Favorite Pin of the Week (1)

So, you're pinning, right? It's completely addictive. And I must get one brilliant idea per week for teaching reading to my students. So, I'm going to share out my favorite finds of the week. If anyone out there come across a good find...link up (see linky below)! This is the first linky I'm trying...so we'll see how this goes! I'll put this up Monday, and keep it up until the following Sunday. Steal the image above (por favor), if you link back to a blog post of yours about a favorite pin.

My  favorite pin from last week (and maybe ever!!?) is a treasure trove of goodness for Response to Intervention: Check out Hall County School's Literacy Site.


I shared this glorious RtI resource immediately with my RtI team members. They have detailed interventions along with progress monitoring tools for every strand of reading. And since we use the DRA at our school, this resource is even more invaluable to me and the teachers at my school. We plan to share this resource with the teachers at an upcoming teacher in-service day at the beginning of January.

This is lifted directly from their site:

Introduction:

• introduction_and_overview.doc
• guide_to_selecting_strategies.doc                                          
• flowcharts.doc
• rti-balanced-tiers.doc
• resources.doc 
• Sample completed Tier 2 forms:
  • sample_rti.doc
  • sample_rti_modification.doc
  • sample_rti_decoding-makesense.doc

Interventions:

• letter_knowledge_interventions.doc
• initial_sound_fluency_interventions.doc
• phoneme_segmentation_interventions.doc
• nonsense_word_fluency_interventions.doc  
• concepts_of_print_interventions.doc
• picture_clues_interventions.doc
• phonological_awareness_interventions.doc
• phonics_interventions.doc
• sight_word_interventions.doc
• timed_reading.doc
• comprehension_sequencing_events.doc
• comprehension_summarizing_events.doc
• comprehending_details.doc  
• comprehension_prediction.doc
• comprehension_interpretation.doc
• comprehension_reflection.doc 

Progress Monitoring Tools:

• letter_naming_pm.doc
• letter_sound_recognition_assessment_pm.doc  
• initial_sounds_fluency_pm.doc
• phoneme_segmentation_fluency_pm.doc
• nonsense_word_fluency_pm.doc
• concepts_of_print_pm.doc
• picture_clues_pm.doc
• phonological_awareness_pm.doc
• phonics_pm.doc
• sight_words_pm.doc
• timed_reading_pm.doc
• dra_short_form.doc
• generic_summary_questions_for_dra.doc 

 

Add this site to your Pin Boards- it's awesome! And become a follower of mine while you're at it (see side bar)! I'd love to see what gems you all are finding out there!!

Link up below!!

Into the Book: An Excellent Resource for Teaching and Building Reading Comprehension

I LOVE this new-to-me resource! If you haven't already come across Into the Book, I suggest you high tail to it and check this out! Pure awesomeness!

Why I love it:

This site has so many wonderful downloadable resources for teachers about reading comprehension. It provides also videos and student interactives to aid in learning reading comprehension strategies. I know I will be using this site extensively next year with my struggling readers. Visit the site to see for yourself!

A Couple of (free) Gems:

Reader's Response Bookmark

Downloadables (Music, Posters, and More!)

Teaching Tips

Links to helpful websites

About the site:

Into the Book is a multimedia package designed to improve students' reading comprehension, as well as their ability to think and learn across the curriculum. Based on current research, the project focuses on eight learning strategies:

• Using prior knowledge
• Making connections
• Questioning
• Visualizing
• Inferring
• Summarizing
• Evaluating
• Synthesizing

Into the Book includes:

• student Web site featuring interactive reading comprehension activities
• teacher Web site featuring music, video clips, classroom design ideas, posters, teacher guides, lesson plans and lots more
• Into the Book video series: nine 15-minute classroom videos teaching children how to be strategic readers
• Behind the Lesson video series: nine 10-minute professional development videos that model effective ways of teaching the learning strategies

The nine Into the Book student episodes feature an extraordinary classroom where a group of ordinary students use powerful learning strategies to enter the world of the story. Programs show student viewers how to use these strategies when reading fiction, nonfiction, or everyday text. They'll also model real-life applications of the strategies. For more information, video clips, and a teacher guide to using the video programs, click on "Student Video" under each strategy.

In the professional development videos, we go Behind the Lesson as teachers demonstrate how they are using these strategies effectively with their students. Programs combine actual classroom footage with dialogue and personal reflection on instructional practices. For more information, video clips, and a slide show, click on "Teacher Video" under each strategy.

This project was developed by the Wisconsin Educational Communications Board, with the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and a team of experienced educators. It is produced by Wisconsin Public Television and the Agency for Instructional Technology.

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"Teaching children which thinking strategies are used by proficient readers and helping them use those strategies independently creates the core of teaching reading. If proficient readers routinely use certain thinking strategies, those are the strategies children must be taught. For the kindergarten-through-twelfth-grade reading curriculum to focus primarily on those strategies, we need a new instructional paradigm: Our daily work with children must look dramatically different from the approaches in wide use in our schools today."

I'm linking up at  Learning All the Time. Visit to find other bloggers' fav resources of the week!

Be well! Read on!

Llama Llama I Miss My Mama!

I'm adding The Children's Book Review to my blogroll. I especially like the read alouds of Llama Llama by Anna Dewdney (See video below).


Their Quest for Literacy sections has good tidbits and general information for parents about teaching reading.


This site is especially good for parents looking for a good book for their kidlets.



What good sites have you come across lately?

I'm Linking up to Learning All The Time. Please visit and check out the other posts from this week!

Be Well Read On!

Using Diigo to Bookmark Online

I going to preface this post by saying- I am not much of a techy. It took me more than an hour to get my facebook like box to show up on the margins of this blog (no joke).  

Have you heard of Diigo? This is a website that allows you to add highlights, bookmarks, sticky notes, get quick links- to any webpage online. I plan to use Diigo as a teacher, web browser and blogger, but I can see it being super helpful for any student or classroom teacher. Nowadays, we do SO much reading and learning online. Diigo is a great way to organize information for a research project or to keep all those amazing teaching ideas in close reach (and organized! I love myself some organization!!). We always talk to our kids about active reading- now here's a way to do it online. I love it! What a great resource for our students!! And it's free!

Here's what you can do with Diigo (from their site):

private/public bookmarks

follow bookmarks from a network of people

see popular bookmarks by tags

import and export bookmarks

automatically post your bookmarks to your blog daily or weekly

save bookmarks as private by default (optional)

organize your bookmarks as a list and shown as a slide

set up groups to pool resources and curate content

automatically bookmark your twitter favorites

keep a full-text copy of your bookmarks (Premium features)

full-text search of your bookmarks (Premium features)

save notes and images, in addition to bookmarks

use highlights and sticky notes as you read - do not just bookmark

capture a portion of the screen and annotate on the screenshot

Do you Diigo?

Read On!