Fantastic ELA resources suggested from Christina Hank at: http://turnonyourbrain.wordpress.com/2012/08/08/basic-skills-in-literacy/
Literacy Skills in Early Elementary
The ORC has a wealth of information available for building literacy skills in the early grades, and I just want to take a moment to mention some of the resources because, to be honest, before I began working at the ORC, I didn’t know it existed–and what a shame that was!
The ORC has a wealth of information available for building literacy skills in the early grades, and I just want to take a moment to mention some of the resources because, to be honest, before I began working at the ORC, I didn’t know it existed–and what a shame that was!
- PreK tools–ORC has an entire website devoted to Early Childhood. There are over 400 lesson plan/activity/experience resources and tons of books and activities for building literacy skills. As a parent who wants her child to be ready to read by kindergarten, there’s a lot of value to me in this site.
- Literacy K-5: This is primarily what I am working on right now with the goal of having all our materials aligned to the CCSS before school starts (whew!). By digging into the work on this portion of the site, I learned more about teaching reading than I did in obtaining my teaching license.
- The K-2 and 3-5 bookshelves are cool because they are organized into sets of books that address either a specific literacy skill (fluency, vocabulary, etc.) or a shared theme (Native Americans, People in Ohio).
- The “Reading” section features the five basic reading skills: comprehension, fluency,phonemic awareness, phonics, and vocabulary. Each section includes specific lesson plans, professional development tools, videos of teachers putting the reading skills into practice, and assessment items.
- And the “Reading Strategies” section that provides standards alignment (*I’ll come back to this in a moment), tools, activities, lessons, and instructional guidance on the reading strategies research has shown to be trademarks of strong readers: comparing and contrasting, connecting to prior knowledge, determining the importance, making inferences,predicting, setting a purpose, summarizing, and visualizing.