Reading and Writing   

Get the professional development training you need to improve student literacy.

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. In this course, you will examine the reasons reading and writing are so difficult for students. Then you will encounter the total literacy framework and see what it does to mitigate literacy problems. Since this framework is based on guided reading lessons that flow naturally into writing challenges, you will learn to successfully transition from guided readings to writing lessons.

Once you have encountered the basic framework, you will 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!

Requirements:

Hardware Requirements:

• This course can be taken on either a PC, Mac, or Chromebook.

Software Requirements:

• PC: Windows 8 or later.
• Mac: macOS 10.6 or later.
• Browser: The latest version of Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox are preferred. Microsoft Edge and Safari are also compatible.
• Adobe Acrobat Reader.
• Software must be installed and fully operational before the course begins.

Other:

• Email capabilities and access to a personal email account.

Why Is It So Hard to Read and Write?

Have you ever wondered why so many of your students struggle to read and write? You're not alone! This introductory lesson will discuss why these two subjects are so hard for students and how you can make their lives a little easier.

The Total Literacy Framework

To really help struggling readers and writers, you need a framework. The total literacy framework is just the thing: Guided reading, writing, engagement, and assessment are the components that make it so effective. This lesson will discuss guided reading, writing, and engagement.

Where Does Assessment Fit In?

Assessment is the part of the total literacy framework that drives instruction. After all, you need to know where students are academically and where they need to go before you can effectively teach them. In this lesson you will look at fun and simple ways to assess students' reading and writing skills.

Recipe for a Guided Reading and Writing Lesson

The recipe you will learn about in this lesson is one that you can easily modify for any K-12 setting, and it's dotted with examples from real classrooms where guided reading and writing are changing lives.

Writing Stories

Have you ever read a great story only to think, "I could write something better than that"? Well, guess what? Your students think the exact same thing. This lesson will teach you the basics of leading a successful story writing activity.

Composing Nonfiction

Nonfiction is often less popular in the classroom. However, with a little imagination, you can make nonfiction come alive for your students. In this lesson, you will learn how you can make nonfiction more appealing to students.

Writing Poetry

Some students absolutely hate reading and writing poetry, but they won't after you introduce the techniques taught in this lesson! Additionally, you will take a tour of the different kinds of poetry that inspire students.

Developing Papers

Writing papers is never going to be the most exciting part of school, but it's always going to be necessary. This lesson will discuss how to teach students to read research material and use it as a launch pad for papers that are clear and thought-provoking the first time around.

Crafting Ideas Across the Content Areas

One of the neat things about employing the total literacy framework is that you can extend it across the content areas. In This lesson, you will learn how to use guided reading and writing to your advantage whether you're teaching math, social studies, or science.

Reinforcing Good Writing Habits

Have you ever written something that was a little hard to understand? This lesson will cover ways to teach students to craft their own style, hone their organization, and check for proper mechanics before they turn in any assignments.

Holding Writing Conferences

Writing conferences are a great chance to make sure students are successful as they turn reading into writing and writing into ideas. This lesson will discuss the power of conferences and how to make the most of them.

Turning Small Successes into Big Rewards

It's important to take time to encourage and inspire students by turning their small successes into big rewards. If you're looking for new strategies to motivate students and make reading and writing fun, you won't want to miss all the tips and tricks in this final lesson!

Learn creative ways to bring differentiated instruction and guided reading to life in your classroom.

Mixed in the right proportion, differentiated instruction will help you build a balanced literary framework that gets results with even the most challenged learners.

In this course, you will learn differentiated instruction tactics that will help you understand how your students learn. 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 can negotiate increasingly challenging texts with unprecedented fluency.

This course is critical for modern educators, who often must 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!

Requirements:

Hardware Requirements:

• This course can be taken on either a PC, Mac, or Chromebook.

Software Requirements:

• PC: Windows 8 or later.
• Mac: macOS 10.6 or later.
• Browser: The latest version of Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox are preferred. Microsoft Edge and Safari are also compatible.
• Adobe Acrobat Reader.
• Software must be installed and fully operational before the course begins.

