12 Recommended Resources to Support Reading Development Across Age Groups


Hello, from The Literacy Bug,

At this time, we’d like to take the opportunity to share some links to a few quality (mostly free) educational resources that we have come across in the last few years.

We appreciate that many of you may be home schooling children during the present COVID-19 outbreak, or you may be organising remote teaching/support for children. The following may serve as useful resources.

We’d also like to ask the community to share their own suggestions. If you have further recommended resources, please add a comment to the blog or send us an email at info@theliteracybug.com. We’d love to hear from you.

Please note: The following suggestions are not designed to replace the teaching ideas that dedicated teachers are sending home for parents. It’s important to work together to avoid a significant disruption to children’s education.

If you are looking for suggestions consistent with the “Big Six”, then look here …

Research clearly demonstrates that budding readers benefit from activities that develop the “Big Six” skills: oral language, phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension.

This is where the FLORIDA CENTRE FOR READING RESEARCH (FCRR) can help. Their comprehensive set of Student Centre Activities provides a wealth of teaching ideas across the Big Six skills for a wide range of ages (preschool to Grade 5). All materials are available freely to the public.

We do note that it can be a bit daunting to teach using just the activities above, which is why FCRR also includes further planning, teaching and monitoring resources:

We all know how to read to our preschoolers … right? … here are a few extra ideas to support children’s early literacy skills

Developed by the Crane Centre for Early Childhood Research and Policy at Ohio State University, READ IT AGAIN-PREK! is a practitioner-friendly, scientifically based, and relevant curricular supplement designed to develop and strengthen young children’s early foundations in language and literacy.

All lessons are organized around adult-child readings of high-quality storybooks.

Each lesson idea is designed to systematically build children’s language and literacy abilities in four areas key pre-literacy areas:

  • Vocabulary

  • Narrative

  • Phonological awareness

  • Print knowledge

Please note that each lesson is centred around particular picture books. In many cases, you will not have access to these exact books, but you can explore the teaching ideas in the support material and apply these ideas to the book you have access to.

There are a lot of phonics apps out there, so we have a couple recommendations that may spark your interest

FEED THE MONSTER is a free, engaging Android game that helps children develop basic understanding of vowel sounds, consonant sounds and simple words. In other words, children:

  • Learn letter names;

  • Learn letter sounds;

  • Learn to sound out simple words; and

  • Practice reading in an interactive setting at varying levels of difficulty

What’s more important is that Feed the Monster is available in over 40 languages including English, Español, Français, Kiswahili, Hindi, and Farsi. The game was initially developed with support from the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation and USAID and was a winner in the EduApp4Syria contest. It is being further developed by Curious Learning, a global nonprofit focused on promoting literacy.

The various Feed the Monster games (including English) can be found on GooglePlay at https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Curious%20Learning

SOUNDS ENGLISH PHONICS is an innovative new learn-to-read app from the educational company Zaprendo.

It is important to note that the game is NOT a beginning phonics app. It is designed for students who have reached the 'early reading phase’ (a reading age of about 6.5 years) and is based on 92 written sounds that occur most frequently in early reading material. Many of these are vowel dipthongs as well as blended consonant sounds - such as 'bl'. This makes good sense for early readers (as opposed to emergent readers) as this extends students who have already mastered basic short vowels and CVC constructs.

The app recommends that learners focus on three sounds per day (with accompanying words). All learning is organised around the “Great Learning Tree”, which provides a visible indications of the learner’s progress.

What is most impressive is the adaptive learning feature, which monitors the words that children get right and wrong. The system uses this information to determine and modify the sequence of letter-sounds that learners encounter in the game.

Please explore and enjoy! And note, this is a paid app.

https://zaprendo.com/apps/

Are you looking for free reading materials for early readers in English but also in a range of other languages?

STORYWEAVER is a digital repository of multilingual stories for children from Pratham Books. Storyweaver is designed to provide children with richly illustrated, open-licensed children's stories in mother tongue languages (including English). The stories are levelled by reading difficulty, so you can find free texts at the right level for your emerging reader.

