Category Archives: Encouraging Words

Encouraging Words, Motivation Tips

Every Little Bit Helps

Sometimes when we are worrying about the big goal of getting someone literate, we lose sight of the fact that every little milestone is a big thing. Watch for the signs that your student is improving in reading and celebrate each and every sign! Here are a few that are easy to overlook:

  1. Your student is reading/recognizing more print in the environment, like signs, labels, or advertisements.
  2. Your student turns on the closed captioning and is looking at the words while watching a show.
  3. Your student can read simple directions or recipes.
  4. Your student is texting or messaging more on social media.
  5. Your student is playing word games, like doing word searches or apps that use letters/words.
  6. Your student is using the internet more independently.

All of these things are signs that students are paying more attention to print and are getting more meaning from print. Keep going!! You can nurture and encourage these things to keep the ball rolling.

Be sure that you are modeling reading every chance you get for your student and pointing out the ways that reading makes your life easier. And celebrate! It’s a big accomplishment for a person with reading challenges to use print more frequently in their life.

Encouraging Words

Slow and Steady Wins the Race

Don’t give up on your reader!  Too often, the pressures and demands of the classroom setting cause teachers to hurry struggling students along too quickly.   The circumstances demand that a specific amount of progress be documented by the end of the school year or other defined date.

However, learning isn’t really on a schedule.  If your child is marching to a different drummer in terms of learning pace, it’s not the end of the world.  You sometimes can make up the difference by supplementing classroom reading lessons and giving your student additional instructional time.  Other times, you can just extend reading lessons beyond the end of the school year, moving forward with learning while classmates are standing still or even moving backwards.  Finally, the end of formal schooling is not the end of learning.  Reading instruction can continue after that point, as well.

The main focus should be taking the student as far as possible and making progress, rather than meeting outside expectations about pacing.  Instruction will be more successful if it is paced in such a way that your student achieves success.  So make the goal a bit smaller.  Strive for progress and improvement instead of complete literacy.  Both you and your student will be much more relaxed that way, and a whole lot more likely to succeed.

Encouraging Words

Take a Breath

Stop right where you are, right now.  Are you stressed about your child’s school progress?  Take a breath.  Are you agonizing over the future?  Take a breath.  Are you wondering how you’re going to make it through homework time yet again?  Take a breath.  Are you worrying about whether your child will pass the next class or make the next milestone?  Take a breath.

It’s easy to say, hard to do, and oh, so important to accomplish.  Don’t fall into the trap of fussing and worrying your life away over things that you cannot control.  Your precious child will be grown before you know it, so make sure you are savoring the time you have together.  Don’t let worry and stress over academic performance or anything else spoil your relationship and steal your optimism.

You are doing all of the things you can possibly be doing to be supportive and to help your child.  You’re doing the best you can with the resources available.  And it WILL be good enough, I promise you.  As long as you are doing your best, it truly will be.

You’ll learn new strategies along the way and you’ll incorporate them, then perhaps you’ll make a leap ahead in progress, and that’s wonderful.  But until you find that magical new idea, keep doing what you’ve been doing.  Keep on trying your best.

There’s no better gift you can give your child than your best.

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