Jon Pickles10 Ways to Boost Your Child’s Speaking & Listening SkillsSpeaking and listening are often de-emphasized in schools due to the pressure on teachers to focus on reading and writing. The fourth thr...
Jon Pickles10 Ways to Boost Your Child's Writing SkillsIt’s no secret that inspiring kids to read is much easier than inspiring them to write. Case in point: I begin every school year with a q...
Jon Pickles10 Ways to Boost Your Child’s Reading Skills Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash When teachers and parents support each other, great things happen. I really appreciate it when parents ...
Jon PicklesA Student's Workspace Part 2#specialeducation #middleschool #motivation #languagearts #inclusion #executiveprocessing In Part 1 I discussed my inspiration and ration...
Jon PicklesA Student's WorkspaceStudent Workspace: In which I discuss an outside-the-box strategy for engaging a special education student. I’ve always been fascinated b...
Jon PicklesThinking About Thinking As children grow and develop, they gradually become aware of their own thought processes. They grow beyond thinking to having thought awa...
Jon PicklesConversing with the Text Reading is a form of receptive language. As such, most people approach reading as a one-way process. This is understandable, but unfortun...
Jon PicklesWays of KnowingI first learned about Bloom’s Taxonomy—a hierarchy of knowledge—back in graduate school and it opened my eyes as to the primary role of a...
Jon PicklesThe Elevated Story MountainThematic analysis is difficult for young readers. Language arts teachers often make it a priority to guide students to an understanding o...
Jon PicklesMarking Text with Special Education Students: Ditch that Tech!Let me begin by saying that I embrace technology in my sixth-grade language arts classroom, but there are times when tried-and-true metho...
Jon PicklesModeling Annotations - Teaching CopiesIn my last blog, I wrote about marking text with low-skilled readers to boost engagement. Marking text is formally known as annotating, w...
Jon PicklesCrossing the Boundary – Reading Across DisciplinesFrom a cognitive standpoint, the greatest disservice done to students was to compartmentalize disciplines. Yet the industrialized model o...