Other:

• Email capabilities and access to a personal email account.

Building a Balanced Literary Framework

If you have you ever wished you had a good way to reach your struggling readers, you're ready to transform reading instruction with differentiated instruction and guided reading. In this lesson, you will discover how blending these techniques will help you build a balanced literary framework.

Getting to Know Your Readers

The first step in helping your students is getting to know who they are and how their minds work. In this lesson, you will learn how to evaluate your students' readiness, interests, learning profiles, and social elements.

Planning Assessments

Assessment is at the heart of differentiated instruction. In this lesson, learn how to plan quality pre-, ongoing, and summative assessments that will give you a clear picture of student learning. The best part of assessing students at multiple intervals is that you can tell what is working and what isn't.

Grouping Students

In this lesson, you will discuss flexible groups. These are a mainstay in the differentiated classroom because they allow you to combine students for different reasons on different days. Sometimes you will combine students based on interests and other times based on readiness or learning profile.

Selecting Texts

There are thousands of options when it comes to selecting the texts you will teach. This lesson will teach you how narrow down your options by understanding the criteria of good fiction and nonfiction texts.

Framing Your Prereading

Did you know that a lot of the learning process hinges on what you do to prepare students before they start reading? It's easy to just introduce a text and let students have at it, but if you plan the time before reading with activities that build anticipation, you will be amazed by the results.

Reading the Text

How students read a text is a highly personal matter, but in the classroom, you must direct their reading to get the greatest results. In this lesson, you will learn how to teach students the right way to read, to comprehend what they've just read, and to make inferences.

Navigating the After Reading Framework

This lesson covers the after-reading framework, where you will teach students to turn information into ideas as they go beyond the text and into the world.

Tiering with Ease

If you think of your classroom as a ladder, you will realize that you have a lot of students on a lot of different rungs. In this lesson you will explore tiering, which helps you separate students based on their readiness, interests, or learning profiles.

Anchoring Your Students to Extra Learning

What do you do with those extra 10 or 15 minutes at the end of a lesson or a school day? An increasingly popular strategy is to anchor your students to the material they've learned by extending learning in new avenues.

Crafting Independent Reading Projects

The ultimate goal of the balanced literary framework is to create independent readers. In this lesson, you will learn the basics of curriculum compacting, learning contracts, and individual projects, strategies to help your students transition to independence.

Putting the Puzzle Together

This lesson wraps up the course by reviewing the foundation that you build for classroom learning. Your attitude is everything. Beyond that, you need to be able to encourage struggling readers and help parents extend the learning at home.

Learn how to support reading and writing skills in young learners.

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.

In this course, you will learn how a child becomes literate from the moment of birth. First, you will investigate the many things a child's growing mind must do to make sense of the written word and create writing. From there, you will explore the development of reading and writing from infancy to the early school years. You will 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.

Requirements:

Hardware Requirements:

• This course can be taken on either a PC, Mac, or Chromebook.

Software Requirements:

• PC: Windows 8 or later.
• Mac: macOS 10.6 or later.
• Browser: The latest version of Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox are preferred. Microsoft Edge and Safari are also compatible.
• Adobe Acrobat Reader.
• Software must be installed and fully operational before the course begins.

Other:

• Email capabilities and access to a personal email account.

Introduction to Literacy

Your first lesson introduces the course philosophy and objectives. Then, you will review examples and anecdotes to show you some of the many ways you interact with reading in your daily lives. You will also explore the history of reading instruction, so you better understand where research has taken us.

Language Development

Just as a child communicates with us before using words, young children initiate many literacy-related activities before they actually read and write. This lesson introduces language skills that have the greatest impact on a child becoming a successful reader and writer. You will end this lesson with a new understanding of the complexities of language development.

Sounds and Symbols

We all get excited when children learn their ABCs. But what role does this skill play in becoming a reader and writer? And what does it really mean to know your ABCs? This lesson uncovers the differences between rote memory, knowledge of sounds and symbols, phonemic awareness, and how all these things come together for the early reader.