All the stories are available online and offline. They are downloadable as PDFs for easy printing, and there are also a number of readalong stories in the repository.

https://storyweaver.org.in

Another resource with a similar intent is the GLOBAL DIGITAL LIBRARY from the Global Book Alliance. Keep a look out for the following resource as it is sure to grow in the coming months.

https://www.digitallibrary.io

Are you looking for accessible, information texts for developing readers?

TEXTPROJECT’S “FYI FOR KIDS” resource provides a wealth of free, short, accessible texts with accompanying activities. These texts can be used to help developing readers focus increasing attention on how to extract key information as they read.

There are texts in a range of difficulties and in diverse subject areas, including science, social studies, arts, music, history and culture. The website also now includes an easy-to-use search tool to filter text by difficulty and topic.

http://textproject.org/teachers/students/fyi-for-kids/

Are you looking for even more reading materials to help expand learners’ understanding of the world around them?

NEWSELA is an innovative site with resources designed to build reading comprehension from a relevant, contemporary source of nonfiction: the daily news.

Newsela includes articles ranging from sport, the arts, to politics, and more. All articles are sourced from reputable new outlets like the Washington Post, Scientific American, the History Channel, and much, much more.

The key is this, though: Newsela creates multiple versions of each article for different skills and abilities. In other words, there will be version written at a Grade 3 level, a Grade 5 level, a Grade 7 level, and so on.

It makes it easy for an entire class to read the same content yet differentiated to suit differing levels of reading skills. In other words, academically challenging content can be presented within the zone of proximal development of the learner.

Please explore and enjoy. You’ll be pleased that you did.

https://newsela.com

Are you wishing to challenge learners with academic vocabulary and enagaging topics?

WORD GENERATION is a research-based program for late primary and middle school students which is designed to teach academic vocabulary in language arts, math, science and social studies classes. It is a program that builds academic vocabulary across subject areas by facilitating deep discussion about concepts and issues of concern to children and young people.

Each unit introduces approximately five or six high-utility academic “focus words” and is designed to offer a variety of texts, word-learning activities, writing tasks, and debate and/or discussion opportunities. Specifically, each unit helps:

  • expand general and content-oriented academic vocabulary;

  • build the reasoning and argumentation skills that are necessary for learning in all content areas; and

  • build reading comprehension and content-area literacy by providing students with motivating text, opportunities for discussion and debate, and weekly writing.

Please explore and enjoy:

Do you need resources to help adolescent readers develop key fluency and deep comprehension skills?

Serp Institute’s STARI program (or Strategic Adolescent Reading Intervention) is a literature-focused intervention for students in grades 6-9 who read two or more years below grade level. STARI addresses gaps in fluency, decoding, reading stamina, and comprehension, aiming to move struggling students to higher levels of proficiency whilst providing cognitively challenging content that is aligned to the Common Core and other 21st century standards.

Each units includes a range of materials to support growing fluency, comprehension, critical thinking and academic development.

Check this one out: https://www.serpinstitute.org/stari

COMMONLIT is a nonprofit education technology organization dedicated to ensuring that all students develop strong reading, writing, communication, and problem-solving skills.

The system includes over 2,000 high-quality free reading passages for grades 3-12, complemented by questions, paired readings and activities to promote deep consideration of important social, environmental and historical issues.

This includes:

  • individual texts (organised by grade level and theme);

  • texts organised into units of study; and

  • novel (book) studies that guide students into deep, critical thinking.

Please note that CommonLit now includes a range of Spanish content, as well.

https://www.commonlit.org

Last but not least, the COMPREHENSION CIRCUIT TRAINING (CCT) resource from The Meadows Centre provides a range of scaffolds to support youth to read with an analytical and critical mind. The CCT resource is part of the broader PACT project (Promoting Adolescents’ Comprehension of Text)

Please stay connected and reach out if you have further ideas and resources that you’d like to share

We are really pleased to share this list with you. It’s not a comprehensive list, but hopefully it has some useful ideas. To explore further, please visit our list of recommended links.

