Lighthouse Literacy Solutions, LLC

08/26/2026

Diane Dragan from Litigating Literacy had a great post the other day about Ralph Fletcher's book titled Why Johnny Can't Read and how we HAVE the answer and still fail to provide Johnny with the instruction he needs to learn to read. As an educator, I have also read Why Johnny Can't Write by Arthur Whimby and Myra Linden (I highly recommend it!) And although I have not read it, there is also a book titled Why Johnny Can't Add by Morris Kline.

Poor Johnny! For more than 70 years, we have been asking why Johnny cannot do what schools were responsible for teaching him to do.

The real question is 𝐖𝐇𝐘 𝐃𝐈𝐃𝐍'𝐓 𝐒𝐂𝐇𝐎𝐎𝐋 𝐓𝐄𝐀𝐂𝐇 𝐉𝐎𝐇𝐍𝐍𝐘?

Words shape where we look for the problem. When we ask, “Why can’t Johnny read?” we begin by examining Johnny. Is he motivated? Does he practice enough? Does he have supportive parents? Does he have a disability?

But when we ask, “Why didn’t school teach Johnny to read?” we must examine teacher preparation, instructional methods, curriculum, intervention, specially designed instruction, progress monitoring, and institutional accountability.

This is not about blaming individual teachers who were never properly prepared or given effective materials. It is about refusing to make children carry the blame for systemic instructional failures.

Children have been described as struggling, below level, resistant, unmotivated, and unable. Meanwhile, ineffective practices continue, achievement gaps persist, and schools purchase another program without confronting whether anyone has been adequately prepared to teach it.

Johnny was never the common denominator! School was.

𝐈𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐩 𝐚𝐬𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐰𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐠 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐉𝐨𝐡𝐧𝐧𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐚𝐬𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐰𝐡𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐭𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐭𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐡𝐢𝐦 𝐝𝐢𝐝 𝐧𝐨𝐭.

08/23/2026

🎉 THREE TUTORING SPOTS ARE NOW AVAILABLE! 🎉

And they opened for the very best reason:
Several Lighthouse Literacy Solutions, LLC students have graduated from tutoring after reaching grade level! 👏🏻 🙌🏻

I am now accepting three new students who need explicit, individualized reading and spelling instruction.

Lighthouse Literacy Solutions, LLC provides structured literacy instruction grounded in the science of reading. Instruction is targeted to each student’s specific needs and progress is measured through data, not guesswork.

As a CERI Certified Structured Literacy Specialist with more than 24 years of experience in special education, I work with students who:
📚 Struggle with decoding or spelling
📚 Read slowly or rely on guessing
📚 Have dyslexia or another learning disability
📚 Have received intervention but are not making sufficient progress
📚 Need instruction that closes gaps instead of helping them work around them

Programs do not teach children - skilled teachers do.
Only three spots are currently available. Message Lighthouse Literacy Solutions to schedule a consultation.

08/20/2026

I fully support our Governor, Mikie Sherrill, but something she said on social media yesterday made me wonder who she is relying on for literacy information. I don't expect her to be a literacy expert, but I do expect her to be guided and advised by experts. She said:

“Before third grade, you learn to read. After, you read to learn.”

I read that and just put my head in my hands and sighed. I hate this saying about learning to read until third grade and then reading to learn. I admit I have used it before so I am not shaming people who have used it, but we should know better by now. Remember, reading is MUCH MORE than just decoding! It also includes vocabulary and comprehension (the ultimate goal.) So, with that said, let me ask you: Are we EVER done learning to read? I am 52 and I am not.

Today, I was working with a student and we came across a word I had never heard before. We looked it up together. Then I said "I want to see how this is used in a sentence" and we looked that up too. I am still "learning" to read. I was easily able to decode the new word, but I had no idea what it meant. Therefore, I did know it and had to learn! I am still learning to read and I am far beyond third grade 😆

So, can we retire this third grade myth please? Can we add it to the "learning styles" trash heap?

08/20/2026

Brett Tingley recently posted a video on the Parents for Reading Justice page about Lucy Calkins attending The Reading League Summit. Brett even extended grace, saying she hoped Calkins came with good intentions.

Then came the defenses:
“Leave her alone.”
“Stop making this personal.”
“She was a pioneer.”
“The pendulum swings.”
“Science evolves.”
“When we know better, we do better.”
“There is no perfect program.”
“Every child learns differently.”
“She made a difference.”
“Her writing units were wonderful.”
“This is cancel culture.”

None of those statements address the actual issue!

Lucy Calkins was not simply a classroom teacher using the methods she had been taught. She was a highly influential professor, curriculum creator, author, institutional leader, and public authority whose ideas shaped teacher preparation, district purchasing, classroom instruction, and the reading lives of millions of children.

The research concerning phonemic awareness, decoding, word recognition, language comprehension, and the limitations of using context to identify words existed throughout the rise of balanced literacy. The National Reading Panel published its report in 2000. Researchers raised concerns. Dyslexia specialists were teaching differently. Parents reported the harm. This was not a case of the science suddenly changing. The warnings were there.

