We have fantastic news! Our training program and curriculum have been officially reaccredited by the International Multisensory Structured Language Education Council (IMSLEC) and the International Dyslexia Association (IDA). Back in 2018, our curriculum, staff, and facilities went through the rigorous IMSLEC and IDA Accreditation examination process and passed with flying colors and high accolades!
During the accreditation process, IMSLEC and IDA conducted an in-depth review of Kendore Learning’s Structured Literacy curriculum, which is used one-on-one with students at Syllables Learning Center and in classrooms across the nation through our Kendore teacher training program.
With these important seals of approval, Kendore Learning and Syllables Learning Center remain among the elite ranks of programs across the country recognized to help students with dyslexia and related learning differences.
Educators who are trained by Kendore Learning know that our workshops and structured literacy, speech-to-print curricula meet well-defined educational standards. They are provided with the training, curricula, and instructional tools needed to teach the way students learn best.
This blog post highlights how the multisensory Kendore activities teachers know and love can be altered to help students work on advanced concepts, including the six syllable types of REVLOC. If you’ve attended our webinars or trainings, you may be familiar with these activities! If you would like to know more about our accredited curricula and trainings, check out our website or contact us.
Hot Lava
Early in the curriculum, teachers learn how to use the Code Quest Consonant and Vowel card decks to play Hot Lava to test their students’ automaticity. The UNLOCK REVLOC card deck is perfect for Hot Lava! Lay down two or three syllable type cards next to each other to form a multisyllabic word. Ask students to read the word and then hop on it to stay “safe.” Create a path of these words and let the fun begin!
Note: The words you form with the REVLOC cards do not have to be real. Students need practice decoding both real and nonsense words in order to know how to apply the rules you are teaching.
You can also create a path using a variety of single syllable cards. Ask the students to cross the “hot lava” by jumping only on a certain syllable type, or by naming the syllable type before they jump on the card. For a Hot Lava reminder, watch our demonstration video.
Beach Ball Toss
This Kendore activity is an excellent way to get students up and moving while they practice identifying the six syllable types! Place cards from the UNLOCK REVLOC deck inside the pockets of the Toss and Teach Beach Ball. Toss the ball back and forth and ask your student to read the card their thumb lands on and identify what syllable type is represented.
Advance to having the student read two cards next to each other on the beach ball so that they can practice decoding and smoothly reading multisyllabic words. Remember that having them practice reading real and nonsense words will help them build automaticity.
For a reminder about how to use the Toss and Teach Beach Ball, watch our demonstration video.
Syllable Tracking
If you’re trained in our curriculum, you’ve been working with your students on Sound Track since their very first Kendore lesson. Now that they’ve been introduced to some of the syllable types, they can work on Syllable Tracking!
This activity follows the same structure as Sound Track, but now each rainbow token will represent one syllable. Therefore, your student will work on strengthening their memory skills by recalling a multisyllabic nonsense word, identifying which syllable is changing, and showing the change.
If you have any questions about these activities, please contact us. We would be more than happy to help!
Our Executive Director Jennifer Hasser, M.Ed., was recently interviewed on the fantastic Dyslexia Duo podcast. Her conversation with Aimee and Melissa spanned two episodes!
In Episode 32, Jennifer talks about how her passion for education began in the high school behavior disorder classroom and transformed as she occupied different roles, including but not limited to being a parent of a dyslexic child and founder/director of a reading remediation center. They also dive into discussions about reading instruction.
During Episode 33, Jennifer discusses the importance of providing teachers with the knowledge, training, and tools needed to identify and support struggling students. In addition, they discuss Kendore Learning’s structured literacy training and multisensory materials, and how Syllables Learning Center provides assessments and one-on-one teletherapy to students nationwide. They’ve conducted 100,000 hours of student sessions in the past 20 years!
“A highly-trained teacher is a very valuable resource.” – Jennifer Hasser, M.Ed.
If a child has heard a word and understands its meaning, they are more likely to be able to read that word when they encounter it in text. That’s why it’s important to develop oral language by reading and talking to your students!
Oral language skills play a crucial role in literacy development, as they lay the foundation for reading and writing. By reading and talking to your students, you support oral language development by introducing them to vocabulary they will encounter later and the meanings behind those words.
Watch this short video for more information about the importance of oral language.
When delivering new content to students (particularly struggling learners), it is important to chunk information into small, digestible parts. Why?