If you’d like to add any further recommendations, please let us know. We are keen to hear from you. Please add a comment to the blog or send us an email at info@theliteracybug.com.

Bye for now.

Eight New Resources Available on The Literacy Bug

In this entry, we are proud to present a range of resources that have been in development for quite some time.

These include:

Please note that the “Elements” Checklist includes information on each of the above (phonemes, graphemes, morphemes, etc), as well as additional notes on reading multisyllabic words and vocabulary development.

All together, the resources are designed to provide reference materials that help one better understand the elements that contribute to word and sentence construction in English. They do NOT describe the activities that a learner can engage in to master these elements, though. As a result, these resources are not particularly helpful on their own, but they can be helpful when planning and reflecting upon the linguistic features that leaners need to master over time.

So ... please explore and enjoy! And remember, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Even if a learner is making progress with mastering the structural aspects of literacy - such as learning to decode words, spell words and write grammatical sentences - there is still a lot of work involved in making meaning from and with the printed word.

Words Sorts

It is with great pleasure that we share another Activity Presentation. This time we explore Word Sorts.

Word Sorts is a simple way to encourage learners to develop an understanding of the predictable patterns when reading and spelling English words. In short, each word sort activity requires learners to examine a set of words, and to sort (or categorise) these words into common patterns whilst identifying exceptions to the rule. This brief activity is designed to be done daily (or regularly) as learners "study" different sets of pronunciation and spelling patterns. In doing so, learners explore how to blend and segment various consonant and vowel sounds in simple to more complex words.

By guiding learners from simple to complex structures, teachers can help learners make logical sense of word reading and writing in English. The Word Sorts (or Word Studies) can easily be organised in such a way that the resulting program is consistent with an evidence-based phonics sequence. Over time, students come to master the patterns of English phonology,  orthography, and morphology, so they are equipped with the skills to rapidly and accurately read both known and unfamiliar words.

Rather than prolong the introduction, it is best to allow the video to speak for itself. The following video presentation provides a demonstration of this activity along with some essential points and resources. Grab your popcorn, because it is a bit of a long one. (NB: The video can also be found on YouTube at https://youtu.be/HCvYgHk6ODc.)

Ultimately, we want children to decode with confidence and notice the patterns within printed words. As Mark Seidenberg observes, “for a beginning reader, every word is a unique pattern. Major statistical patterns emerge as the child encounters a larger sample of words, and later, finer-grained dependencies.” (Seidenberg, 2017, 92)  “Readers become orthographic experts by absorbing lots of data  … The path to orthographic expertise begins with practice practice practice but leads to more more more.” (Seidenberg, 2017, 108).

After you watch the video, we encourage you to download resources that are mentioned in the presentation:

You can also access the Word Sort - Activity Cards, which have been organised into key developmental stages.

We encourage you to check out the book Words Their Way by Donald Bear and colleagues. It's a highly regarded educational resource with a thorough discussion of activities, developmental expectation and assessment tools.

  • Bear, S., Invernizzi, M., Templeton, S., & Johnston, F. (2014). Words their way: word study for phonics, vocabulary, and spelling instruction (5th edition). Essex: Pearson.

Also, please visit our Mastering the Code presentation, including the presentation slides. This presentation and its associated slides provide background research that will help you better understand the purpose of the activity.

We hope the activity is a valuable addition to your practice. We welcome your feedback and ideas, so please stay in touch.

Thank you for your time. Please explore and enjoy!

 

References

Bear, S., Invernizzi, M., Templeton, S., & Johnston, F. (2014). Words their way: word study for phonics, vocabulary, and spelling instruction (5th edition). Essex: Pearson.

Seidenberg, M. (2017). Language at the speed of sight: how we read, why so many can’t, and what can be done about it. New York: Basic Books.

Analysing Spoken Words - A New Activity

It is with great pleasure that we add a new type of resource to The Literacy Bug: Activities.

And the first cab off the rank is Analysing Spoken Words. The following video presentation provides a demonstration of this first activity along with some essential points. (NB: The video can also be found on YouTub e at https://youtu.be/8DVPbK0HSyY.)

