after school job know what it’s like to juggle multiple responsibilities. Students can be prompted to think beyond personal experiences, too. Perhaps they remember scenes from Field of Dreams and can apply those images of cornfields to their reading. Or maybe they remember reading Esperanza Rising in middle school, which taught them about the labor needed to harvest crops. Students may not realize the value of their prior knowledge, but what they bring to a reading can vastly improve their understanding of it.

jepoirrer via flickrcc

Close Reading 

Close reading is a worthy goal for any instructor, no matter the content area, to select for his or her students. Research on close reading, or reading for a specific purpose, showed that students who did not demonstrate decoding or fluency difficulties were able to make large gains in comprehension. When students successfully read a text closely, they preview the text systematically, taking note of its structure and other relevant information. Then they read and reread carefully, self-monitoring all the while. Next, they reflect on what they’ve read to determine what’s most important. Finally, they synthesize the information and draw conclusions about it.

This complex process takes requires lots of modeling and support (and patience!) on the teacher’s part and practice on the students’ parts. But it can improve comprehension enormously. Some instructional sequences worth checking out are THIEVES (Manz, 2002 – Title, Headings, Introduction, Every first sentences, Visualize and vocabulary, End of chapter questions, Summary); TELL (Cummins, 2013 – Title, Examine, Look, Look); HIP (Hearaver, in Cummins, 2013 – Headings, Introduction, Prediction); and CATAPULT (Zwiers, 2004 – Covers, Author, Title, Audience, Page 1, Underlying message, Look at features, Time/place/important people).

Note that this kind of intensive reading is not necessary for every text. Because the process can be time-intensive and laborious, students must understand that they should reserve these strategies for dense texts that give them difficulty. Effective instructors will help students to understand which texts demand particularly close reading.

Marking Texts

Annotating a text can be a very effective way to improve comprehension. Most students benefit from learning particular ways to do it, however; simply underlining or highlighting can quickly become a passive process, and the results are difficult to navigate when the student returns to the text later. In addition to helping students understand what to underline, teachers can invent their own system of symbols for quick annotation in the margins, such as:

• Star – Information that seems very important
• Exclamation point – Something you found surprising
• Check mark – Something you agree with
• X – Something you disagree with
• Question Mark – Something you don’t understand
• Heart – Something you can connect to personally
• V – New, important vocabulary word

Stay tuned for the final post in the Teachers College Literacy series, about best practices in writing instruction!

Great Sources for Frontloading Videos – Part 2

Our regular readers will remember last Monday's post on this topic in which we introduced MinutePhysics and MinuteEarth as sources for frontloading videos for middle and high school students. As we explained in the previous post, frontloading is an effective instructional technique in which students are given a brief overview of a topic before learning it more thoroughly. Frontloading gives students an idea of what to expect, helps them to focus on the salient information more readily, and aids in memory.

Here are two more sources for great videos, all available free! Handwritten Tutorials will be useful to students of high-level biology and anatomy, while CrashCourse offers a broader range of courses on science, literature, and history.

Handwritten Tutorials  – high school, college, and nursing/medical school

Martin Wardle, the brainy artist behind Handwritten Tutorials, follows three guidelines as he conceives and draws up his lectures: they should be under ten minutes long, free, and enjoyable to watch. Martin has uploaded more than 75 videos in which he quickly draws all of the most important aspects of topics like anatomy, biochemistry, neuroscience, and more, narrating all the while. The explanations are easy to understand and the helpful sketches make things crystal clear. Want to take a closer look, make your own notes, or spend a bit more time studying? Students can even download the completed drawing as a PDF from the Handwritten Tutorials homepage.

CrashCourse – high school and college

Teenagers who are fans of author John Green’s quirky humor will love this channel just as much as they love his popular novels, which we have recently reviewed in our Recommended Reads series. Brothers John and Hank Green take on the task of explaining U.S. and world history, chemistry and biology, literature, ecology, and psychology on this channel, which has dedicated playlists for each topic. The videos tend to be longer, between ten to twelve minutes, because they cover more ground than the Minute videos described above. The Greens’ fast-paced delivery, visuals (comprised of diagrams, photos, maps, and animations), and joke-a-second, cerebral humor will pique adolescents’ interest in the topic before they get into the nitty-gritty of learning it in detail. There are over 100 videos to choose from.

We hope that you’re as impressed by these videos as we are! We think any of them would make a wonderful starting point for more in-depth learning.

Great Sources for Frontloading Videos – Part 1

One of our favorite strategies here at the Yellin Center is frontloading. Frontloading is a great way to boost comprehension in almost all learners, and especially in students who struggle with attention and comprehension. The principle is simple: A preview of a concept, in which a learner is exposed to some of the most important ideas, tends to help students understand and absorb the information when they’re presented with more thorough instruction later. For example, if a student reads a short summary of a science chapter before reading the chapter itself, she tends to understand the complicated ideas in the chapter more easily. She knows, for example, which information is most important. She also has a sense of where the chapter is taking her as she reads and so can more easily build a schema in her mind.

Frontloading can take many forms, but one of our favorite ways to frontload is to take advantage of the treasure trove of information available on the internet. Videos are a great way to frontload for lots of reasons: they’re visual, engaging, move fairly quickly, and hold students’ attention. We want to share some great sources for frontloading videos, all of which are available, for free, on dedicated YouTube channels. Not only are the videos below great sources for information about physics and earth science, they’re all humorous and are characterized by quick but precise explanations and explanatory visuals, too. Students who spend a few minutes watching a video preview before they attempt to read a textbook chapter or attend the next day’s lecture on the same topic will more readily understand and remember the relevant information.

MinutePhysics – middle and high school

As the name suggests, this channel hosts a series of videos that explain topics important in physics, such as gravity, wave/particle duality, the mechanics of the sun, and even Schrodinger’s cat. At the time of this writing, there were 123 videos available, though new ones are added all the time. Most videos are between one and two minutes long.

MinuteEarth – middle and high school

Just like MinutePhysics, this channel is a gold mine for students learning earth science and geology. Viewers can learn about the properties of sand, how trees survive winter, where Earth’s water came from, and other topics, all in less than three minutes per video. So far the channel has 33 videos, but their collection is growing.

Stay tuned for a follow-up post in which we’ll share other favorite video sources!