Ruth Rumack is in the house, and we're diving deep into the world of reading, where we unravel the mysteries of why some kiddos can read like the wind while others are left scratching their heads. With over 30 years of experience, Ruth knows the ins and outs of transforming struggling readers into confident bookworms. She highlights the powerful connection between reading development, emotional well-being, and family vibes, sharing how understanding and aligning instructional materials with a child's readiness can turn learning into a stress-free adventure. Plus, we’re getting the scoop on her decodable comic series, Yak Pack Comics, designed to make reading fun and engaging for early and striving readers. So grab your favorite snack, settle in, and let’s get ready to sprinkle some reading magic into our kids' lives!

Bringing Education Home is an educational podcast brought to you by Kristina and Herb Heagh-Avritt.

If you enjoy the show, we'd love for you to leave a rating or review on your favorite podcast app!

Please let your friends know they can listen for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or their preferred podcast app or online at Bringing Education Home.

Sponsored by Vibrant Family Education - creating Happy, Healthy and Successful kids

Follow us on these socials:

Facebook

LinkedIn

YouTube

Instagram

Facebook Group - The Family Learning Circle

Facebook Business Page: Vibrant Family Education

Support Bringing Education Home

Copyright 2026 Kristina & Herb Heagh-Avritt

This podcast is hosted by Captivate, try it yourself for free.

I now have the pleasure of introducing Ruth Rumack. Ruth is a reading specialist with more than 30 years of experience helping striving readers build both the skills and confidence needed to succeed.

Many of the families she works with have a bright, capable child who is struggling with reading without a clear understanding of why. As the founder of Ruth Rumack's learning space, she helps uncover what's really getting in the way and how to support it effectively.

Ruth focuses on how reading development, emotional well being, and finally family dynamics are deeply connected and how adding aligning instruction materials and a child's readiness can reduce stress and transformation and transform the learning experience at home. She is a frequent media contributor, appearing on morning television news programs and in newspapers to share insights on education and learning.

Ruth is also the creator of Yak Pack Comics, a decodable comic series designed to support early and striving readers in a way that is both effective and genuinely engaging. Welcome, Ruth. It is a pleasure to have you here today. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you so much. I'm honored.

Thank you again for my point as well. We are going to be talking reading today, one of my passions. Ruth and I are like, oh, yeah, let's talk reading.

And we're going to rely on Herb to every once in a while say, oh, hold on, what was that word? Talking parent ease instead of educator ease.

But you know, this is just so very, very important, Ruth, and you know it, because we've both been in this learning space, this teaching space, and if our kiddos don't have reading skills, how do they access so much of their learning? And then their confidence tanks and their love of learning tanks and all sorts of everything. So, yes, thank you for being here.

And I'm excited about talking to parents and kids, caregivers about how do we help at home and what do we really need to get these guys going. So thank you very much.

I'm so excited. Where should we start? There's so much to talk about.

Well, I love asking the question about your passion, right? Where did this come from? We know you've been doing it for quite a while.

Can you pick out a specific instance or a specific student or somewhere where that pivot hit? That's like, you know what?

I've been doing this for quite a while, but now I really need to create the books or be out there in the media more or something like that.

So I think it's.

It was like a series of events that happened, you know, not just one particular thing, but when I started my practice, I was Actually, just working from home, just me and my students, we would have a little tea party to start, a little snack, then we'd get to work. And I was right out of teachers college.

So it was, you know, after five years of university, two degrees later, and you, you really don't come out with a lot of good practical skills. You get a lot of theory, but not a lot of boots on the ground. Like, what do we do in this situation?

So I was starting to see students one on one from my home in my little apartment. And it was very cozy and it was really lovely. And it started out, I think, being more like homework support.

Oh, could you help my child with so and so. You're in the neighborhood. I know who you are. I was working at the community center as a children's program director.

So the community knew who I was and they knew what my background was. So slowly but surely I would get more students. And every student that I received, you know, I had to do a deep dive.

I had to figure out, where are they coming from, what are their needs, you know, what, what's not working here? Why are we seeing this challenge over here? But they're perfectly capable on the other side.

And the more students I saw, the deeper I went into the research.

And this was like really 30 years ago when in my district, anyway, we were really looking at the balanced literacy diet as opposed to a structured literacy diet. And we can talk about what that means in a moment. But it was a different way of teaching reading.

Most schools were using the whole language, where you're memorizing words, where you're looking at the picture clues, where you're guessing based on maybe the first few letters. But for most of my kids, it just was not working and it was actually pushing them farther behind.

So the more research I did, the more I felt confident about phonics and phonological awareness and phonemic awareness and how to break words down, how to put them back together. And so slowly but surely, I started to build my toolkit of what are best practices for me and for my students.

And what I was using in my tutorials in my one on one sessions was completely different from what was going on in the classroom. But parents were starting to see the change quite quickly. They were seeing first confidence changed.

You know, confidence, excitement, engagement in the learning, and then slowly but surely the skills we were acquiring more skills. And the more confidence we acquired, the more skills we acquired and vice versa.

I was feeling like, yes, this is what I've been doing all along. And I'm so glad that somebody else has recognized this.

And from there it became, well, if it's working for my students, this technique and the way that we present our learning skills, we use a lot of humor, we use a lot of action, we use a lot of what we call kinesthetic body, brain, mind, all working together, moving around the room. You'll see kids bouncing down the halls on giant bouncing balls and, you know, using hockey puck and a net to do different drills, reading drills.