Ultimately, we want children to notice the patterns within their oral language (e.g. in their words), so they are equipped with the fundamental skills upon which they can build more formal literacy (e.g. sound-letter correspondences).

As Mark Seidenberg attests, “spoken words [need] to be treated as consisting of component parts, [which is a skill that] we now consider [as] an ordinary, teachable aspect of learning to read: phonological awareness. (Seidenberg, 2017, p. 63)

After you watch the video, we encourage you to download the following resources, which are mentioned in the presentation:

If you would like further background, please visit our Mastering the Code presentation, including the presentation slides. This presentation and its associated slides provide background research that will help you better understand the purpose of the activity.

To wrap up our thoughts, over time children need to develop the ability to:

  • Learn rich language;

  • Hear/isolate words within sentences (or the speech stream);

  • Focus attention on words;

  • Detect/isolate syllables within words;

  • Detect/isolate sounds within syllables/words;

  • Begin to recognise the possible sounds within their language(s);

  • Correlate their developing understanding of sounds with their emerging knowledge of sound-letter combinations;

  • Focus on the meaning of words; and

  • Focus on the use of words in rich, meaningful sentences.

We hope the activity is a valuable addition to your practice. We welcome your feedback and ideas, so please stay in touch.

… And please note ... the activity can be done partially or in full, depending on the age and ability of the learners. … And it can be incorporated into many aspects of daily practices, whether this is around book reading, in the sand pit or with general word play. These and other bits of advice are discussed in the above video and associated resources.

Thank you for your time. Please explore and enjoy!

 

Reference

Seidenberg, M. (2017). Language at the speed of sight: how we read, why so many can’t, and what can be done about it. New York: Basic Books.

Mastering the Alphabetic Code

Today, we share "Mastering the Alphabetic Code" which is available below as well as on YouTube at https://youtu.be/dA4nt3rxTYM. 

This video is a presentation that outlines the key elements involved in learning to “master the alphabetic code”, such as phonemic awareness, phonemic knowledge, letter-sound correspondence, orthographic patterns, morphological patterns and automatic word recognition and construction skills.

It emphasises the need for teachers to develop scaffolded activities that provide learners with the skills to succeed.

The presentation slides can be downloaded at http://bit.ly/Mastering-the-Code. We highly recommend that you download the slides, since they contain many resources mentioned in the video. Please be patient during download. It's a large file, at least in PDF terms (20MB).

Please explore and enjoy! And send us a message if you have any questions, comments or suggestions.

Keeping the eye on the prize

Photo by BrianAJackson/iStock / Getty Images

Photo by BrianAJackson/iStock / Getty Images

There is a niggling concern that I always have when I become too preoccupied with "the basics" of literacy, including components like phonemic awareness and phonics. Sure, these skills are essential, and it’s relatively simple to measure progress in such areas, but I can't help but think, "this isn't the hardest part about literacy, though. We still need to integrate this knowledge into more complex and more ambiguous acts of communication."

I have witnessed many learners who develop such basics, but who still go on to struggle with reading and writing. At the risk of sounding unfair, they often struggle with the patience, stamina, concentration, guidance or even time to become a strong(er) reader/writer - all of which comes through opportunities to manipulate the script.

It reminds me of this little picture that Wittgenstein once painted of someone who had learned to deliberate over a task, “every now and then there is the problem 'Should I use this bit?' — The bit is rejected, another is tried. Bits are tentatively put together, then dismantled; he looks for one that fits etc.. So I sometimes make him say 'No, that bit is too long, perhaps another one fits better.' — Or 'What am I to do now?' — 'Got it!' — Or 'That’s not bad”' etc. ..." In particular, the act of writing resembles this inner dialogue. It's not a straightforward linear task.

At the culmination of this passage, Wittgenstein rightly states, "thinking gives [the learner] the possibility of perfecting his methods." Learning to read and write effectively is a bit like this inner dialogue. Actual reading and writing involves quite intricate acts of problem solving. The learner needs plenty of practice chewing over texts and creating them, particularly after they have gained momentum with the basics.

