Public and school libraries have a long history of supporting children’s emerging literacy. Libraries also have the resources to support adult and family literacy efforts, which have a lasting impact on children. The American Library Association (ALA) partnered with Reading Rockts to produce this free toolkit.
This resource bank aligns with the competencies and components of instruction required to develop a proficient level of knowledge in the Science of Reading and Structured Literacy within the Rhode Island Right to Read Act.
This guide focuses on three key school readiness areas: social-emotional and executive function skills (enabling children to plan, focus attention, remember instructions and juggle several tasks), early literacy, and the health determinants of early school success. To help parents strengthen three competencies, the guide includes these recommendations: engage in nurturing and affirming “back and forth” interactions; enrich their child’s vocabulary and promote a love of reading; and track and assess progress toward early developmental milestones.
This eBook from The Reading League provides a firm definition of what the science of reading is, what it is not, and how all stakeholders can understand its potential to transform reading instruction.
A tool to help district and school-based practitioners conduct self-studies for planning and implementing early literacy interventions for kindergarten, grade1 and grade 2 students. This guide is designed to promote reflection about current strengths and challenges in planning for implementation of early literacy interventions, spark conversations among staff, and identify areas for improvement. This self-study guide provides a template for data collection and guiding questions for discussion.
Developed to help district- and school-based practitioners conduct self-studies for planning and implementing literacy interventions. It is intended to promote reflection about current strengths and challenges in planning for implementation of literacy interventions, spark conversations among staff, and identify areas for improvement. This guide provides a template for data collection and guiding questions for discussion that may improve the implementation of literacy interventions.
Parents are a child’s first and most important teacher. This series of booklets gives parents easy-to-adapt ideas on how to help their young child get ready to read. Each booklet includes a story that models effective ways to introduce books and reading to a young child, suggested activities, and a checklist to guide parents as they think about their child’s reading skills.
Successful literacy instruction and interventions provide a strong core of highly explicit, systematic teaching of foundation skills such as decoding and spelling skills, as well as explicit teaching of other important components of literacy such as vocabulary, comprehension, and writing. This practitioner-friendly publication will help educators and others better understand the definition, characteristics, and purpose of the term and its affiliated principles and practices.
This publication helps educators create differentiated reading instruction experiences for their students by showing the relationship between two distinct resources: Student Center Activities (SCA) and the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Reading specialists, reading coaches, and teachers will find this document useful in lesson planning, as it contains crosswalks that map the relationships between each SCA and a corresponding, grade-specific standard in CCSS. The guide illustrates how SCAs relate to standards in English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects in K–5.
Any effort to increase third-grade reading proficiency should maximize the summer months as a time to catch up, stay on track, and remain healthy. Equipped with the right information, tools, and supports, parents can make sure their children have healthy and enriching summers. The guide includes these recommendations to support summer learning: engage children in enriching summer activities at home or in the community; use technology to facilitate ongoing learning, especially during the summer; and encourage, support, and model healthy eating and fitness.
With this step-by-step guide, learn how to successfully implement blended learning and expanded learning time at your school. The first part of the guide profiles six expanded learning time schools across the country that have implemented blended learning for various purposes, in various ways, and with varying degrees of success. The second part of the guide offers a seven-step roadmap for planning and implementation, based on the experiences of the six schools profiled in part 1, along with insights from blended learning and expanded learning time experts.
This practice guide provides four recommendations that address what works for English learners during reading and content area instruction. Each recommendation includes extensive examples of activities that can be used to support students as they build the language and literacy skills needed to be successful in school. The recommendations also summarize and rate supporting evidence.
This teacher toolkit is designed to help teachers build a culture of attendance in the school and community, and maintain it throughout the school year.
This practice guide offers educators specific, evidence-based recommendations that address the challenge of teaching writing in elementary school. The guide provides four recommendations: provide daily time for student writing; teach students to use the writing process for a variety of purposes; teach students to become fluent with handwriting, spelling, sentence construction, typing and word processing; and create an engaged community of writers.
This guide draws from research to provide practical tips to strengthen children’s language abilities, increase their world knowledge, help them become familiar with books and other printed materials, learn letters and sounds, and recognize numbers and learn to count.
This 2020 update to the 1999 foundational report reviews the reading research and describes the knowledge base that is essential for teacher candidates and practicing teachers to master if they are to be successful in teaching all children to read well.
Created for preschool through second grade teachers, our Teachers’ Guide lists typical reading achievements by grade level and suggests how teachers can foster the development of phonemic awareness, fluency, spelling, writing, and comprehension skills.
As students progress through schooling, they are often faced with the challenges of comprehending informational and content area text. Informational texts are known for their use of text features. This guide takes you on a teacher’s journey to understanding the importance of teaching text features and shows you how to apply some of these activities in the classroom and with your students.
This guide for parents provides basic information about dyslexia, common warning signs, and information on how to support your child with dyslexia at home and at school, using audio books and digital books, and accommodating students with dyslexia.
This study reveals that increasing access to diverse books in the classroom environment increases the amount of time that children spend reading, and positively impacts students’ reading scores. It also reveals that while educators almost uniformly believe that a diverse classroom library is important, most classroom libraries fall far short of representing or reflecting the current diverse student population. Additional research is needed to further understand the impact of diverse books.
This summary of research and expert opinion highlights the importance of reading volume (how much reading), access and exposure to print materials and books, reader choice and variety, and reading aloud to developing young readers.
This report examines the benefits of summer learning opportunities, drawing on research that attributes the achievement gap to a lack of access to quality summer programs. Recommendations for policymakers and researchers include tapping philanthropic organizations, spreading awareness, and collecting additional data on underserved populations.
Research has shown that students can be taught to comprehend the material better while they are reading. Successful instruction of this type has usually focused on the teaching of comprehension strategies — that is, intentional actions students can use during reading to guide their thinking. Such strategies improve both understanding and memory. Some strategies that have been successfully taught include summarization, questioning, story maps, comprehension monitoring, and graphic organizers; however, the teaching of the combined use of multiple strategies has been most effective in improving reading. Strategy teaching is most effective when it takes a gradual release-of-responsibility approach in which the teacher models the strategy use (“I do it”), guides students to use it successfully within reading (“We do it”), and then assigns independent practice with the strategy (“You do it”). Reading comprehension instruction needs to take place in both narrative and expository text.
The story of how Mississippi, Tennessee, and other states in the vanguard of today’s reading revolution have redesigned reading instruction and raised student achievement in thousands of public schools through state level leadership. The states profiled have addressed every aspect of early literacy, from how teachers and prospective teachers are trained to the curriculum they use, how students are assessed, and third grade retention.The report includes recommendations for other states as well as an appendix of each state’s literacy strategies and key legislation.
School psychologists play a critical role in the lives of children who are struggling to learn to read. Together, Reading Rockets and the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) have created the Reading Rockets Toolkit for School Psychologists. The goal is to help professionals get more involved in the development of comprehensive research-based reading programs in their school districts, as well as apply evidence-based strategies to your assessments of students with reading difficulties.
