Emily Carter

When my daughter was in second grade, I got a note from her teacher saying she was “below benchmark” in reading fluency. I had no idea what that meant, so I sat at our kitchen table with a stopwatch, a library book, and a red pen to figure out how to measure my child’s words … Read more

If you have ever watched your child sound out the same sentence three times and wondered whether something is wrong, you are not alone. Parents ask me all the time how to tell if their child’s reading speed is on track for their grade. It is one of the most common concerns I hear, and … Read more

I’ve watched my nephew stumble over the same paragraph three times in a row, eyes tired, voice flat. He wasn’t struggling because he couldn’t read the words. He was struggling because reading still felt like work. That’s the moment most parents start searching for how to improve reading fluency with repeated reading at home, and … Read more

Fast readers can have poor comprehension because reading speed and reading comprehension rely on separate cognitive processes that operate independently. Your eyes can move across text quickly, but your brain still needs time to decode meaning, store information in working memory, and connect it to what you already know. When you read above roughly 400 … Read more

Have you ever listened to a child read aloud and noticed that every single word sounds like its own separate sentence? That staccato, robotic delivery is called choppy reading. While it seems harmless at first glance, word-by-word reading hurts comprehension in ways that can affect a student’s entire academic journey. When someone reads one word … Read more

Your child sounds out every word correctly, turns pages at a steady pace, and finishes the chapter, then asks what the story was about. This is one of the most common concerns I hear from parents, and it almost always comes down to one truth: reading and comprehension are separate skills. A child can master … Read more

If you have a child in early elementary school, you have probably heard teachers talk about the shift from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.” Learning to read is the early phase where children build foundational decoding and phonics skills; reading to learn is when they use those skills to absorb new information from … Read more

If your child can read the words on the page but struggles to tell you what the chapter was actually about, you’re not alone. I’ve worked with dozens of families on this exact issue, and the good news is that summarizing is a teachable skill. In this guide, I’ll walk you through how to teach … Read more

I have watched my own child push a book across the table and say the words no parent wants to hear: “Reading is boring.” If you are reading this right now, you have probably heard them too. Maybe more than once. Here is what I want you to know before we go any further. When … Read more

If you have a son who would rather do almost anything than pick up a book, you are far from alone. The gender reading gap is one of the most consistent findings in education research, and it shows up in nearly every country studied. Boys score lower on reading assessments, report less enjoyment from reading, … Read more