So we keep our things very physical and very engaged.

And I tried to take all that knowledge and put it into a series of early readers in order to keep students engaged, but to make sure that you had what we call scope and sequence.

Or you're starting at the very beginning, you're teaching one skill at a time, you're working towards mastery, and then you build from there as you go along. So your question was, was there a moment?

No, I think it was a series of moments that allowed me to get to this place where I feel, you know, we, we see the results of the work that we do, and that's the most rewarding part of what I do.

So now from the out of the box kind of thinking, so even, even like new teachers, when they're getting into the work, they can see how obvious the approach that you take is. Why is it then that our administrators are pushing these ways of thinking that are bizarre? They don't work.

They're actually known to actually slow other kids down. Why are they not taking such obvious science based, natural based learning ideas and bringing in them into the classroom?

What's up with the complexity? That doesn't work.

That's a, that is a huge problem. I would say all over North America.

And you know, there are, there are pockets of really dedicated administrators who, who see the results of using this science based learning. And it's not just for reading. You can apply the science to a whole, you know, all of our learning from beginning to end.

I think that people get stuck in their ways. Number one, you know, you, you learn something, you learn that something is the right way and that's what you stick with.

And you don't, you know, people don't like change.

So to look at your whole school, let's say you've got 800 students, a thousand students, in your school, you've got, I don't know, 2, 200 kindergarten and grade ones to make that change and to change all of your curriculum, to change all of your textbooks, to change all of your support material. That seems like. Like that's a lot of work to do. And I think a lot of districts just aren't getting the support from the higher up.

And so it trickles down to the classrooms where the teachers are afraid. They are afraid to try something new because they're not getting the support behind them.

And on top of it, they are not trained to do this new thing, and they're not getting the right training in order to be able to do it effectively. They're afraid.

I'm going to say I kind of watched that in reverse because I remember Christina went into the basement and pulled out all of the curriculum that was working because they were radically changing quickly to this new curriculum that didn't.

Yeah, yeah.

And so she went into the basement and pulled out History hoarded.

Absolutely.

And years later, started bringing them back into her classroom. And other teachers are like, where are you getting this revolutionary new material? And it's like, stuck in my closet.

It's been stuck in the closet because they told us we couldn't use it. And they radically changed everything quickly. Why don't. So the.

The idea that they don't want to radically change that, I don't see that if it's radically going in the wrong direction, they seem to jump on that really quickly. No child left behind is like, no child was allowed to get ahead is more like what was happening.

Oh, gosh.

Because I was very much impacted by that, because I was one of the smart kids who had to suddenly not be able to go ahead. So it's like, you can't leave them behind. You have to get behind them. It's like, that's ineffective.

Well, it's a challenge. You have a classroom of anywhere from, let's say, 22, 25 kids to sometimes even 35 kids.

And you've got kids at all different levels, and at every grade, you have kids at all different levels. So, I mean, a hats off to those classroom teachers. I know they're trying their best. For the most part. They're really trying to reach everyone.

They can't. It's impossible. And so that's part of why I started to do the work that I was doing, which was one on one.

And that's why I created Ruth Rummac's learning space, because I wanted that opportunity to be able to take that kid Figure out where they are right now, what do they need right now, Create a plan for them that was going to take them from where they are now to what they needed to and where they needed to be in the future, and work with them step by step to get that mastery, to get them to that new place. So for me, that was the most rewarding kind of education that I could see myself in. Being in a classroom, I felt frustrated.

I felt like, you know, my heart was breaking because I couldn't give every kid what they needed. And no matter how hard I tried, no matter how many hours in the day I wished I had, there was no way that I was going to reach everyone.

So the work that we do at root through max learning space, the work that you guys do and that you're empowering, is really about taking back control for that particular child, that one on one situation, so that we can give them the tools that they need right now, knowing what they're going to need later, and then just sort of scaffold it step by step. Let's get there. We're not there yet. I'm a big believer in a positive mindset, and I really want parents to understand that, you know what?

If you may see where your kids are now, and it's frustrating for you and it's frustrating for them, but there is, there is light at the end of the tunnel. If we take tiny little steps one at a time and put one foot in front of the other, we're gonna get there.

One of the most amazing things is when the parents realize that their kid has that love of learning again. And then they're bringing everything to the parents. It's like the parents are like, oh, I'm gonna have to teach them so much.

It's like, no, you're going to have to, like, figure out how to not squish their enthusiasm. Like, quit coming to me with all of this stuff you're learning.

So, yeah, so, yeah, instead of go do your homework, it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down, let's take a break.

And one of the things I really want to point out here, you know, what Herb and Ruth were really talking about, is that parents need to also realize that in the education space, especially the public schools, there have been these big swings and shifts. Right? With me in the classroom 27 years, I saw the full pendulum.

I went from that whole reading space all the way over here to the detailed phonics space. And, you know, there's kids that kind of fall somewhere in the middle. Right. If the whole language doesn't work. Absolutely.

Look at the phonics and phonemic awareness and things like that. If they can't quite get that, maybe they are more of a memory kid. You might tend more towards the whole language.

But please don't go all the way there.

Please go back.

Don't go back. Let's not go back.

No, it's true. And it's funny that you mentioned the pendulum, because that's the word that always comes up in my hand, which is this swing. This.

You know, I learned to read using phonics, and so that's how I learned to read. It made sense to me. I. I was a pretty early reader and a fast reader, and. And that worked well for me.

