Supporting Diverse Learners with Comorbidity: ADHD and Dyslexia, in Grades 6-8

 

This session is designed to equip educators with the knowledge and strategies to support students diagnosed with ADHD and Dyslexia effectively. Participants will leave this workshop with an understanding of how to address comorbidities and learn practical tools for creating inclusive and nurturing environments in middle school.

Sharon Thomas (MAIA Founder and Director) and Samantha Santiago-Gionet (MAIA Executive Director of Executive Function Coaching and Tutoring) will co-present this session along with Dr. Paul Yellin, MD. Dr. Yellin provides neuropsychological evaluations at the Yellin Center and has expertise in diagnosing both dyslexia and ADHD.

 

 

Esther will review relevant research on vocabulary acquisition and how to apply the research to practice. Accessible instructional strategies will be presented, as well as ways to embed these instructional moves into your literacy program and content area instruction.

 

 

Esther will review the research, development and components of phonemic awareness and thencelve into a Cook's tour of instructional activities for assessing and teaching rhyming, segmenting, blending and other aspects of this important area -- all easy to embed in your early literacy or intervention program. 

 

 

Do your children struggle to transfer their reading skills into their writing? As a teacher, do you struggle to fit writing lessons into an already-packed literacy block? Parents, do you struggle to get your child to sit down and start an essay or writing piece? In this session, we'll explore the three main skills that are required for students to be effective writers, as well as how to develop these skills in an already full day (both in school and at home!)

 Prescriptive Instruction: Using Assessments Strategically

 

If a child is struggling with phonics, is the issue really phonics - or do we need to go back and look at their phonemic awareness skills? If a student can't comprehend, is it truly a comprehension issue, or do they struggle with word recognition or vocabulary? This session looks deeply at how to use assessment to get to the root cause of our readers' struggles to be able to provide them with targeted instruction that helps them soar!

We'll also talk about effective small grouping, as well as how to support our secondary students. 

his session is ideal for parents, teachers, administrators, tutors, and anyone who wants to give students the most effective support in their literacy acquisition.

 

 

 

Actively teaching children how to generate questions provides them with important tools to guide their thinking as they read. This workshop will provide a research-based context for instruction in question generating and present robust strategies, including ReQuest, 5Ws,  Question Answer Relationships, and others that can easily be incorporated in the literacy block, in tutoring, in content area instruction, as well as at home.

 

 

This workshop will cover the science of fluency building and its importance in successful reading development, covering instructional strategies for fluency building based on the method of repeated readings, ways to bring fluency building to the classroom, tutorial setting and beyond. We will describe the research, assessment of fluency, and a range of "how-to" instructional strategies for incorporating this critical area of reading into daily instruction.