Attention and Literacy

While attention and literacy may seem like big words for little people, the way a child's brain is attending to print in his world has a huge impact on reading, writing, and learning. In this lesson, you will learn about different types of attention and the importance of having an organized thinking system in order to learn about print.

Memory and Literacy

This lesson introduces what's happening when a child works to store information in memory. By the end of this lesson, you will realize how important it is to store information in some sort of order, and also how to get things out of memory again once they're put away. You will then be able to watch a young reader with a new awareness of how this skill impacts her success.

Comprehension and Literacy

You will understand what understanding is all about in this lesson. How does a child make sense of what you read to him or what he reads to himself? You will explore the many skills a child needs to understand text. Just because a child can say a word doesn't mean he knows the word when reading it.

Birth Through Age Two

While you would never want or expect a child under two to read, much pre-literacy work goes on during the early years before a child is really even talking. In this lesson, you will learn how infants grow to become readers and explore the literacy processes that occur during the first two years of life.

Ages Three and Four

This lesson explores the sequence of skills that brings toddlers and preschoolers to the threshold of becoming true readers and writers. You will learn why you should read that favorite story one more time, with enthusiasm. In fact, once you understand how much this repetition is helping your child's literacy, you will want to read it a dozen more times.

Kindergarten and Beyond

Research shows that humans learn literacy skills in the same order. This lesson explains that order and why it's okay if your child doesn't meet these milestones by a specific age. This lesson will guide you through the evolution of reading and writing letters, words, sentences, and complex ideas.

Becoming a Fluent Reader

How do all of these pieces come together to produce an able reader? By the end of this lesson, you will know what fluency looks like when a young child is successfully reading. Literacy skills continue to develop so a child can be successful with literacy activities throughout school and life.

Becoming a Fluent Writer

Now that you know all about the mental processes and learning sequences that lead to becoming a writer, you will learn new activities that demonstrate how the complex skill of writing emerges. You will learn what to watch for and how to assist a child who's becoming a successful scribe.

A Word About Disabilities

What's going on when a child isn't reading or writing when you expect him to? By the end of this lesson, you will know how to assist a child who struggles with literacy learning and how to locate resources for assistance. You will also understand the concept of "learning differences," which can help you focus on the strengths of a child who masters reading and writing slower than their peers.

Learn response to intervention (RTI) strategies that ensure the struggling readers in your classroom get the help and education they need.

Whether you're working with struggling readers in kindergarten or 12th grade, you will 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 will 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.

You will 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 will 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 will 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.

Requirements:

Hardware Requirements:

• This course can be taken on either a PC, Mac, or Chromebook.

Software Requirements:

• PC: Windows 8 or later.
• Mac: macOS 10.6 or later.
• Browser: The latest version of Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox are preferred. Microsoft Edge and Safari are also compatible.
• Adobe Acrobat Reader.
• Software must be installed and fully operational before the course begins.

Other:

• Email capabilities and access to a personal email account.

What Is Response to Intervention?

Have you been searching for ways to help your struggling readers? Well, wonder no more. Response to intervention is here to help. Your first lesson explores how response to intervention uses research-based and tiered strategies to help students overcome roadblocks to literacy. You will discover how these strategies will help you meet your adequate yearly progress goals.

RTI's Problem-Solving Model

Response to intervention is based on a problem-solving model, which means that you get to be a scientist while you're teaching reading. You will begin by giving students a universal screening, deciding which intervention tier will be most helpful, trying several strategies, and then tweaking as necessary. Of course, you're also constantly evaluating how well your plan is working and whether students could benefit from more or less support.

Phonemic Awareness Strategies

Did you know that most adults aren't sure just what phonemic awareness is? You definitely won't be one of them after this fun lesson on the smallest units of sound a word can be divided into. First, you will learn about how to identify phonemes (/c/a/t/), and then take a look at how Elkonin Boxes and alphabetic arcs help students build phonemic awareness for simple and complex words.

Phonics Strategies

Phonemic awareness is the key to phonics instruction, so this lesson continues your journey by building a bridge between the two. When you teach students phonics, you're helping them understand the relationship between the word's sounds and the letters that represent them. Soon you will be able to teach your students to parse words into their individual sounds and letters and then put them back together to spell new words.

