Literacy How, Inc.

Introducing our NEW Online Comprehension Course. Learn to put research into practice with a deep dive into comprehension! This interactive, self-paced online course brings the Literacy How Comprehension: Knowledge to Practice book to life and provides teachers with classroom-tested activities they can use with their students.

The ultimate goal of reading is to understand any text from the earliest decodables to the most complex content. That means that comprehension instruction shouldn’t wait for beginning readers to master decoding. Instruction that focuses on a variety of language processing abilities needs to occur concurrently with word recognition instruction!

Register today by visiting our website: https://literacyhow.org/comprehension-online-course/ Make sure to buy the book as well!

Educators! Help combat students' summer learning loss with these helpful tips (alt-text below).

1. Provide ability-appropriate reading packets when you send students off for break. ReadWorks.org ReadWorks offers free, summer-themed passages by grade level.

2. Create ways for your students to record and report on their summer reading to share with next year’s teacher.

3. Take your students to your local library to meet the librarians, learn about summer programming, sign up for library cards and summer reading initiatives (with
parental consent).

4. Partner with your school or local librarian to offer book lists by reading ability and topics of interest. ReadingRockets.org has summer book lists by interest
and grade level.

5. Lend out the books that you are ready to retire from your classroom library.

6. If you live in Connecticut, check out ReadyForTheGrade.org to refer students to summer reading programs at local libraries through the New Alliance Foundation.

7. Check out the National Summer LearningAssociation’s (NSLA) website SummerLearning.org for ideas on how to create a powerful summer learning program in your school or district.

When readers draw upon information from what they read in order to write sentences, the writing simultaneously checks for understanding of the reading and facilitates remembering important content knowledge. Use this Sentence Summary activity to reinforce the Reading/Writing connection with your students while reading narrative texts.

Interested in learning more about the Reading/Writing connection and Literacy How Comprehension activities? Purchase our Comprehension: Knowledge to Practice book, and look out for our NEW interactive online Comprehension course, coming soon! (see link in bio)

Calling all special educators, reading specialists & interventionists, SLPs, and teachers of multi-lingual learners! Join us this July for 5 exciting sessions of STRUCTURED LITERACY 2, our series on the Science of Reading, Structured Literacy, and supporting students with SLD/Dyslexia and other language-based learning disabilities. This course, accredited by the International Dyslexia Association, will empower teachers with knowledge to enhance their tiered intervention or special education for specialized instruction. The instructional strategies and techniques that teachers will learn may be used with an existing program or as part of a Structured Literacy approach. Participants are required to attend all 5 sessions in-person from 8:30am-3:00pm at our NEW Literacy How offices in North Haven, CT on the following dates: 7/7, 7/8, 7/9, 7/14, 7/16. For more information or to register today, visit the link in our bio or our website: https://bit.ly/SL2Summer26

The Knowledge Tree is a comprehension activity that guides students in selecting and categorizing information from an informational text in order to build background knowledge. To do this activity:
1. Display and review the parts of the Knowledge Tree (slide 2).
2. Read the passage Clouds and Rain (3).
3. Use sticky notes to write information that students recall from the reading.
4. Guide students to place sticky notes in the appropriate parts of the Knowledge Tree (4).
5. After reading and sorting the subtopics, read additional articles (5) on the same topic to add more details to the Knowledge Tree (6).

Learn more about the Knowledge Tree and other text comprehension activities by purchasing our Literacy How Professional Learning Series book, Comprehension: Knowledge to Practice (link in bio). And keep a look our for our BRAND NEW, online Comprehension course, coming next month!

Use the Narrative Story Map in your classroom to help students engage with deep reading and deep thinking, which are important components of reading comprehension. The Narrative Story Map helps students understand the elements of a story's structure, as well as the feelings that motivate characters to solve a problem within a story.

To learn more about the Narrative Story Map and text comprehension activities, purchase our Literacy How Professional Learning Series book, Comprehension: Knowledge to Practice here - https://literacyhow.org/literacy-how-books/

Keep an eye out, we also have a virtual comprehension course coming later this month!

Join Literacy How founder and president Margie Gillis at the Learning Ally Spotlight on Dyslexia virtual conference on Thursday June 4, 2026. Dr. Gillis will be speaking on "Oral Language: The Heart and Core of Reading and Writing Proficiency." Visit https://learningally.org/conferences/spod26 to register today!

Our final stop around the Reading Wheel takes us to Text Comprehension, which is the ability to make meaning, and the ultimate goal of reading. Many educators think of comprehension as an end product for their students to demonstrate reading skills. However, understanding is a process that leads to a product. By process, we mean: what do students do while reading to construct meaning?

For students to comprehend what they read, they have to engage in the following cognitive processes:
1. Identifying and making meaning of idea units
2. Monitoring understanding
3. Integrating ideas between sentences
4. Integrating prior knowledge and inferencing
5. Organizing overall understanding

Get ready to learn more about text comprehension this month by purchasing our Literacy How Professional Learning Series book, Comprehension: Knowledge to Practice (link in bio or https://literacyhow.org/literacy-how-books/)

Morphology is the study of meaningful units of language (morphemes) that are combined to form words. Prefixes (word beginnings) and suffixes (word endings) alter the form or meaning of words.

A Morpheme Matrix is a tool to teach word structure that increases student engagement and understanding. You can find or create your own morpheme matrices on Neil Ramsden's website: https://www.neilramsden.co.uk/
To teach with this tool:
1. Explain to students that words are built using morphological elements/word parts.
2. Define the base/root, prefixes and suffixes in the matrix.
3. Have students build as many words as they can!

Want to learn more about teaching morphology and vocabulary? Buy our Literacy How Professional Learning Series book, Vocabulary: Knowledge to Practice at the link in our bio or https://literacyhow.org/literacy-how-books/

Calling all special educators, reading specialists & interventionists, SLPs, and teachers of multi-lingual learners! Join us this July for 5 exciting sessions of STRUCTURED LITERACY 2, our series on the Science of Reading, Structured Literacy, and supporting students with SLD/Dyslexia and other language-based learning disabilities.

This course, accredited by the International Dyslexia Association, will empower teachers with knowledge to enhance their tiered intervention or special education for specialized instruction. The instructional strategies and techniques that teachers will learn may be used with an existing program or as part of a Structured Literacy approach.

Participants are required to attend all 5 sessions in-person from 8:30am-3:00pm at our NEW Literacy How offices in North Haven, CT on the following dates: 7/7, 7/8, 7/9, 7/14, 7/16. For more information or to register today, visit the link in our bio or our website: https://bit.ly/SL2Summer26