In a year of massive educational challenges schools now confront the latest new challenge. How to bring students back to the classroom after a year of reduced learning and social isolation, with dramatically increased inequity. This raises the question: What to do first—over the summer perhaps, even before the new year starts–especially in the area of…
Last week Beth Verrilli shared a thought-provoking post about the power of Read Alouds in an online setting. Beth noted how the two videos we shared both helped students to understand how to read a given text independently and also connected them to reading and to the classroom community. I found myself thinking about that when…
As many of you know, Read Alouds have always been a crucial part of our curriculum and literacy work. Reading aloud breathes life into a text, and when a text comes to life it doesn’t just connect students to the act of reading, it connects them to one another. The words come alive; we share a…
Last night, after reading aloud to my daughter and tucking her in, I was mopping up a bit of work from the day and came across this observation by Isabel Beck: “The source of later vocabulary learning shifts [as students get older] to written texts–what children read [as opposed to what they hear]. The problem is…
With thanks to Larry Ferlazzo for the heads up, it turns out that today is World Read Aloud Day, and I am going to make up for the fact that I was not really on-the-ball with Valentine’s Day by being all over World Read Aloud Day. With good reason. First, a clever Valentines/World Read Aloud Day…