By breaking content into smaller bits, and presenting it gradually over a period of time, we maximize retention rates in the classroom because chunking makes more efficient use of working memory. A child is more likely to remember twenty vocabulary words if they are presented with two or three new words each day rather than all at once.
Watch this short video to hear our Executive Director explain why this strategy helps students succeed!
Elena Mendoza is the Founder of Integrative Learning and an artist who shares her artwork and creations, which celebrate dyslexia, on her website and Etsy. To raise awareness during Dyslexia Awareness Month, we invited her to share her story!
Elena Mendoza: From Dyslexic Teacher to Thriving Artist: A Journey of Resilience and Creativity
Life often takes unexpected turns, leading us down paths we never imagined. My journey from being a dyslexic teacher to embracing the world of art after a concussion has been a testament to resilience, adaptability, and the transformative power of creativity. In this blog post, I share my personal story of navigating my challenges.
Dyslexia, a learning difference that affects reading, writing, and spelling, became a lens through which I viewed both my students and myself. Instead of seeing it as a hindrance, I embraced my dyslexia as a source of creativity and empathy, finding innovative ways to connect with and support my students.
Life has a way of surprising us when we least expect it. A sudden concussion changed the trajectory of my career and, in many ways, my identity. The cognitive challenges that followed forced me to reconsider my path and find new ways to channel my passion for expression and connection.
During recovery, I discovered the therapeutic power of art. Creating became a sanctuary, a space where I could channel my thoughts and emotions without the constraints of language. Art provided a form of communication that transcended the limitations imposed by my concussion, offering a profound sense of healing and renewal.
My journey from dyslexic teacher to artist is a testament to the resilience that resides within us all. Embracing dyslexia taught me to find strength in adversity, and the concussion served as an unexpected doorway to a world of artistic exploration. It is a reminder that even in the face of unexpected challenges, there lies an opportunity for growth and reinvention. As I continue to navigate this artistic path, I carry with me the lessons learned from both my teaching days and the transformative period post-concussion.
In the end, my story is a celebration of the unexpected, a reminder that even in the face of challenges, there is always the potential for growth, self-discovery, and the emergence of new and vibrant chapters in the story of our lives.
Phonological awareness is the human brain’s implicit or explicit sensitivity to the way sounds combine to form words, sentences, and language. Some people naturally understand (implicit) phonemic awareness without knowing phonological awareness concepts. Others must be taught (explicit) phonological concepts to benefit from them.
Phonological Awareness includes:
Breaking sentences into words,
Breaking words into syllables,
Recognizing and producing rhyming words, and
Breaking words into sounds: Phonemic awareness (a sub-category under phonological awareness that deals exclusively with words and is strictly auditory).
During our two-part YouTube series, Executive Director Jennifer Hasser, M.Ed., discusses phonological awareness and strategies for helping students develop this critical learning skill. Watch now to learn more!
The Kendore Kingdom curriculum is designed to benefit all students. Our activities enable teachers to continually assess student progress so that they can help struggling readers while also giving those who catch on more quickly the opportunity to delve deeper.
We received the following question from a Kendore-trained teacher and wanted to share Jennifer’s answer!
Hi Jennifer,
What do I do if I have students in my group that already know or quickly grasp the understanding of sounds and letters? I want to make sure I attend to all the kids in my classroom and not hold anyone back.
Sincerely,Dealing with Mixed Levels
Great question! All students can benefit from retrieval, memory, and phonological awareness activities while building reading capacity. Teachers often confuse rushing through phonics as true reading instruction, but that would be like memorizing the rule book for basketball and never over-learning the fundamentals. We want students of all levels to have a solid foundation before moving forward.
You can attend to high-performing students by layering challenges into your activities. It’s easier than you think! Help strengthen their oral vocabularies, phonological awareness skills, understanding of syntax, and more with our recommendations.
Here are some ways to provide challenges for students while focusing on phonological awareness. Our curriculum is full of activities, so all kids are sure to stay engaged regardless of level!
Provide students with a word and ask them for words that rhyme with it (e.g., cat, bat, hat). Discuss why these words rhyme by breaking down the sounds in each word. Challenge students to identify the initial and final sounds.
Use our Smiley Thumbs Up word lists and have students identify words containing the target sound(s) for the week. Add advanced vocabulary to test high-performing students, e.g., “Give me a thumbs up if you hear the /f/ sound in the word “photograph.” How many times do you hear the /f/ sound in this word?” (2 times).
