The Balanced Literacy Diet Website: Putting research into practice in the classrooms

The Balanced Literacy Diet website (www.LitDiet.org) is a research-informed professional development website for elementary teachers and teacher educators. The website is freely accessible and provides tools and resources to support literacy education.

Read more from Dr. Dale Willows, creator of the Balanced Literacy Diet website and former member of the National Reading Panel, about implementing a balanced and flexible literacy diet.

The Reading Pyramid

The Reading Pyramid shows key concepts in reading development and instruction that are essential to every beginning reading program. Similar to The Cognitive Foundations of Learning to Read Framework, the Reading Pyramid illustrates the building blocks of reading by organizing these components into two main groups—print-related skills (those that promote the ability to recognize words) and language-related skills (those that support the ability to make meaning of text).