Fluency Strategies

When many readers read, they don't need to pause to decode what they are seeing on the page. While you might take this for granted, it's an experience that's completely foreign to most struggling readers. So, in this lesson, you will explore the ways you can help struggling readers build fluency with direct and indirect approaches. This will help them learn to read with more automaticity.

Vocabulary-Building Strategies

Have you ever sat down to read a thermodynamics text just for fun? Probably not. Many readers prefer to read text with words they know. But for many of your students, that means only a handful of texts will fit the bill. What's the solution? Helping students build three tiers of vocabulary, from the common sight words on up to complicated words with prefixes and suffixes. You will learn how to do that in this lesson.

Comprehension Strategies

This lesson tackles comprehension by engaging students where they are so they can build a bridge to where they're going. You will learn about several powerful comprehension strategies, like Making Connections and Bloom's Taxonomy. With a little practice and a lot of coaching, your struggling readers will be making meaning in no time.

Content-Area Strategies

Get ready to meet a powerful strategy to help students who are struggling with content area reading. Have you heard of SQ3R? With such a complicated name, it looks like it belongs in science fiction, but it can actually help students decode ordinary math, science, social studies, and language arts text. In this lesson, you will discover how to survey, question, read, recite, and review.

Writing Strategies

Do any of your students suffer from Blank Page Syndrome when it's time to write? In this lesson, you will learn how to counter this difficult problem with some creative and fun ways to take the monotony out of putting ideas on paper. Get ready for Doodles to Details, brainstorming, quick writes, and more.

Differentiating Strategies

Perhaps you have already found a strategy you love, but you want to tweak it a little bit to better meet your students' needs. Well, that's what differentiation is all about—adding some extra spice to the classroom. This lesson covers how to tailor powerful response to intervention strategies to different students' learning styles, multiplying the choices you can offer your students.

Enhancing Teamwork

Are you eager to turn your school into a professional learning community? Great. This lesson delves into effective collaborate by exploring how you can use teamwork to build a more cohesive classroom and create more meaningful learning experiences. If you've been wondering just what goes into a strong team and how to get one started at your school, don't worry — you will soon have all the answers.

Cementing RTI Interventions

While you can perform literacy miracles at school if given enough time, ultimately, you need to involve parents if you want your efforts to last. In this final lesson, you will explore some smart strategies for getting parents onboard including the best ways to communicate, share, and answer any questions that come up in the process.

In this teacher-training course, you'll learn from an experienced educator how to motivate and assist developing writers.

In this teacher-training course, you will learn from an experienced educator how to motivate and assist developing writers. You will get an overview of the writing basics, focusing on the importance of the task, audience, and purpose. You will also discover how to organize your materials to create an inviting writing environment.

This course will discuss each step of teaching writing and the strategies you can use with your students. You will also learn how to strengthen your students' writing using technology. Along the way, you'll develop engaging lessons for literary response, narrative writing, expository writing, and persuasive writing. You will discover the secrets of effective writing assessment as you learn about evaluation tools like portfolios and rubrics. The approaches you learn in this course will enable you to put everything you know about teaching writing into an applicable, workable format.

Requirements:

Hardware Requirements:

• This course can be taken on either a PC, Mac, or Chromebook.

Software Requirements:

• PC: Windows 8 or later.
• Mac: macOS 10.6 or later.
• Browser: The latest version of Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox are preferred. Microsoft Edge and Safari are also compatible.
• Adobe Acrobat Reader.
• Software must be installed and fully operational before the course begins.

Other:

• Email capabilities and access to a personal email account.

Instructional Material Requirements:

The instructional materials required for this course are included in enrollment and will be available online.

1. Getting Started: Writing Basics
2. The Writing Process: Part 1
3. The Writing Process: Part 2
4. Ways to Strengthen Writing
5. Enhancing Writing Instruction With Trade Books
6. Narrative Writing
7. Expository Writing
8. Persuasive Writing
9. Writing Across the Curriculum
10. A Trait-Based Approach to Writing
11. Writer's Workshop
12. Writing Assessments

Learn how to nurture student writers in the early elementary classroom.

