One year ago, today, Roadways Literacy Studio moved from a home-basement location to a large warehouse space! Although it seemed a strange day to make our move, it has been anything but “foolish!”

April is National Poetry Month, and since poetry plays an important role in our Roadways to Reading system, I always look forward to this opportunity to emphasize the reasons behind using the rich language of poetry to teach reading.

Our students and teachers are busy preparing for our next Roadways Market Day! Friday, March 13, 2020, from 10:00a.m. – 12:30 p.m. we will be selling our products. The theme for our sale is “Pantry Particulars,” and includes many items you will need to stock your pantry. After shopping in our market, please stop at our lunch booth for a bowl of Irish stew and a biscuit in celebration of St. Patrick’s Day!

Summer Reading Camp: August 10-14 & 17-21, 2020. Conditioning Camp for Bookworms is a fun opportunity to get back to routine and practice those skills before school begins again. Students practice their reading and writing through engaging games and activities. Plan to register for our camp this summer!

This is our third year to include entrepreneurship in our math program at Roadways Literacy Studio. Entrepreneurship provides an opportunity to apply the numbers and operations that they are learning in class to a real-world situation. It is also interesting to note, that 35% of dyslexic people become entrepreneurs!

Roadways Literacy Studio hosted a fall workshop that covered each of the five key areas of literacy, demonstrating how the Roadways to Reading System can be used to assist and support struggling readers.

This fall we celebrated that opening of our new Roadways Literacy Studio location! Thank you to Gord and Maureen Haddock for providing us this incredible space!

Roadways Literacy Studio is a “Structured Literacy Program,” which we have found to be so effective for struggling readers. Particularly, in the world of a dyslexic student, a structured literacy program can be a saving grace. This article explores the differences between balanced and structured reading programs.

Hello! My name is Benjamin Johnson and I’m an educator here at Out of the Box Academy. Since coming to work with Sheila Erickson back in 2016, I’ve had quite the journey along the path that is Roadways, learning just as much as the kids who benefit from the program. I come from a linguistic background with particular interests in grammar, phonetics, and morphology. Roadways is a stellar program for educating on these vital topics, topics I firmly believe should have a place within our existing provincial education program, but which sadly seem to be always lacking in some way or another within the classroom setting.

Spelling is one of the most tested elements of literacy and one of the least well taught. Most classrooms today follow a Traditional Spelling Method, and churn out students who cannot spell! Even students that succeed on weekly tests often struggle to spell correctly in other contexts.

Repeated reading can be incorporated into a regular classroom reading program or be used with content area text. It can be modified to include unassisted or assisted repeated-reading techniques as described above with whole groups, small groups, or individuals. Text selections need to be based on students' reading levels.

Have you ever thought about what it takes to solidify something new into your memory? Research shows that one of the key strategies is repetition. This is not a new idea – in fact, it is so old there is a Latin quote about it…. Repetitio mater studiorum est… ‘Repetition is the mother of all learning’.

What is phonics? It is simply the association between the sounds and letters in our language. Phonics is an essential component of reading instruction - an established fact, and documented by Nancy Lewkowicz in the Journal of Educational Psychology 1980.

Fluency refers to accurate reading at a speed that is easy for an audience to listen to and is read with expression dictated by the author’s punctuation.