But then we saw that swing to the whole language where we were catching some of the kids. I mean, it's not like we created a whole entire generation that can't read.

There are lots of people that can read proficiently, but it's the kids that really needed that extra attention that didn't get it. And that's. Those are the kids that I do my work for, which are the kids that fall through the cracks that they may be really good memorizers.

And they could have. They got great. You know, they slid through grade one and integrate two. But by grade three, when you're not learning to read, you're reading to learn.

Now, you can't sound out the words on the map. You can't sound out a new word that comes up in your geography textbook, because you just don't have the skills to break those words down.

And it doesn't necessarily mean that you have a learning challenge, something diagnosed. It could just be that you didn't learn those skills.

I cannot tell you the number of millennial parents that have come to me when their kids have reading struggles who say to me, well, I don't know how to sound that word out. If I saw that in a board meeting or if I had to stand up and say that word, I don't know that I could do it.

And I have to think back to, well, how did you learn how to read? And what skills did you acquire to break a word down and then put it back together?

Yeah, I mean, statistically, I think it's. Less than half of graduating seniors can read at or above a sixth grade level right now. And that statistic is actually, like, nationwide.

Most adults can't actually read at or above a sixth grade level.

Well, I think most news, in a way, aren't about a grade six level. Aren't they? I think most newspapers are written at about a grade six level.

I think so because they've learned that they had to or else the people couldn't access it. I mean, right now. Yeah.

And so it's really interesting when the parents sometimes are working with the kids and they learn something about reading and suddenly the parents are reading. It's like, I didn't know that. And now suddenly they're reading better too. So it's kind of weird.

We talk about it's child education, but we're educating the family as well. So there's so much that, that they missed, especially like if they're going to start homeschooling their kids again.

One of the biggest myth is I was terrible in school. I'm not, I'm not smart. How can my kids. It's like for me, that's like super obvious.

If the school let you down, then why is it going to be better for your child than it was for you?

So, good question again, as you start now teaching your child, what are you going to pick up that you might have missed that's going to open up your life and open up your love of learning as well. So that, that's one of the interesting things, is how much the parents get when they think they're not smart enough to teach their children.

Well, you bring up a few interesting points.

One thing it makes me think about is, you know, when teach with a scope and sequence, which means from beginning through with mastery, step by step by step, you're adding as you go along. But we're also teaching very specific rules.

So these are, you know, reading rules, sound rules, spelling rules, and we're even, you know, you have to address. People think that the English language is, is all, you know, higgledy piggledy like it. It's just, there are no rules.

It just, you know, you say a rule, but then it gets exemptioned over here.

But it's actually except after C, right? Or when it says A as a neighbor and way. It's like I remember the poem and then still I write a C and it's like, oh, shoot, is this EI or ie?

Yep, yep, yep, yep. I understand that.

But even though there are exceptions to the rules, there are some really, really, let's say, generalized rules that apply most of the time. And if it applies most of the time and you use rule consistently, then most of the time you're going to be correct.

And then, you know, you can take into consideration the other aspects of the rule. But, but when we teach Our students, those rules, then they go home and practice them with the parents.

The comments that I get back are exactly as you said, which is, I didn't know that, like, now it makes perfect sense. Oh, thank you. Thank you for showing me this in this way. Because now I get it.

And then they feel more confident to be able to explain it to their kids. The other thing that you make me think about is shame and guilt.

And a lot of parents carry a lot of shame about their own academic abilities, their own reading abilities, whether it's warranted or not. But for whatever reason, they carry that. Maybe it was from a teacher, maybe it was from peers, maybe it was from their own parent.

And I think our job as educators and parents is to really protect the learner's identity as a learner. You know, when children don't just learn to read, they learn what kind of learner they are going to be.

So we really need to protect that identity and make them feel confident about their learning, even if it's hard. Right? Learning is hard. Learning something new is hard.

But if we can create a safe space for that student and allow them to make the mistakes, you know, mistakes are just showing that you're doing the process. They're. They're proof that you're learning.

So if we don't, as parents and educators, create that space for our students, they need a space to take risks. Learning is all about risk. And if you don't have a safe space to take that risk, you're not going to take it and you're not going to move forward.

Exactly. And that is so, so important because even when I was in the tutoring, I was in the classroom every year, I had to create that safe space for my kids.

So they understood that I was there to support them and help them, that they were struggling, I wouldn't get mad at them, etc. Right?

And so whenever parents started bringing kids to tutoring with me, I would take like the first two sessions and we would play games and we would little gentle probes and things like that. And I was always concerned that the parents, like, oh man, they're just playing games. She's wasting the time. But is that.

That was that connection I had to make, I would be willing to branch out and make the mistakes in front of me, right?

Absolutely.

Parents, take this to heart.

If your children are having trouble with their homework, if they don't feel safe in front of you, because for some reason, like, you get frustrated and upset, really easy, please take a step back, let them know you're There because you want the best for them and try to not be that upset and really guide them through it gently.

I think that's the best advice that I can give parents, which is take a breath, take a break. The world is not going to end if you don't finish this piece of homework, this worksheet, this story, these questions this evening.

It's not going to end. And we also have to take into consideration when do our kids learn best? Some kids are real morning people.

You know, they're up at the crack of dawn and they're like focused and ready to go. And maybe that's when you do the most challenging parts of your lessons.

And then, you know, by lunch time, you know, they need to run around, they need to blow off some steam and maybe we can't come back to it again until later in the afternoon.

