Application - Early Literacy Portal
Gary Obermeyer, Fri October 21, 2005, 07:17 AM
Nevada Reading First maintains an early literacy portal (part of a constellation of portals on various education topics).
The portal is a searchable database of early literacy resources, reviewed and catalogued by Reading First Consultant Connie Poulton.
The portal is currently a separate application, which means that it is a separate login. Registration and login is not required to access the resources. However, if you are a registered user, the portal automatically builds a personalized collection of resources for you as you use the site.
We will be using the portal frequently throughout the Virtual Academy. We hope that this experience forms a habit that you'll want to continue after the workshop is over.
For this assignment you will:
- Register on the Early Literacy Portal.
- Spend some time exploring one of the channels.
- Find a strategy/resource you'd like to use in your classrooom.
- Tell us why you selected this strategy/resource and how you anticipate it will benefit your students.
I love to have my students share with each other but I always seem to be having them pair up with the same 1 or 2 students. It takes too much time for me to pair them up. This clock buddy strategy looks like this will solve this issue.
Pairing up with another student is a great idea. It really works well with ESL students.
This website seems very beneficial, but I definately need more time with this. What a great way to have so much information in one place!
Family Literacy: I was impressed with the variety and extensiveness of this one channel. What an excellent resource.
What I found most beneficial is that it provides a lot of information that I can easily share with parents, including short articles and websites that have games and songs.
One resource I am eager to share in particular is the Home Literacy Environment Checklist. Many of my parents are eager to provide more experiences for their children and this checklist can give them ideas for improvement and places them in control. You can check it out at http://www.getreadytoread.org/pdf/Home_Checklist.pdf
I was very impressed on the different articles that I read from the portal. I am a first year teacher, so I chose to read the "Focusing on Reading First Core Programs" and learned a lot about the books and resources to choose from. Hopefully I will find more time to read up on more of the articles!
I really enjoyed searching around this website. I chose to look up more resources on Readers Theatre because kids love doing it. I was amazed at the selection of stories available. Each story is already broken down into reading parts. It is easy to use and students love it. I know I will use this resource in my classroom.
Pairing students up is a great way to get all students engaged and active in their learning. It allows every student a chance to share what he or she is thinking and to hear comments from different peers. It also allows for those students who would not necessarily feel comfortable sharing in a large group to share in a smaller setting.
This site was very useful. There are a ton of Reader's Theatre material available for all grade levels. This is great when working on fluency and the kids enjoy it at the same time.
I was also impressed with the wealth of information this site provided that was specific to the 5 big components of RF. I look forward to seeing more paired student interaction during response time in your literacy blocks. Denise
I am impressed that there are so many different areas that can be addressed to help our students succeed in reading. There is an area that applies to every student in the classroom. I am very excited to read more articles on the struggling reader.
I found this website to be very useful. I choose to research comprehension. I found some great articles as well lessons that I may use in the future.
This site is very helpful and useful. It focuses on so many different areas, and provides a lot of research and strategies to help with each area. I looked a lot at the activies in phonemic awareness and spelling. There are a lot of fun lessons, strategies and activities that have the students focus on short vowel sounds and I look forward to trying some of the strategies presented.
As a resource for a first year teacher, this website will prove to be very useful. I looked mostly at the phonemic awareness section as this is one of the main focuses for kindergarten. I found "A Rhyme a week- Nursery Rhymes for Early Literacy." This includes lesson plans and downloadables that can be used along with the program to emphasize phonemic awareness."
This is Ursula Conway's portal review (posted as a separate thread, October 25, 2005)
"This is a valuable site. It can be difficult to find quality resources on the web with the abundance of information available - I like that the links provided are research-based and peer-reviewed."
As I read the portal reviews I'm delighted with the positive tone. However, most of the reviews are missing the main points: * Find a specific strategy/resource you'd like to use in your classrooom. * Tell us why you selected this strategy/resource and how you anticipate it will benefit your students.
A good example is Timbra Vaughn's review (near the top).
I looked up motivation and found the games and printouts to be interesting. I selected this strategy/resource because in my reading groups it seems difficult to get them excited about it. These games, stories, and printouts might help accomplish that because it makes reading words fun by using cartoon characters and visual aids that are both entertaining and educational.
I looked up Vocabulary because I am always looking for new ways to let my students explore their meanings. I was very excited to see how many ideas there were on the website and look forward to using some of them in the future.
There were so many good ones to choose from, I didn't pick just one. I plan on using it often to get great ideas to help my special ed students.
i found many great new strategies to use, this is a wounderful resource. i enoyed the comprehension techniques and would like to try the 3 minute pause with my students to help them generate ideas about what we read and be better able to answer questions, i also liked the checklist mentioned above, i checked that out and that is a huge help when asked by parents what else they can do.
Two of the most effective strategies that can be used in the classroom are implementing SIOP (sheltered instruction observational protocol) and GLAD (guided language acquisition design). The reason is that these two specific ideas focus on EVERY child in the classroom. With that, I mean the native English speakers, GTs, special ed students, and ELLs. This week, I actually implemented a GLAD strategy to our classroom for the introduction to the letter "m." I designed a center poster that has the words (all beginning with m) and pictures for a matching game. This is part of the pictoral input idea associated with GLAD techniques. I was able to implement this strategy into our lit block by incorporating words from the McGraw-Hill curriculum. The students seemed to really enjoy this activity today and look forward to it tomorrow. It does take some time to prepare things like this for classroom, but it is worth it for the students' learning growth.