Wittgenstein presents us with an similar image of teaching that seems to suggest how one initiates another into ways of working, “if a person has not yet got the concepts, I shall teach him … by means of examples and by practice. -- And when I do this I do not communicate less to him than I know myself. In the course of this teaching I shall show him … get him to continue an ornamental pattern uniformly when told to do so. -- And also to continue progressions. And so, for example: I do it, he does it after me; and I influence him by expressions of agreement, rejection, expectation, encouragement. I let him go his way, or hold him back; and so on. Imagine witnessing such teaching. None of the words would be explained by means of themselves; [they makes sense in the context of the practice ... of apprenticeship].” (Philosophical Investigations, #280)

Consequently, this places experience at the forefront of learning. In other words, the learner requires the practical experience to integrate component skills into meaningful, literate act(ivitie)s. In doing so, the learner becomes adept at manipulating the script, and the mentor teacher provides the learner with opportunities to exert this knowledge in engaging ways. Therefore, “the teacher’s role is to help the child by arranging tasks and activities in such a way that [advanced tasks] are more easily accessible.” (Verhoeven and Snow, 2001, pg 4-5)

This gradual initiation relates to something I mention in the recent grammar/sentence presentation. That is, the rules of grammar do not tell me why one sentence should precede or follow another, nor do they tell me anything about what should be the content of my ideas. They may help me formulate and re-formulate a sentence with greater ease - and this is of value - but this in itself does not dictate the logic or content of my communication. Often the sequence of my sentences is guided by convention, and convention is shaped by the expectations of my audience. And I must have had enough experience with this audience to have a sensible understanding of my idea and how to express this idea.

As Ray Monk (1999) would say, “the reason computers have no understanding of the sentences they process is not that they lack sufficient neuronal complexity, but that they are not, and cannot be, participants in the culture to which the sentences belong. A sentence does not acquire meaning through the correlation, one to one, of its words with objects in the world; it acquires meaning through the use that is made of it in the communal life of human beings."

A similar sentiment led Newton Garver (1996) to express the following comment.

“If Wittgenstein and Saussure agree in using ‘grammar’ descriptively, they disagree about ... other matters. One is that Wittgenstein’s grammar has to do with uses of language (discourse conditions and discourse continuation) rather than forms and their combinations (morphology and syntax) ...

"Considering uses rather than forms is a deep rather than a superficial departure from classical linguistic methodology ... Studying uses of language makes context prominent, whereas the study of forms lends itself naturally to analysis.” (Garver, 1996, pg 151)

Maybe I am stating the obvious. Perhaps, I am not making a strong point here. But I write this against the backdrop of the proposal to introduce the Year 1 Phonics Check here in Australia. Whilst I have no objection of teachers getting good data on what their students can and cannot decode, we should always keep our eyes on the prize, which involves the integration of this knowledge into meaningful acts of reading and writing. I often ask, “how can I create opportunities for learners to integrate their skills into meaning making? How do I support and motivate them to take risks and challenge themselves?” We should always offer students opportunities to “use their expanding knowledge of language and their growing powers of influence to figure out [how to read and write] texts.” (Wolf, pp 131)

There you go. I’ve had my say. It’s not a critique of anything. Just an observation.

 

References

Garver, N. (1996). Philosophy as grammar. In H. Sluga & D. Stern (Eds.), The Cambridge companion to Wittgenstein (pp. 139–170). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Monk, R. (1999, July 29). Wittgenstein’s Forgotten Lesson. Propsect Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/ray-monk-wittgenstein/#.Uo_n_pHqvGY

Verhoeven, L. and Snow, C. (2001). Literacy and motivation: bridging cognitive and sociocultural viewpoints. In Verhoeven, L. and Snow, C. (Eds.), Literacy and motivation: reading engagement in individuals and groups (pp. 1- 22). New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers

Wittgenstein, L. (2001). Philosophical Investigations (3rd ed.). Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing.

Wolf, M. (2008). Proust and the squid: the story and science of the reading brain. Cambridge: Icon Books.