But for most, you know, families that are in a typical situation where you're leaving the house at 7:30 in the morning or 8, you're at school all day until 3:30, 4, maybe after care until 5 or 6, you get home, you shove something in your mouth and then at 8 o' clock you're sitting down to do homework. Like, we are not creating the most ideal situations for our kids to thrive in that, in that environment.

And so for those kids like I, you know, who kind of peter out by 4 o', clock, they're done. Forcing them to sit down sometimes even for 10 or 15 minutes is just counterproductive.

Yeah, yeah.

That's why when we help take parents or help take parents take kids out of school, like the first month or two, it's like, let's, let's figure out the natural rhythms. Let's find out when your child is engaged, when they're tired, when they're hungry and angry, when they're full and tired.

Let's, let's balance that out to actually optimize when they're learning and then when they're playing.

Yes, I love that. And the other thing is that, I mean, food is a huge part of that.

I know that's not part of what, you know, we're here to talk about, but nutrition, protein, you know, the sugar content, what you're feeding your kids really does make a difference in terms of their ability to learn, their ability to focus. It's still. Well, and I say sit still with a caveat because I don't actually believe that learning has to take place when you sit still.

And you know, if you come into our learning space, you'll see kids literally doing Their lessons. Under the table, we have a quiet corner. Kids are sitting on, you know, big, soft, comfy pillows. We're lying down on the ground, we're playing games.

We're doing all kinds of things that are really productive, but they don't look like, you know, you're sitting at a desk and filling in a worksheet. Exactly. So environment, you know, your, your, your own rhythms. Food, nutrition, sleep. Another huge part of, of being able to be ready to learn.

But I think all of those things taken into, have to be taken into account when you're, you know, putting something together for your own kids.

Yeah, diets. Diet is a huge one. We actually have a lot of nutrition people here and the diets in schools are awful.

So they give them so much sugar and then expect them to sit still.

And then when parents do bring their kids home and then start actually feeding them healthy food, the calmness that they have, their ability to learn, the safety that they feel inside of their own body. Nutrition is absolutely huge. And again, sunlight and getting them outside and fresh air, all of that, which is happening less and less in schools.

Well, I would go back to what we were saying just a minute ago, which is the frustration level, like homework or when you're working on something that is hard, frustration level gets to a 10 very quickly. I have never been opposed to just saying, oh, okay, well, let's move on, close this book.

Let's take a break, let's go get a drink of water, let's walk around the area, let's get a breath of fresh air. But if we do it as parents and educators, with compassion and with, let's say, you know, just like, matter of fact. Okay, let's go.

I think, I think we're going to put this aside for now. We'll come back to it. Don't worry about it.

As opposed to with guilt and our own frustration, it goes a long way to, to making that learning situation much happier.

So I want to jump in here and actually give some parents some actual, like, knowledge here that maybe they don't have. Can you go through a little bit of the scope and sequence if we're trying to help our kids read?

Yes.

Do we start with just the ABCs? Do we start with blends like a CA shoot? What do we start with? What's the general kind of.

So parents, when they're going to the library and try and pick out books for kids and they're trying to get those right fit books, what should they be kind of looking for at the kind of the Beginning in the middle of the end of this learning process.

So I would say at the very beginning.

And remember that that beginning can start as, as early as right from zero in terms of how we talk to our kids and the language and the play we do with kids as infants is really, really important.

And you know, to be talking to your babies and to be explaining things and showing things and finger plays and songs and music, all that at the early, early stages are so, so important. To develop language, to develop comprehension, to develop vocabulary, and to develop just life experience.

To end the bond, right, the bond and the joy of that play, which is really important.

So once your kid is around year and a half, two years, and even before, we're starting to read picture books with our students, with our kids, and that again is a bonding time. So doing a lot of oral reading, reading picture books, reading signs.

You know, even if you're reading a magazine, you can be reading it out loud and be showing them and explaining, you know, what, what you're reading about. So we start with what are called phonological awareness skills. And that's a big umbrella topic. It holds a lot of things under it.

And phonological awareness skills is the ability. It's an oral skill. So it's something we hear. It's not a written or it's more of a listening ability.

It's the ability to hear and manipulate sounds within spoken language. So if I said to, you know, my three year old, what's your name? Your name is Paul. Well, what sound do you hear at the beginning of Paul?

P. Look at my mouth. What sound am I making? P. It's a P sound. Or how many claps can we put in your name if your name is Angelica, when we can say Angelica.

So we're talking about syllables and breaking words into sounds. So this idea of phonological awareness is the big umbrella, being able to recognize those sounds.

Then we move into phonemic awareness and that's recognizing individual sounds within the words. And then we move on to phonics, which is that idea of the sound and letter correspondence. So that's the code of our language.

You know, English has a code. We have symbols and each symbol makes a different sound. And when we combine different symbols, they make different sounds again.

So we are listening to those different sounds and now we are actually seeing them in print. So we're looking at the symbol and we are associating a sound with it. So that's where you get to the Alphabet.

But the Alphabet learning your ABCs is not learning how to read. And I will say it again, learning your ABCs is not learning how to read.

So ABCs are the names of the letters, which are important too, but they are not the sounds of the letters.

So I, when I was teaching my daughter to read, I was looking at the name of the letter, the shape of the letter, and the sound that that letter makes all at the same time. And we did that through play. We did it with magnetic letters on the fridge.