We must also ask:
What should influential academics and institutions reasonably have known?
When should they have known it?
Whose warnings were dismissed?
Why were those warnings disregarded?
Who was harmed?
What responsibility has been accepted?
What safeguards will prevent the same ideas from being repackaged and sold again?

People want everyone to forgive and move forward.

Meanwhile, where are the children? Where are the students who lost years of irreplaceable instructional time? Where are the families who spent thousands of dollars on evaluations, tutoring, advocates, and private placements? Where are the children who were called lazy, careless, unmotivated, or learning disabled after the instructional system failed them? Where are the adolescents and adults who still cannot read proficiently?

Apparently, everyone’s discomfort deserves protection except theirs. And let's be clear about one thing: Calkins has NEVER apologized.

A person may have created writing lessons that teachers loved and still bear responsibility for promoting a deeply flawed approach to reading instruction. Those truths can coexist.

Lucy Calkins has every right to attend, listen, learn, and change. The real question is whether education is capable of examining how prestige, institutional power, commercial influence, professional identity, and resistance to evidence allowed this to continue for so long. Because if our response is “leave her alone,” “everyone makes mistakes,” and “the pendulum swings,” then we have learned almost nothing.

And if we refuse to understand how this happened, it will happen again.

08/19/2026

“Strong spelling depends on high-quality word knowledge, not memorization alone.”

In Episode 258 of the Melissa & Lori Love Literacy® podcast, Brennan Chandler, PhD explained that effective spelling instruction must change as students’ word knowledge develops:

“Developmentally, the weighting of those layers changes over time. Early in elementary school, our instruction is going to lean more heavily on phonology and those basic orthographic patterns. But later, morphology becomes increasingly important as students encounter words like magic and magician, or heal and health, where the spelling preserves meaning.

Strong spelling depends on high-quality word knowledge, not memorization alone.

For teachers, the practical question becomes: What does this word demand? Is it mainly a sound-to-spelling challenge? Are my students having a pattern challenge? Is it morphology, or some combination? That question helps teachers decide what to model and what kind of practice students need.”

That practical question, “What does this word demand?”, connects directly to something Dr Nathaniel Swain has said about explicit teaching:

“To make explicit teaching work, we have to be interactive, and ready to bring the lesson to life for the students that are there in front of us. This adaptability must be based on deep knowledge of our subject matter and what our students already know.”

This is why simply telling teachers to use a particular program is not enough.

A program can provide a sequence, but it cannot determine why a particular student misspelled a particular word. It cannot decide whether that student needs support with phonology, an orthographic pattern, morphology, etymology, or some combination of them.

That requires a knowledgeable teacher who can analyze the word, interpret the student’s response, and adapt instruction accordingly.

Responsive teaching is not improvisation; It is the application of deep knowledge to the students and words directly in front of us.

08/16/2026

When I was in the classroom I used to LOVE picking out My Favorite Mistake of the week (yes, with Sheryl Crow playing lol). I wanted students to see that mistakes are to be learned from and that if they are making it - chances are others are making the same error.

I still use a version of this in my sessions. One of my favorite instructional routines is to rewrite a student’s misspelled words exactly as the student wrote them and ask, “Can you find the mistake?”

This kiddo has dysgraphia and weak working memory. When spelling is embedded in writing, he must simultaneously hold the word in memory, sequence its sounds and letters, retrieve spelling patterns, and manage handwriting. His written product does not always reflect everything he knows.

But when I reduce those demands and allow him to examine the word, he often finds and corrects the error.

Recognition is not the same as independent recall, so this does not mean the spelling is mastered. It does mean the error deserves closer analysis. A misspelled word does not automatically tell us that a student lacks the underlying knowledge. Sometimes the student knows more than the written product allows us to see.

Errors are data. The conditions under which they occur are data, too.

08/16/2026

This is cute!

As a dyslexic, reading, spelling and comprehension are always a challenge, but I find punctuation can also be a bit tricky, which is why I love cheat sheets like this!

08/05/2026

𝐄𝐱𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐭 𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐢𝐧 𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐰𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐬. Why?

Because handwriting and spelling affect whether a child’s thinking can reach the page.

Working memory is limited. Joshi, Treiman, Carreker, and Moats (2008/2009) explain that 𝐧𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐮𝐭𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐝𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐝𝐞𝐝 for planning, generating ideas, formulating sentences, and monitoring one’s writing. Students who struggle with spelling tend to write fewer words, produce lower-quality compositions, and restrict themselves to words they know how to spell.

Explicit spelling instruction also supports reading. Linnea Ehri (1997) famously described learning to read and learning to spell as “the same, almost.” Both depend on knowledge of the alphabetic system and increasingly precise representations of words in memory.

