Lisa Leyshock

Welcome to the Byrom Literacy webpage! Our department currently runs about 25 reading intervention groups per day while serving approximately 90 students. I am a half time literacy specialist and am at school on Monday, Tuesday and every other Wednesday. I am lucky to work with a dedicated, talented team of instructional assistants: Leah Ceserani, Dana Krebs, Donna Maxey, Linda Shaw and Christi Wahnschaffe.

 Reading is practiced at school all throughout the day. Here's how:

    * We practice by listening to words and stories being read and talking about and recognizing the sounds in our language.
    * We practice by looking for patterns in words and knowing what letters and patterns usually sound like, and by looking at words and pictures to make meaning of what we are reading.
    * We practice reading smoothly and naturally by reading aloud, reading things that we've read before and performing plays and readers' theater programs.  That's how we become fluent readers.
    * We practice our vocabulary by reading lots of books, magazines, stories and chapter books and informational texts.  That way, we are exposed to so many words in context.  Sometimes, we recognize a part of the word, and by looking at prefixes and suffixes, we can understand what the whole word means.
    * We practice comprehension by thinking while we are reading.  We look for connections between the things we read and the things in our lives that we understand.  We try to predict what may happen, we ask questions, we summarize, we visualize the story in our minds, and we draw pictures or graphs to help us make meaning of what we are reading.

* When your kids practice reading AT LEAST 20 minutes a day at home, they become better readers! Read with them!