From the time that a young child picks up a crayon and makes marks on a paper to when an older child puts the finishing sentence on an autobiography or a poem, a young author is developing the skills that will be used for a lifetime. In this course, you will examine the developmental stages of writing, from scribbling to the standard spelling stage, so that you can foster your students' skills and gently nudge them to grow as authors. This course is full of practical ideas that you can use to motivate students in your classroom.

You will look at tools such as the writer's workshop, the six traits of writing, and genre studies for ways to teach students about writing. You will see how each of these tools can be used by teachers to encourage early elementary writers. As your students become better writers, they will become better readers, and you will see how well reading and writing instruction work together to support each other.

The course also covers ways to support the writers who struggle, whether due to a lack of motivation, fine motor skills, or ideas. You will explore techniques for getting parents involved so that they can help with writing at home. By the end of the course, you will have a new enthusiasm for teaching that will ignite your students' love of writing.

Requirements:

Hardware Requirements:

• This course can be taken on either a PC, Mac, or Chromebook.

Software Requirements:

• PC: Windows 8 or later.
• Mac: macOS 10.6 or later.
• Browser: The latest version of Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox are preferred. Microsoft Edge and Safari are also compatible.
• Adobe Acrobat Reader.
• Software must be installed and fully operational before the course begins.

Other:

• Email capabilities and access to a personal email account.

Growing Young Writers

What makes teaching writing so important for our K-3 students? Your first lesson introduces the relevance of writing instruction in early elementary school. You will learn some practical ways to grow writers in our classrooms and talk about providing role models and celebration and meeting students at their developmental and skill levels.

Growing Talkers

This lesson delves into the connections between oral language and writing. You will learn how varying literacy experiences at home affects young children's work when they first enter elementary school. You will also examine strategies for helping students move from oral language to writing.

Growing Scribblers

This lesson explores the developmental stages of writing, starting with the scribbling stage and moving on to the letter-like symbols stage. Then you will visit a kindergarten classroom and a resource room to get some great tips for working with these young writers.

Growing Explorers

This lesson focuses on the strings of letter stage and the beginning sounds stage. And as you did in the last lesson, you will visit a kindergarten class and resource room to see how our teachers work with students in these two stages.

Growing Risk-takers

When it comes to writing, our young risk-takers are ready to make bold choices when they put their pens to the paper. This lesson introduces two developmental stages: consonants represent words and initial, middle, and final sounds. You will also learn strategies help your students achieve success.

Growing Butterflies

This lesson explores the final two stages of developmental writing: transitional and standard spelling. The standard spelling stage is our goal for all students, although they'll always be works in progress as they move toward this goal.

Writer's Workshop

There are many ways to hold successful writer's workshops. And this will be the focus in this lesson: examining the writer's workshop as a tool to meet your students' diverse needs. You will also learn the three components of a successful writer's workshop: the mini-lesson, writing time, and sharing time.

The Six Traits of Writing

What does great writing look like? There's no easy answer to this question, of course. And that's just what this lesson focuses on — defining and teaching great writing traits. You will learn the six traits of writing: ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions.

Conferencing With Students

This lesson focuses on writing conferences. You will be introduced to the different conferences types and how to effectively conduct your own conferences with students at varying developmental levels. You will also learn about rubrics and how to use them to assess student writing.

Navigating Roadblocks

How do you help students who struggle with some of the physical aspects of writing? In this lesson, you will learn how to navigate roadblocks such as trouble with fine motor skills, posture, and stamina. You will also explore specific tactics for reversing letter reversals.

Getting Into Genres

This lesson is all about genres: narrative, expository, procedural, persuasive, and transactional. You will learn how genre study motivates students and increases writing and reading comprehension skills. You will also examine the components of each genre and incorporate them into their classroom instruction.

Teamwork Gets It "Write": Building the Home-School Connection

The final lesson focuses on working with parents to support their young writers at home. You will learn how to have productive conferences with parents about their children's writing. You will also examine answers to some common (and often tough.) parent questions.