Holly Britton is a handwriting instruction specialist with teaching experience in grades K through eight. She educated her own four now-adult children, has taught in private and public school classrooms, served as a curriculum director and founded Squiggle Squad, a unique approach to handwriting instruction for children, pre K to second grade.

In this episode we go in depth into strategies for teaching writing, with emphasis on early transcription skills and letter formation. If you’re helping kids teach writing, you’ll want to take notes.

For all links and resources mentioned in this episode, head to the show notes: https://www.educatorforever.com/episode155.

For this episode, I speak to Maya Smart, an early literacy advocate, parent educator and author of Reading for Our Lives: The Urgency of Early Literacy and the Action Plan to Help Your Child. She's affiliated faculty at Marquette University and holds degrees from Harvard and Northwestern. Her website MayaSmart.com features weekly book picks some playful learning ideas and free tools to help parents grow as their children's first teachers.

We get into how she became in reading and why she wanted to research early literacy. We dive into her research, which found disparity in reading achievement between black and white kids. We also spend time discussing her book and how she wrote it. Take notes, it’s a good one!

For all links and resources mentioned in this episode, head to the show notes: https://www.educatorforever.com/episode154.

In this episode, I talk to Donita Grissom, a senior lecturer at at the University of Central Florida and co-author of the book, High Five to Thrive. She is also the CEO of Best Questers, which provides teachers with practical, effective teaching strategies that they can immediately implement in their classrooms to help create resilient, thriving school communities.

In this episode, Donita and I talk about her start in education as a K–12 ESOL teacher and how that led to her training other ESOL teachers. She also explains her Hope Theory and her belief in the importance of goal-setting. This interview is full of great tips to reignite your passion for teaching!

For all links and resources mentioned in this episode, head to the show notes: https://www.educatorforever.com/episode153.