We did it with letter puzzles, we did it with click together letters, we did it with foam letters, like, wherever we were, however we needed to do it. Pudding letters, jelly letters, whatever you could do. So we look at the name, we look at the sound, and we look at the shape.

And so that makes that kinesthetic, that body movement, brain, body connection. And it helps us associate the sound and the movement, which will later help us with printing.

So once we get the sound symbol correspondence, then we move into decoding, which is my favorite part because that's where I put a lot of my concentration. And we can talk about the yak packs and how they're really the best thing for decoding from the very beginning.

But decoding is the ability to take a word, break it down into its parts, say each part, and then blend it all back together. And that's the skill of reading. The other skills are the pre reading skills.

This decoding piece is where we really get into the meat of reading, and which is why we need to teach these individual sounds one at a time and then build them together and blend them together. So once we've got the decoding under control, then we're practicing for fluency.

And when we practice, we want to make sure that we're using text that is aligned with the skills of the student. So, so often, you know, I've had parents come in frustrated with their kids because I gave them this book to read. And I, you know, they. They could.

I know that they can do it, but they're not doing it.

And I would open up a leveled reader and the level reader, which says that it's a kindergarten level, but it has so many different sound combinations and patterns in it that these students have never seen before. They've never been taught these before. So how can we expect our students to.

The one book I remember so clearly was called the polar bear, and it was a kindergarten book. Okay, so you've got the polar bear, and it was a pattern book. So the polar bear eats fish.

Well, just in that sentence alone, the or the is a sight word. Okay, we have to teach that one by itself. High frequency word.

Then we've got polar, which the O is a long sound, which we usually don't teach that first.

And the ar, which would normally say R is actually something called a schwa, which is something completely different that they definitely haven't learned before. So we're only in word two. Right.

The polar bear is B E, A R, where E A can say E, but it can also say e. And then we move to the next word, which is eat, which is another ea saying ea in another way. And I just looked at this book and I really like. That's.

That I think was one of my aha moments, which is like, we've got to be able to do better than this.

Yeah. It's a memorization pattern book instead of an actual reading.

And this is where that idea of memorization. Yes. There are certain words we will have to memorize. Those are called high frequency words.

But we shouldn't be memorizing every single word because you will never know how to break down words that you've never seen before. So that was one of my aha moments where this polar bear book, it's like ingrained in my mind literally. It was 25 years ago.

This kid has probably got kids of her own now. You know, she was five when she came to me and now she's probably 30. So the.

That part of the fluency is really important to be practicing, but practicing with materials that are aligned with the skills that your child has already learned. And then we get to vocabulary. And then the last part is comprehension. So, you know, understanding what you're reading. Reading for meaning.

Thank you.

And I know that was a long explanation for people who are listening, but it's just really important to realize that there are so many pieces and parts that build up to actual reading.

Yeah.

That when a teacher says to you, your child can't really read. Maybe they're just reading, saying the words. But reading is when you get all of that all the way up into the comprehension level.

So, yeah, you have a really bright creator who can decode the words and can say them. But when you ask them what's happening in the book.

Yeah, yeah. There are lots of kids. That's right. There are lots of kids who are good decoders and they're really proficient. But they can't.

It could be a memory thing. They can't remember what they've read. And so they can't put all the thoughts together or they're decoding well, but they can't.

You Know, they can't take all that information and picture it in their heads as they're going along. So they can't hold on to the story idea.

I mean, when somebody says your kid isn't reading well, there are like a thousand questions that come to my mind. And so when we see a student, you know, we do a diagnostic. You need to know what parts of this reading journey, where are they at? What have they.

What have they mastered? What do they still need to work on? But you have to dig deep in order to really understand where to begin with a student.

And that's the empowered parent question. It's like, okay, my child isn't reading. Well, in what way?

Yes.

Section. Yes.

Yeah, I'm going off track. I keep thinking about this wonderful comedian that I had growing up. His name was Gallagher. He's also known for the. For Smashing Pumpkins.

Yes, Watermelons.

Right, the watermelons. But he has this. These skits where he does is. Where he has these, like, where you flip over the letters and is like. And he's like, that's big.

And he's like, no, that's little. No, this is little. No, that's big. This is little. But also it's like, oh, you know, you need to say a word. W O R D Is this bird?

No, that's not even a word. It's not. B O R D is not bird, but W O R D is word. How does our language make sense? And how. So he would do whole, like, sticks on that.

And I loved it because. Because makes wordplay, word play of how ridiculous our language is and how hard it is.

But at the same time, once you get it, the amount of fun that you can have playing with it at the same time.

Very true.

And I. My. My mom kind of taught me to read without learning, so she would read us books, and then she would stop and be like, oh, I don't want her to read.

So I would pick up the book and pretend. And then one day I realized I wasn't pretending and I was reading.

So I don't remember learning how to read, but I do remember English lessons and wondering what that had to do with reading later. I now know what a dangling participle is, and I use them sometimes like. Like you were talking the. The schwa.

Yes.

I haven't heard that word in a long time. But. So it's. It's a complicated thing, but it doesn't need to be.

Yeah, Yeah. I think that scope and sequence, that structure is the most important thing. And we know, right.

Science of reading has done 30 plus years, probably 60 years of research to tell us how should we teach this? What order should we teach this? What sounds to kids need to know first in order to, you know, get the ball rolling? What do we add next?

What is the next level of difficulty? And we move from there. And that's, you know, something that I infuse in all of our lessons, which is that scope and sequence.

