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Tone and mood are easy to confuse! To understand how they are different, let’s first take a look at what tone and mood each mean. From there, we can discuss what makes them different and how to identify both tone and mood in a book. What Is Tone? When you…

Teaching dialogue is about more than introducing grammar formatting and dialogue words (although that is important.) To learn how to write dialogue, students need to learn when and why to use it in their writing. This is a mystery to many writers, even in adulthood – but you have to…

Summer is a largely unstructured time for students, which often leads to a significant reduction in the amount of reading they do – and the amount of information they gain. In some cases, students may even lose some of the reading skills and strategies they spent all year building. The…

Most of the time, students read texts from beginning all the way to the end without pausing to comprehend what they’re reading. However, this requires readers to go over a challenging text again and again to really understand it. But there isanother, more effective way to read for comprehension and…

Journaling, for elementary students, might seem inaccessible or pointless — like “extra writing” on top of what they do now. But journaling at a young age has numerous academic and personal benefits. And the writing process doesn’t have to be boring, either. Read on for: What is journaling, exactly? How…

Reading practice is essential If you’re following this blog, then you’ve heard this before – and will probably hear it again: Nothing helps strengthen reading mastery more than practice. Practice is so important, in fact, that a 2000 report released by the National Reading Panel stated that the major difference…

While most students understand how to write a solid introduction, and know how to add body paragraphs with supporting arguments, they struggle to start a conclusion. A first glance, it can seem like a conclusion is just a copy of the introduction, and isn’t really useful when building an essay.…

When you already know how to read, it seems like such an easy skill. Then you sit down with your child and the prospect of teaching reading to them becomes suddenly overwhelming! Don’t worry! Teaching your kids to read takes time but with these 5 ideas, you’ll notice marked improvement…

In a rapidly changing world where information is at your fingertips, it’s less valuable (but still important!) to memorize, and more important to be able to put information together and draw a conclusion. Every time you make an inference, prepare an argument, or solve a problem with given information, you…

For years, summer has been painted as something to fear, mostly by academic programs offered during those off-school months. But what if we stopped seeing the time students spend out of school as a “loss”? What if summer is actually an opportunity to advance in unique ways that regimented school-like…