Lots of kids may know their sounds, but do they know how they’re produced? Talk to your students about how each of the sounds are made (where the air travels through the mouth, tongue placement, mouth placement, etc.) and ask them to watch their own mouths in a mirror for a full kinesthetic learning experience.
Try Magazine Madness! During this activity, kids cut up pictures from magazines into strips, one for each sound (phoneme) or syllable. For example, the word “fish” has 3 phonemes (sounds), so a picture of a fish would be cut into 3 vertical strips. This can prove to be quite challenging!
Incorporate parts of speech into your lessons by using a MadLibs. Teach nouns, verbs, and adjectives containing the target sound(s) for the week (e.g., “Give me a noun that begins with /v/.”).
Even high performers can build automaticity to increase their reading rate! Use fluency drills to build sound retrieval, and pair off students of similar levels to time each other.
With card games, memory building activities, Sound Track and more, the possibilities are endless!
– Jennifer
Please contact us if you need more ideas or have a question you’d like answered. We may feature it in a future blog post.
All too often, we hear people say that the English language doesn’t make sense and that spelling and word meaning “just have to be memorized.” This couldn’t be further from the truth! Our language does make sense…if you know the rules. For example, the word “have”follows the rule that English words should not end in <v>; therefore an <e> is added.
Let’s stop telling our students that our language is illogical, and let’s teach them the tools they need to easily break the code to read and spell thousands of words. Watch Executive Director Jennifer Hasser, M.Ed., explain more in our helpful video.
If you’d like to learn strategies that make structured literacy instruction more effective and memorable, attend our workshops. Our curricula and training program are accredited by the International Dyslexia Association (IDA) and the International Multisensory Language Education Council (IMSLEC).
The letter <r> becomes very bossy when it follows a vowel! This letter affects the sound a vowel makes, giving a vowel followed by an <r> the name “r-controlled vowel.”
Tricky R-Controlled Vowels: <er>, <ur>, and <ir>
In the Kendore Kingdom, we call these three r-controlled vowels “growling r” vowels because, rather than letting the vowel say its sound or name, the <r> makes the vowel growl like a tiger. “Growling r” vowels are vowel digraphs since they are two letters representing one sound.
Since <er>, <ur>, and <ir> all sound the same, spelling these digraphs can be tricky. It helps to know that <er> is the most common spelling of the /er/ sound (40%), <ur> is the second most common (26%), and <ir> is the least common (13%). When all else fails and the student does not know the proper spelling, knowing frequency will help students make an educated spelling guess.
<ar> and <or>
While <r> still controls the sound of /ar/ and /or/, these r-controlled vowels have unique sounds — making them easier for children to spell.
Did You Know?
When you hear the /er/ sound at the end of a word, and it represents the noun suffix <er> meaning “a person who,” it can be spelled multiple ways. If you hear /er/ at the end of a word that:
means “a person who,” spell it <er> (usually after an Old English base, as in teacher, painter, and leader).
means “a person who” and follows a <t>, spell it <or> (usually follow a Latin base, as in actor, sculptor, or raptor).
Attend our Kendore Word Play training to learn more strategies behind spelling the /er/ sound at the end of multisyllabic words!
Teaching R-Controlled Vowels
The Kendore Kingdom features a memorable story about the Growling ‘r’ tiger. Poor Growling ‘r’ hasn’t learned his manners and he growls when introduced to new friends. Children remember the adventures of Growling ‘r’ tiger and translate this story into an understanding of r-controlled vowels. If you are a Kendore-trained teacher, be sure to refer to your manual for instructions on using Growling ‘r’ tiger to teach your students r-controlled vowels.
When writing/spelling a word with an r-controlled vowel, students will often incorrectly reverse the <r> and the vowel. In many words, reversing the two letters will still produce a real word (barn/bran, arm/ram). Dot and Jot (phoneme/grapheme mapping) can help students prevent these transpositions.
Tiger Trek Card Games
Our Tiger Trek card games are a fun, multisensory way to reinforce r-controlled vowels. The Tiger Trek deck can be used to play many games, including War, Rummy, Memory, Go Fish and more!
The deck contains both real and nonsense words in order to assess concept knowledge and discourage rote memorization. Students should be able to decode nonsense words such as ‘fram’ and ‘terk’ as well as real words.
Watch a demonstration of Tiger Trek games on our YouTube Channel!