Sequence and what we've put into our, our yak pack books as well.

Dada. So much easier to say than mama.

Why they say it first, right? It's true. It's true.

And I just want to highlight what you said there because that has been the biggest trend in like the last five years or 10 years is the science of Reading. But luckily it's not really a trend. It's not like the whole word and the back, the phonics only kind of thing.

It's, it really is that integration of all the best pieces that help your children learn how to read. So if your teachers in your school are actually using and following the science of reading, your kids have a pretty good shot of this.

Yes, yes. And I think, you know from, from my conversations with new teachers, let's say, or teachers that are new to science of reading.

They are, they're amazed at how quickly their class, their grade one classes are learning to read compared to what they were doing before. And they're also amazed at how, how much confidence their students have. You know, we have our YAKPAC books.

They're in 70,000 classrooms and homes across North America and outside of North America too. But the comments that we get back on a regular basis are really about how engaged the students are and how much success they feel.

And then when they feel success, that empowers them to keep reading. And I can't tell you the number of times that a teacher or a parent has said to me, I couldn't, I, we couldn't leave.

You know, we couldn't leave for school because my child was engrossed in your comic book and we just, he wouldn't put it down.

Or actually in our own waiting room at our learning center, there was a student, I took a video of him because he literally wouldn't leave until he'd finished the book. And there were five stories in the book. And this was a student who would not pick up a book just a couple of weeks before.

So, you know, those are the, the moments where you're like, yeah, it's working, it's working.

So, so here's here's maybe a kind of a controversial question. We have some parents who like unschool and they didn't even really start teaching their children to read until 6 or 7.

But then when the child wanted to read, they like caught up really fast. Is there, you need to start teaching children to read at a specific age? Is there something that they have to get done?

Or like with boys, kind of the sciences now is you can actually wait to put them in a classroom till seven, six or seven, a little older and then they can pick up more because those last couple of years is very important for their physical body.

So can you go into that as like, oh, they should be here, they should be there by that age, or can we relax that and let the children grow into reading at their own pace? Or do they have to be somewhere?

I think it's a combination. I think that we as parents need to know what are the milestones in terms of milestones of the skill as opposed to milestone of the age.

And I mean I've worked with so many students who were diagnosed with reading challenges, dyslexia, combinations of dyslexia and adhd. So really neurodivergent students who didn't learn to read until grade four, so they were nine or 10 years old.

The issues that I see around that is parents need to know what they're looking for in terms of are there underlying issues, are there things that we can address now so that we again avoid having that child's identity be wrapped up in the fact that they are not progressing academically versus are we just there to meet an age target? So I think it's a combination. I think if a parent understands what are the milestones, what are the skills that we need to hit?

And those things really start early, early on, as I was saying, with phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, playing with language, playing with sound.

If you have a three or four year old who is not sort of picking up on the different sound combinations or, or not recognizing, you know, that a word has a beginning, let's say a short word like it, and you have an E and a T, you've got two parts of that word.

I would want my, my three, four year old to be able to hear at least the first sound, the beginning sound of their own name, of their, you know, their sibling's name. So I think we have to look at the milestones, the skills.

The ages are not quite as important because from my practice I've taught kids to read, you know, well into their teens who were not considered readers at that time. It's really about setting the stage.

So if you're playing with language, if you're doing lots of reading with your students and you know that your child has a hard time concentrating and they've got to mature in a certain way before they're going to be able to put these pieces together, I would say honor that. Just know what you're looking for. Because if there is an underlying issue, we want to at least set the stage and address it early enough.

And I would just like to add to that.

You know, if your child is interested in books and interested when you're reading and things like that, you're pretty sure that you know they're going to get it eventually, right? But if they're completely avoiding books, if they don't even want to sit still and listen, right? Is it an eye problem problem? Is it an ear problem?

Are there things that your mommy spidey senses are popping off? It's like, we need to get this checked out. Don't just let somebody say, oh, they'll get it when they get it. Your spidey senses are going off.

Check in.

Yes, always. Chest your gut. Always, always.

Because, you know, so many parents that I speak to will say things like, you know, I, I, their child is 9 or 10 now and I knew something was wrong when they were four, but everybody told me just to wait and it'll all come together. I mean, that's the other thing. It's kind of the opposite of what you're saying.

But you know, I talk a lot about the wait and see approach and I don't like it.

I don't like the wait and see approach because if you as a parent feel that there's something off, if it's not clicking, if you are seeing other things that are giving you pause, get it checked out. Because the sooner we can start intervention. And intervention isn't like, you know, a heavy handed kind of program.

Intervention could be very play based, but just sort of getting the brain primed for those academic skills that we will need later. Through play, through reading, through games, through activity.

You know, there are lots of ways to do it that aren't confining and aren't sitting down doing paper pencil drills. So I think listen to your gut always.

Okay, but now we have to talk about the helicopter and the bulldozer parents that are just gonna, oh, my child, he's like, like 3 years old, he should be able to read this.

He should know.

It's like, so how do we Again, how do we address that balance of. You'll know and don't be so pushy. Helicopter, bulldozer, parent pushing them.

You know what's funny? Okay, So I have two kids. I have a 34 year old and I have a 17 year old. And my, my 17, yep, yep, it's true.

My, my 34 year old is my bonus child, but he's been in my life since he was 4. So I, I consider, you know, we're attached. And my 17 year old was, she was a very, she.

Her phonological awareness skills were amazing at, literally, and I'm gonna brag a little, but you know, at 18 months old she talked very early. She talked at nine months and at 18 months old she could tell me how many sounds were in a five, like a four or five syllable word.

She could take a word and break it into its parts, all oral. But then when it came time to the actual reading part, things really slowed down.

And I, at first I was like, well this is curious, you know, like she's got all these skills, she's primed, she's ready to go. I thought that it would be kind of, you know, a no brainer that she would just put the sound and the symbol together and off she went.

It didn't work that way. So for her she needed a little more time.

And I was, with all my education background and being her mom, I had to pull myself back and say, okay, well she's in kindergarten this year. I'm going to let the teachers and I like the program they were using, so I approved of their methods. I'm just going to let it go.

And we went through kindergarten. We have two years of kindergarten in our district. So she was, you know, senior and junior or junior and senior.

And I was like, okay, well if it's not coming together by the end of kindergarten, then I'm going to look at a little further. But she just needed that extra year.

So between the end of junior kindergarten and the end of senior kindergarten, as she was going into grade one, these pieces were starting to come together. And by middle of grade one, she was back on track where she needed to be.

So even for me, and I played all the games, our environment was hugely rich with vocabulary and literature and all kinds of stuff and lots of reading time and oral reading. But she just needed a little extra time and that was okay.

So to those helicopter parents, yes, you have to trust your gut, but you also have to honor where your child is. And you know, if you're pushing them and Pushing them. Pushing them to the point of frustration, where you're frustrated, they're frustrated.

Their tears, they're running away, they're hiding under the bed. It is not worth it. You. You want to establish a gentle, compassionate, fun environment where reading is a joy and not a chore.

Absolutely. Yeah. Well, Ruth, I could keep talking to you forever and ever and ever, because it's just all of this is so important.

It's like, can I just put this on replay?

For parents who are trying to raise up readers, it's like, let's just, you know, start way back at toddler age, where they're learning to pick things up and distinguish colors. And that's all the beginning reading. Right. Like you're.

It is.

But tell us, Tell our audience how they can get a hold of you. Ask more questions and tell us a little bit more about those books that are behind you, the yak Pack. Because I would. I. She sent me a copy.

I'm ecstatic. I want to get it in the hands of some more kiddos and things like that. And then I have actually one little controversial question about the format.

Okay. Okay, so we'll do this part first. So these are the yak packs. And you can see in the background, there are five red books.

Those are the books that are based on phonics. These are phonics and comics. So we created these comic books. They're decodable comic books. They follow the science of reading.

They are aligned with you fly, which is, you know, out of. Out of Florida. They are based on signs of reading research, and then all of my experience working with students, too.

And they follow that scope and sequence where we start with the short vowel sounds. That's book one. And my favorite part is that they are comics. They are comic books.

And for those younger readers, you know, the 3, 4, 5, they're just engaged with the panels and the characters. And the characters are so silly and they're so funny, and they have real stories. They are not babyish.

I use that word in quotes because so many of my striving readers. And I use the word striving because I don't like to call it a struggling reader. I think that that kind of puts a negative connotation on it.

But they're striving for that next step.

Those readers who are often a little bit older or who may have focus and attention issues, diagnosed learning difficulties on the ADHD spectrum and also on the ASD spectrum, they are really engaging because they are, I would say, dignity preserving. They don't look Like a baby book. They look like a comic book. And they have panels. This is just book one.

By the time we get to book five, they're even more detailed with lots more words.

And the thing that we've included in these comic books is that they start with those short vowel sounds, and they move all the way through the different skills. So short vowel sounds. Then we work on digraphs, which are two letters together. Then we work on blends.

Then we work on the bossy E. Then we work on R controlled vowels.

So if you start from the beginning with book one, and we start systematically adding those skills, we're working through from about a kindergarten level to about a grade two level. And the nice thing, because we're educators, because I'm a teacher and I can't just let things go, we included a whole lesson plan.

So a parent can start with the target sound. And it tells you what that sound makes, how to make that sound with an anchor chart or a picture.

And then it tells you all of the word families that you'll practice in here. So we also recommend using these words for games. You can do a treasure hunt.

You can take letter tiles and just play with the letters and get them to make the sounds. And the words as you say them or the reverse. They can spell them as you say them.

And then we have a whole box of the sight words that you're going to see in there. So this is all the pre teaching. This is all the let's get ready to learn. Kind of get your brain primed.

Then you read the story, and the story is usually a few pages long, and then you can do a little checkout. So we have both the comprehension questions and we put in these phonological awareness skills because nobody teaches them, nobody practices them.

But if you are a striving reader or you have a child that's a striving reader, that's where you want to practice. You want to play these phonological awareness skills over and over and over again. Just get their ear ready to hear different sounds.

So within each book, there are five or six different stories. That's.

And you do the whole book in one session in one night?

No, definitely not. Definitely not. In fact, we recommend that you may. You may not even get through one whole story.

Maybe you're only going to get through one page of the story. And that's enough, right? We start with the first page, and that's enough.

And again, we're monitoring how our kids are doing, what their frustration level is ours. My guess is that because of the engagement of the, of the comics, they're going to be pretty engaged and they're going to want to keep going.

That's my hunch and that's what we keep seeing in classrooms and in homes all over the place. But my real strong recommendation is you don't read it just once. You're going to read that story many, many times.

Because that, that's the fluency part. That's the practice.

That's the really getting deep and, and dirty with the, the words and the sounds and making sure that we can keep practicing and reading towards reading mastery. So that's the phonics book. Book sentence five.

How many of your kids have also turned those into coloring books?

You know what, that, that's actually a really good point. We purposely made them black and white so that there can be more engagement with them.

And yes, I know lots of classrooms that have a set for each child and each child has their own with, you know, they've got their name on it, they take it home once they've reached a certain, you know, proficiency or fluency level, then they get to color in the pictures. So I'm all for it. I'm okay with it. Yes.

And where do our families reach you and reach these books?

So you can find us on Amazon, Amazon.com and you can look under the Yak pack. Comics and Phonics. The second series is the word high frequency words, which are also important.

This is again, we used to teach kids to memorize these high frequency words, but now we teach them as heart words. I don't know if your readers are familiar with. Yeah, so heart words, for example, I'm going to show you a quick one.

A heart word is a word that has some parts that you can sound out, but it also has a certain part that you need to memorize by heart. And we show that to a student by putting a little heart around the part that doesn't sound like it normally would when you sound something out.

So you can see at the bottom here, there's a heart around the E for the word the. Because we don't say the word the or the. We say the. It's sort of a sound at the end, but we memorize that that E makes that sound.

And then we teach each sound the th is one sound.

The last part is its own sound, for example, and has three sounds and we can see the buttons underneath so you can be specific about each sound as you're learning it. And these frequency, high frequency word books are only teaching two Words at a time, and the other words are shown with pictures, so pictographs.

And by doing that, the student can sound out the word if they know how to, but if they don't, then they can use the symbols to help them read. And what we hear from feedback from our, our students and, and parents and educators is that that's the part that gains confidence.

Because when you're only learning two words at a time and you're practicing that through the whole story, by the time you finish that story and then you do your little checkout and you practice writing the words and you practice some other activities with those words, you're really, really solidifying your knowledge. So those two sets together, the red set and the blue set, the high frequency words and the phonics words together create a complete reading system.

And it's great for summer if you've got, if you've got the time over the summer, which I seriously suggest you do. You don't want to lose those skills over the summer.

But it's a perfect time when the rest of the curriculum isn't moving Forward to take 10 or 15 minutes a day, go through the books from beginning to end, and really see the difference that your children are going to make between June and September.

Beautiful. Thank you so very, very much. I love that. And here comes the hard question.

As a teacher, second, third grade, I absolutely hated when the comic books became big because my kiddos, and especially my struggling ones would pick those things up and then they wouldn't read fluently and they would be choppy and their handwriting or their story writing became chalky choppy because of the comic books. Why the comic book format?

So it's. That's interesting. You're probably talking like the dogman.

And you know, those where their sentence structure was really poor and the phrases that they were using were, you know, not proper English, really. You know, there's the syntax, the vocabulary, all of the pieces that made it makes the sentence a sentence were kind of not necessarily present.

So I think in those situations, the comics kind of took us down a notch. I can say with confidence that our comic books are well structured sentences and they are full stories.

So they, you know, they have a beginning, a middle, and an end. There's a, there's a conflict, it gets resolved and the characters are just, oh my gosh, they're so delightful and lovely.

We chose the comic format because we knew the kids loved it. It was familiar to them. But what we did was elevate that format to a place where it was Academically sound. It was pedagogically sound.

And all of the work is based on the reading of science. So we are confident that we have not dumbed down the comic book industry. We have elevated it to a new level.

Awesome. Thank you so very much. Ruth, Like I said, we could keep going, but we do need to wrap up.

Was there anything that you didn't get to talk about that you wish you could have talked about while we were here?

I think my top three takeaways from today would be that remembering that reading difficulties and challenges are not an intellectual or an intelligence problem.

Knowing that kids need an emotionally safe environment in order to thrive, and that the materials that you choose to practice, the skills have to be aligned and that you want to choose things that are going to really gain. Give your kids really quick confidence and success because they know how to do it. So those are my three big takeaways.

I love it. Thank you.

Awesome. So, Ruth, I would love to thank you for being here today. Again, this is more her.

Her forte with the reading, but I also now know enough to be able to ask some questions that come in from the outside. And you did beautifully answering them. Thank you so very much.

And as for the simplicity, it's like I do some brain training with people, and it's four arrows and four colors, and it's super simple.

And the complexity and the depth you can get to training with just simple tools is so sometimes so much more profound than what you can get to by being hard and complex. So, again, thank you for bringing that today. Thank you for being here.

So many people are having trouble with reading, and there is so much shame and guilt around it. So thank you for being here. Thank you for helping people see that and work their way through that and to help reach their children.

That is a beautiful thing that you're doing. You are making the world a better place, and that's what heroes do. So thank you for being on our show.

Show today.

Well, I thank you very much. It was really delightful.

Oh, thank you, Ruth. And audience, you know what we really, really, really need to do? We need to get this show in everybody's hands. So please, like, review, share.

If you have a struggling reader in your household, listen to this episode. Again. If you have a neighbor who has a struggling reader. Sorry, a striving reader. Striving reader. Share this episode. Right.

Give them a leg up, a hand. Up, up. So we can raise those happy, healthy,.

And successful kids and share it by leaving a comment. So by leaving a comment that also encourages engagement that helps get it out to more people.

So if you are going to share it at their name in the comments, send it to them that way. Get this out there so that more people can see it.

All right, until next time, everybody, thank you so much for being here and supporting the show. And bye for now.

Bye for now.