But spelling requires children to work through that system in the more demanding direction. They must hear a word, segment its sounds, connect those sounds to letters, preserve their sequence, and account for increasingly complex orthographic and morphological patterns.

Reading can sometimes conceal incomplete word knowledge.
Spelling exposes it.

O’Connor and Jenkins (1995) found that teaching kindergarten children with disabilities to construct written representations of spoken words improved both spelling and word reading. Møller, Mortensen, and Elbro (2022) later found that integrating spelling with systematic phonics produced stronger gains in phoneme awareness, spelling, and reading for kindergarteners at risk for reading difficulties.

Handwriting matters within this system, too. 𝐖𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐥𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐛𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐮𝐭𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐜, 𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐧 𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐝𝐞𝐯𝐨𝐭𝐞 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐮𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐦𝐞𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠. When it remains effortful, the physical act of getting words onto the page can interfere with composition.

This is the crucial distinction:
Retrieving knowledge, organizing ideas, and constructing meaning create productive mental effort. Struggling to form letters or spell nearly every word creates cognitive interference.

Automaticity does not remove the thinking from writing. It makes room for the thinking. Writing is not merely how students demonstrate what they have learned. 𝐖𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐩𝐬 𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠. But for writing to become a powerful tool for thinking, we must explicitly teach the foundational skills that allow ideas to move from the mind to the page.

Spelling is not an isolated weekly test. Handwriting is not just a nice thing if you have time to get to it. Both are integral parts of literacy instruction.

08/01/2026

𝐀𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐚 𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐝 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐠𝐠𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐧 𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐠𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐞𝐧 𝐚𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐛𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐚𝐢𝐫𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐲 𝐫𝐨𝐨𝐦. 🚨 🚑 ⚕️ 🧑‍⚕️ 👩‍⚕️ 👨‍⚕️ 🩻 🏥 🩺 🌡️ 🚁

All hands on deck.

🛑 Do not wait for the situation to become critical.
🛑 Do not wait for the child to fall further behind.
🛑 Do not wait for failure to become the evidence.
🛑 Do not wait for frustration to become avoidance, anxiety, or shame.
🛑 Do not call it “developmental” without investigating.
🛑 Do not tell the family to “wait and see.”

🟢 Bring in the teacher, reading specialist, interventionist, and family.
🟢 Assess the child.
🟢 Study the errors.
🟢 Identify the missing skills.
🟢 Provide explicit, evidence-aligned instruction with enough frequency and intensity to change the trajectory.
🟢 Monitor the child’s response and adjust quickly when something is not working.

A kindergarten reading struggle is not a reason to panic...it is a reason to mobilize.

Early intervention should feel like urgency, coordination, and relentless attention to the child’s needs.

Because “wait and see” too often becomes “wait until the situation is critical.”

07/31/2026

"The Gift of Dyslexia."

"Dyslexia is my superpower."

"Dyslexics are more creative."

Can someone explain the purpose of this to me?

I understand the desire to replace a deficit narrative with something affirming. But turning dyslexia into a collection of magical cognitive gifts is still stereotyping.

Some individuals with dyslexia are highly creative, spatially gifted, holistic thinkers. Others are methodical, sequential thinkers. Some have visual-spatial weaknesses. Some have ADHD or language difficulties that affect organization and expression. Those are individual profiles, not properties bestowed by dyslexia.

A brain is indeed a brain. Dyslexia describes a persistent difficulty developing accurate and fluent word recognition, decoding, and spelling. It does not describe the route a person’s thoughts supposedly travel.

This particular post from The Dyslexia Center of Utah is kindo of shocking. It leaps from “reading networks may function differently” to unsupported claims that:

👉 dyslexic people do not think sequentially;
👉 their thoughts “fire in multiple directions simultaneously”;
👉 they process entire systems at once;
👉 they naturally excel at spatial reasoning, pattern recognition, lateral thinking, and creativity.

Those are not diagnostic characteristics of dyslexia. Researchers have not identified a universal “dyslexic thinking style.” A review of spatial reasoning research concluded there is no general spatial advantage in dyslexia, and meta-analytic research has found no overall creativity advantage.

And “thinks in connections” is essentially meaningless. All brains think through neural connections. All people make associations, recognize patterns, and sometimes explain ideas indirectly. The tangled-line graphic is a metaphor presented as neuroscience.

𝐶𝑎𝑛 𝑤𝑒 𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡 𝑠𝑡𝑜𝑝 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠?

I feel like this type of talk places enormous pressure of children with dyslexia and makes them feel even worse. What if you aren't creative? You can't draw or build things or have some special "dyslexia superpower"? Now you are not only dyslexic but you are also missing this mysterious creativity that everyone attributes to being dyslexic. It is right up there with learning styles. 😡

𝐀 𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐝 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐝𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐚 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐚𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲 “𝐝𝐲𝐬𝐥𝐞𝐱𝐢𝐜 𝐬𝐮𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐩𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫” 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐚𝐝𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐯𝐚𝐥𝐮𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐦 𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐦 𝐭𝐨 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝.