Ready, Set, Read!
Take this opportunity to find out how children really learn to read and write. Explore current research that cuts through the media messages about reading wars and the right way to teach children. Learn by reading stories about children, doing interactive assignments, and exploring the latest in parent and childcare information. You will see everyday children's play with a new eye as you understand how play can connect to literacy.
You'll learn how a child becomes literate from the moment of birth. First, you'll investigate the many things a child's growing mind must do to make sense of the written word and create writing. From there, you'll explore the development of reading and writing from infancy to the early school years. You'll know what problems to look for and how to assist a struggling reader. You will see how you can boost literacy growth during daily routines and child's play.
Gain confidence in your ability to guide a child's literacy development, and take pleasure in seeing how even the littlest events can lead to major steps in reading and writing success.
Guided Reading and Writing: Strategies for Maximum Student Achievement
Around 30% of students in sixth grade already have trouble with basic reading and writing. These literacy problems affect performance across subject areas, and they often leave teachers wondering how to help. Get the professional development training you need to improve student literacy as an accomplished teacher shares the secrets of turning guided reading strategies into opportunities for teaching writing. The road to literacy is also the road to ingenuity, invention, and imagination, and you'll soon learn how to take your students from groans to grins with creative lesson plans that really work!
We'll start our journey by talking about the reasons reading and writing are so difficult for students. Then we'll meet the total literacy framework and see how it mitigates literacy problems once and for all. Since this framework is based on guided reading lessons that flow naturally into writing challenges, you'll learn the recipe for a successful guided reading into writing lesson.
Once the framework is in place, we'll investigate a number of ways to modify this basic recipe for a variety of K-12 circumstances, wrapping up with a look at good writing habits and the traits of a productive writing conference. If you're looking for the right way to get students excited about the power of literacy, this is the course for you!
Note: To receive 25 hours of instruction in the State of Oregon, please ensure your school is eligible to issue professional development units, and that the course is approved by your professional learning coordinator.
Guided Reading: Strategies for the Differentiated Classroom
Now more than ever, today's teachers are grappling with the question of how to reach struggling readers. While there are no quick fixes, thousands of teachers are combining the principles of differentiated instruction and guided reading with unparalleled success. Mixed in the right proportion, these popular strategies will help you build a balanced literary framework that gets results with even the most challenged learners.
Differentiated instruction tactics will help you understand how your students learn so that you can teach in a way that makes sense to them. When you apply those tactics within the guided reading framework, which helps you lead students through new ways of approaching text, great things start to happen. The result is a classroom full of students who are able to negotiate increasingly challenging texts with unprecedented fluency.
This course is critical for today's educators, who often have to teach on the run with limited resources and unlimited demands on their time. Get ready to reach your readers with ease in no time flat!
Response to Intervention: Reading Strategies That Work
Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could be proactive in helping our struggling readers? Well, we can! In this six-week course, you'll learn response to intervention (RTI) strategies that ensure the struggling readers in your classroom get the help and education they need. RTI is research based and gives us a strategic plan to bring tiered interventions to our students, at their reading level and with their unique challenges in mind. Helping them with phonics, fluency, vocabulary mastery, comprehension, and writing, these intervention strategies tackle the toughest literacy problems with flexibility and creativity.
During our time together, you'll discover tools like Elkonin Boxes, alphabetic arcs, Bloom's Taxonomy, and new and exciting graphic organizers. Whether you're working with struggling readers in kindergarten or 12th grade, you'll find that these strategies work with a full 80% of students, without the need for special pull-outs or extra IEP intervention. Why? Because RTI gets to the root of the problem—quickly!
If you're eager to learn the right ways to help your struggling readers make steady progress throughout the year, you'll find that this course gives you the power to teach flexibly and creatively, without the need for extra training in literacy or fluency. As an added bonus, there's nothing quite like helping students discover the pleasures of reading!
Suite bundles are not eligible for partial drops or refunds. Transfers to other open sessions of the same course are available. Please refer to your school for additional details regarding drops, transfers, and refunds on Suite bundles.
About The Instructor
Kt (Katie) Paxton
Kt (Katie) Paxton is a certified teacher with a Master's Degree in Education focusing on Learning and Technology. She has more than 20 years of classroom experience and has been an online instructor since 2003. She also owned and managed a home daycare for five years and is the author of More Adventures With Kids in San Diego. Furthermore, Kt has trained and placed tutors with at-risk students in over 100 schools in addition to working with the students herself.
Cheryl Dick
Cheryl Dick has more than 25 years of teaching experience and is currently a classroom teacher. She's taught 2nd, 4th, and 5th grade and has previously worked as an instructional coach. She graduated from Missouri State University with a Bachelor of Science in elementary education, with a focus on early childhood education. Cheryl also holds a master's degree in elementary education from Texas-Wesleyan University and a second master's degree in educational administration from Lindenwood University.
Audrey Cass
Audrey Cass has extensive experience working with teachers and students in several roles in person and via e-learning. Audrey holds an MS in Management from Antioch New England University and a BS in Education from Keene State College in New Hampshire. Audrey specializes in differentiating instruction, designing resources, student-centered planning, relationship building, collaborating, and mentoring.
Wendell Christensen
Wendell Christensen is a veteran educator with over twenty-five years of experience as a classroom teacher, literacy coach, mentor, and consultant. Wendell has worked with students, teachers, parents, and administrators across the country to combat illiteracy one child at a time. He believes that with the right mix of encouragement, intervention strategies, and support, every child can learn to read.
Wendell is passionate about expanding the understanding around Response to Intervention (RTI) and how their research-based strategies and flexible approaches can benefit all struggling readers without a need for special pull-outs or an Individualized Education Program (IEP).