Brain Fact Friday on ”Accelerating Literacy: Understanding How the Brain Learns to Read”

DID YOU KNOW that “How quickly and successfully the brain learns to read”[i] is greatly influenced by the student’s ability to speak.  “It is important to understand what cognitive neuroscience has revealed about how the brain processes the spoken word” (Souza, page 11) when looking to unlock the secret for accelerating literacy with our students, or children. On this episode you will learn: ✔︎ How the brain learns to read. ✔︎ Why it's so important that our children/students learn to read by 3rd grade. ✔︎ Strategies that you can use today to accelerate reading with your emergent bilingual students, or struggling readers. Welcome back to the Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast for BRAIN FACT FRIDAY and EPISODE #182 on “Accelerating Literacy: Understanding How the Brain Learns to Read” For those new, or returning guests, welcome! I'm Andrea Samadi, author, and educator from Toronto, Canada, now in Arizona, and like many of you listening, have been fascinated with learning and understanding the science behind high performance strategies that we can use to improve our productivity in our schools, our sports, and workplace environments. For this week’s Brain Fact Friday, I’m deep in the middle of preparing for a presentation with Assistant Superintendent Greg Wolcott[ii], and his Learning Abilities Summit. If you are an educator, looking for new ideas and strategies for your students, please do visit his Summit page to learn more.[iii]  For a reasonable cost, he offers training for educators that’s available virtually, from people around the country who share their expertise to accelerate learning for your students. I highly recommend following these Summits and offering them to your staff for professional development. As an educational consultant, I first began making the connection with how the brain impacts learning back in 2014 and began creating presentations around what I was learning years before I had launched this podcast. One project was with an educational publisher who asked me to create a whitepaper on how ELL (English Language Learners or our Emergent Bilingual) students learn to read. This was right in the middle of watching my youngest daughter struggle with learning to read in 1st grade (she’s now in 5th grade struggles much less) but as we begin, I have to say that I have not only taught these strategies to educators, and created training materials with them, but have personally used them with my own daughter as learning to read is not only a challenge for our ELL students, but many English speaking students as well. Before I offer some of the strategies, I discovered in my research to create this whitepaper to accelerate literacy, I think it's always important to dig deeper into "the why" behind looking for solutions to the most common challenges our students are facing when learning to read. We know that every child learns at their own pace, but there are important metrics to notice with reading and I did ask Dr. Daniel Ansari, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning about these benchmarks when it comes to numeracy and math on our interview #138[iv] this past summer. If you want to review the important metrics he suggests for math, please do revisit his interview by looking at the references in the show notes. But getting back to literacy—I want to share some statistics (and these are US statistics for our international listeners) but you will get the point no matter where you are listening to this podcast. I’m sure it wouldn’t shock you to know the problems that illiteracy is causing in America (and internationally) but if we dig just a bit deeper, did you know that: 2/3 of students who cannot read proficiently by the end of 4th grade will end up in jail or on welfare. Over 70% of America’s inmates cannot read above a 4th grade level. 1 in 4 children in America grow up without learning how to read at all. Students who don't read