I really liked the idea of using rime (nursery rhymes) and games (an adaptation of making words) in the classroom. I am at a loss on how to further access these sites and download what is needed to use them. Am I alone in this? Ginny Warfield
I could spend all day looking at the information. There is so much. I went into the fluency link. I am going to try out one of the reader's theatre with my kids. We can work on fluency and have some fun doing a Thanksgiving play. I'll let you know how it goes.
The Struggling Readers site was, unfortunately, intermittent at best. I eventually found the Professional Development Guide on Phonological Awareness: Principles for Instruction and Progress Monitoring. The section on Integrating Adaptations for Students with Learning Disabilities, Adaptations Activity was helpful in that it validated the methods I already use in the classroom. On the Phonological Continuum, as the students move from the simple to the complex, it is important to be aware that when a student is having difficulty moving on to more complex activities, I can easily go back to some of the simple activities.
I am selecting Family Literacy. One of my roles as the Literacy Specialists is to provide opportunities to engage parents and students with shared reading experiences. I think that this site will help me as I plan our school's monthly Family Literacy events.
I had trouble deciding because all of those would be wonderful. I think that I will select Struggling Readers because I do have a lot of students who are not reading at grade level and struggle with reading. I'm hoping that this site will give me some excellent tips and strategies on how to best help those readers.
Since I have the flexibility as a resource teacher, I have the students read directly to me. Our groups are usually small enough that the students can have some time throughout the day to read with me. Adam, I saw GLAD used at the school where I was subbing last week. It looks like a wonderful program. It is a program that helps all students.
I'm selecting motivation. There are students that really need some motivation to engage in literacy activities. http://pbskids.org/lions/games/ is one website that students can explore and engage.
I would like to try Guided Imagery with a group of my students. This can help them prepare for a new story or deepen their understanding after the reading. All I work with is struggling readers, and this strategy was found under "struggling readers". So, I'd like to try this strategy with all my readers within time. I also know I will need to try it more than once with the same group to see if the strategy works or not.
I looked at the Phonemic Awareness thread and the Phonics and Spelling thread. Both areas had some great activities. I really liked the Rhyme A Week in the Phonemic Awareness area and the Octopus Activity in the Phonics area and will try them in my class.
I really liked the Early Literacy Portal. I especially like using Reader Theatre with my ESL students. I have not had a great opportunity to use this as a tool to my teachering this year, however, the little amount I have during my time with 3rd grade ELL students working on in the Houghton Mifflin program- I have found it to very motivating for my students.
Since I do not have a classroom of my own, I investigated the Family Literacy thread and found a ton of great websites to both explore to build my own knowledge and to use with our families. Some of the links were bad (the one for vowel sounds is one I can remember now) but the PBS site filled with games, songs, stories and printables will go home at the top of my list for families at our next Literacy Lunch. The book pals website, featuring videos of famous actors/actresses reading, will be very motivating to some of our students. Also, the Get Ready to Read site has ideas, instructions and activity cards IN SPANISH!! This is invaluable for many of our families and not only will I give out the website, I'll print the cards out to reach all of our learners more effectively.
I found an area focusing on family literacy with a link to information on the Hispanic Family Learning Institute and resources. This is an area that I would like to explore further to better support my children who are English Language Learners and their families.
I chose Fun & Games for English Practice under the ELL category. There are just too many good sites to go to, but under Fun & Games, I found a wonderful site (www.gsc.amdsb.ca/)that my EL students can go to to practise just about all the different aspects of learning English language. This site provides grade level appropriate activities from K thru 8th. Not only are the materials relevant, they are fun, colorful, have great animation and sound. In younger grades, there are even interactive reading with Clifford and interactive stories. I can introduce my students, at any Englsih proficiency level, to this website and find an appropriate activity. The big issue is when to find the time in class since I see them for 30 minutes per session.
I chose the Phonemic Awareness thread and the Phonics and Spelling thread. I really liked the Octopus arm game under the Phonics thread. My students really seem to enjoy any kind of game and I think this would be another fun way to get them to learn word families.
I chose the Phonemic Awareness thread. I really liked the Poems and Songs that Teach. THis gives a wide variety to use in the classroom. My students love to sing and find rhymes. This website gives good songs and poems to use in the classroom. http://teachingheart.net/readerstheater.htm
I thought that the resources on this portal were great. I especially liked that some of the phonemic awareness and phonics links actually had video clips of teachers doing these activities with their own students. I thought this gave a great example of how the activity should look and/or sound.
I am doing this at home and I cannot get onto the Early Lit Portal. I clicked on the link and it starts to load then goes back to this page. Is it working? I will try from school tomorrow.
The portal gave a lot of good resources and ideas. I think I could use many of them in my classroom for all students and particularly with struggling readers.
I like all the readers theater ideas and my ESL students enjoy reading parts..It esposes them to another visual and imaginary story form of reading.
I am ca first year teacher and I have been going into another teachers classroom and she uses readers theater. In college, I didn't learn a whole lot about this so I was particularly interested in this topic. I know that I will be referring to this page in the future for ideas to use readers theater in the classroom. I have tried it out once and the kids really enjoyed it. It doesn't take too much time to plan and I think that the kids will enjoy the acitvity over and over again.
I am a first year teacher and I have been going into another teachers classroom and she uses readers theater. In college, I didn't learn a whole lot about this so I was particularly interested in this topic. I know that I will be referring to this page in the future for ideas to use readers theater in the classroom. I have tried it out once and the kids really enjoyed it. It doesn't take too much time to plan and I think that the kids will enjoy the acitvity over and over again.
Wow!! this portal is fantastic. What a great recourse for a first year teacher like myself. I espcially liked the clips!! Michelle Cabello told me about them so of corrse I checked them out. What better way to show how to do something!!