Reading instruction has been the subject of significant controversy for more than five decades, and Kappan has allowed advocates of many different types of reading instruction to make their cases in the magazine's pages. Teresa Preston chronicles the history of the reading wars as they played out in Kappan. Researchers and scholars have debated…

Students with disabilities, like their economically disadvantaged counterparts, experience lower expectations and less demand for academic success from teachers. Students who experience both disabilities and social and economic disabilities may experience even less rigorous expectations from their teachers who experience only one condition or the…

Each year, many students take the Advanced Placement (AP) Music Theory Exam, and the majority of these students enroll in specialized AP music theory classes as part of the preparation process. For the teachers of these AP music theory classes, a number of challenges are presented by the difficulty and complexity of the exam subject material as…

In a test-driven educational environment, teachers see a great need for more engaging resources that produce the literacy results needed for students to thrive academically. In 2015, The National Assessment of Educational Progress reported that only 36% of fourth graders scored at or above the Proficient level of reading. This statistic was…

For learners who need sight-word practice, including young students and struggling readers, digital flash cards may promote automatic word recognition when used as a supplemental activity to regular reading instruction. A novel use of common presentation software efficiently supports this practice strategy.

Barbershop music has undergone some thing of a revival in recent years; some would argue that it never went away. The author discusses how music teachers can make use of this uniquely American art form. Rick Spencer, director of music and education for the Barbershop Harmony Society, the world's largest all-male singing organization, encourages…

The complexity of words makes vocabulary development a multi-faceted process that presents challenges to early childhood educators, offers benefits to young learners, and must be supported through evidence-based strategies. All students, regardless of socio-economic status or background, need to make significant gains in receptive and expressive…

Although the recent publication of the Rose Report appears to draw a line in the sand that privileges synthetic phonics over other methods in the UK, history indicates a pendulum swing of preference between whole-word and phonics since the advent of mass education. Suggesting that the current "victory" for exponents of synthetic phonics…

Anchoring new words in multiple contexts, teachers can make vocabulary meaningful and memorable. The forms of vocabulary instruction is presented so that the misidentification between words and their meanings can be avoided.

Teaching guitar is about much more than just the instrument. It is about developing positive habits, attitudes, skills, and thought patterns that are transferrable to other areas of life. In this article, the author shares some effective techniques in teaching classroom guitar. He presents his daily lesson structure and describes the four basic…

Children listen, act out and recite nursery rhymes and thus learn about rhyming words, absorb the rhythm of English language, and begin to develop speech sound awareness in an interactive and fun way, which can further enhance reading achievement. Encouraging children to dramatize the rhymes leads to role plays which uses basic vocabulary sight…

Learning disabilities teachers were given training and materials for a one-week teaching procedure. Overall posttest performance did not differ among the groups; however, children taught using reduced response competition required fewer trials to reach criterion on each word. Results indicated that teachers also benefited from the program. (Author)

This case study of an adult with developmental disabilities and no educational history reports on the successful literacy tutoring method used, which entails echo reading of brief passages and moving from holistic recognition of print to analysis of decoding and spelling. This approach contrasts with methods that first use small units of…

Describes Cuba's preschool reading readiness program, which emphasizes phonemic analysis. (AEA)

Fifteen regular grade 2 teachers used a set of 150 written lessons that were designed to develop, over the course of a school year, low and normally achieving students' ability to decode by analogy (i.e., to read unknown words using known words). The lessons provided (1) a planned sequence for teaching phonic elements including common spelling…