In recognition of Dyslexia Awareness Month, the nonprofit advocacy group Park City Reads is hosting Nancy Redding for a keynote address followed by a panel discussion Thursday.
Redding taught at Marsac Elementary School, now Park City Hall, from 1973 to 1975, where she established the district’s first resource room for students with learning disabilities. Today, she trains and mentors teachers who want to be certified through a national academy.
Structured literacy, Redding explains, is a traditional, science-based approach to reading instruction that emphasizes phonics, decoding, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension—the five pillars of reading. Though widely used in the 1940s and ’50s, she says it fell out of favor in later decades. Now, it’s making a comeback.
“Structured literacy is probably the most traditional literacy approach,” she said on the “KPCW Local News Hour" Oct. 6. “It is directly and explicitly teaching how to read and spell in a way that matches how young brains learn to read and spell. So, it is explicit, it is cumulative. You always build on what a child knows to build their self-esteem, build their ability to read from the ground up.”
While some children learn to read naturally, she says the majority do not.
“That leaves about 55% to 60% of children who definitely need more explicit instruction, and that includes about 10% of our population who will be somewhere in the realm of dyslexia,” she said. “All kids can be good readers and spellers. We're all different. We all have different brains. Different kids need different amounts of this kind of explicit instruction.”
Redding will give a keynote address on Thursday, Oct. 9, at the Blair Education Center at 6 p.m. After, she’ll be part of a moderated panel to answer questions from the audience.
The event is free to attend. Click here for more information and to register.
