Early Literacy Initiative

The 2001 Summer Reading Program sought to meet the following goals: (1) provide children in grades pre-K–3 with the opportunity to improve and retain reading skills in order to achieve greater success in school; and (2) encourage parents to participate and play an active role in reading with their children. The data from all stakeholders in the program - libraries, students, parents, and teachers - demonstrate that the Program made great strides towards meeting its

Early reading success is the foundation of a student’s knowledge and self-esteem. The foundation also provides future opportunities for growth. Students must learn to read proficiently so that they are able to learn more in future grades, post-secondary schools, and the workforce. Beverly Tyner’s Small-Group Reading Instruction: A Differentiated Teaching Model for Beginning and Struggling Readers states “In the United States, which offers few career opportunities for the illiterate, teaching children to read proficiently is the most important single task in education.” (Tyner, 2009). Beverly Tyner created the Small-Group Differentiated Reading Model which incorporates research-based strategies for teaching beginning reading skills and skills

RTI provides the framework for reading instruction at Newsome Park elementary School. Due to limited resources and a burgeoning population of at-risk students RTI is not implemented in mathematics or content areas. A school wide positive behavior intervention system is in place. Every student in second grade is screened using the Phonological Literacy Screening (PALS). This data is used to identify instructional reading levels, and spelling/phonics knowledge. PALS assesses accuracy, fluency and comprehension. However, the comprehension assessments are not considered rigorous enough for an accurate assessment of this skill. Additionally, students are screened for sight word recognition using the Fry word lists. The results of these screenings guides development of small groups, identifies students for the most intense levels of intervention, and serves as a basis for goal setting. The full PALS is administered in the fall and spring (Newport News Public Schools, 2015). An additional PALS assessment is given in mid-year as a diagnostic. PALS quick checks, Fry word lists, informal running records and DRA’s are administered throughout the year to monitor progress and set new goals (Newport News Public Schools, 2015). This is all in accordance with Virginia’s Response to Intervention Initiative. This initiative establishes a multi-Tiered system of interventions. The initiative states that typically 5- 10% of students would receive Tier 3 instruction, 10- 15% would receive Tier

Regarding the literacy program at my high school, we have very few strengths. We do not perform with an outstanding rating in any of the characteristics on the Literacy Program Analysis Survey. The characteristics we rated adequately in include direct instruction, teacher modeling of processes, differentiation, and opportunities to write. We are most successful with direct instruction; our language arts department directly ties direct instruction to modeling. As one of the two language arts instructors, I can say with certainty that our department’s approach to writing instruction relies on the teacher modeling thinking processes. My senior class, for example, just finished their first critical analysis paragraphs as an entire class. We used our SmartBoard to compose compelling topic sentences, to identify the best possible pieces of support, and to develop our skills in elaboration. Students wrote their paragraphs down as we worked collaboratively, and they kept these to use as models for their own responses to a new article. As part of our daily instructional processes, all teachers are required to begin their classes with brief questions about the day’s objective to which students reply in written form. In this way, students are given opportunities every day to learn how to organize and elaborate on their own ideas

With its tremendous benefits, the Balanced Literacy Approach that has been adopted by the Houston Independent School District and many others may have possibly overlooked a key component to the implementation and success of the program: the need for explicit (direct) reading instruction in decoding, vocabulary, and comprehension for reading growth. This is especially true of at-risk students who may be one or more grade levels behind in reading. To better understand the impact of direct instruction its effectiveness in improving the reading achievement of at-risk students, an action research was conducted at one of HISD’s elementary campuses.

Teaching literacy is certainly not an easy task; hence, educators must have significant background knowledge and experience in the literacy area in order to provide the best learning experience to students. Educators must constantly promote literacy in their classrooms, especially when the students are young readers. For that reason, it is extremely important that educators make a great effort to get to know their students’ and their reading abilities, their strengths and weakness in the reading area and most importantly, to have an extended knowledge of how to teach literacy. Reading is the foundation of learning; every concept and subject taught requires some form of reading, therefore, building a strong reading foundation will enable individuals to become successful not only academically, but also socially.

The Literacy Collaborative program strives to utilize purposeful, explicit, and guided instruction designed to ensure learner independence. The program provides opportunities for students to engage in authentic, collaborative, and holistic language acquisition through the use of high quality rigorous cross circular instruction. The program is structured within a framework that allows educators to create a dynamic learning environment that allows for flexible grouping, collaboration, and actively involving students in the learning process. Moreover, “teachers engage students in a selection of specified activities, including interactive read-aloud, shared-reading experiences, targeted vocabulary and phonics lessons, guided reading and writing

The Alabama Reading Initiative is a federal statewide program in Alabama. This program involves a statewide movement that aims at ultimately achieving grade-level reading for all Alabama’s public school students. This program is completely voluntary, and schools are selected from a pool of applicants who must agree to seven commitments to enter the program. These commitments include the following: must set a one-hundred percent literacy goal, achieve commitment of eighty-five percent of the faculty, attend a ten day training program, principal must be the site leader, each school must adjust their instruction to the program accordingly, each school must model research-based reading instruction for other schools, and be evaluated by an outside

Thank you for joining me today to discuss your daughters recent assessment scores. We do Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills assessment or DIBELS 3 times per year. This information tells us where Suzie is in her reading skills and where we would like her to be. We gave her three very short assessment only consisting of 1-2 minutes each assessment. The three assessments that we gave her where Letter Naming Fluency or LNF for short, Phoneme Segmentation Fluency (PSF) and Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF).

Emergent literacy intervention is most beneficial when it begins early in the preschool period because these difficulties are persistent and often affect children's further language and literacy learning throughout the school years. Promoting literacy development, however, is not confined to young children. Older children, particularly those with speech and language impairments, may be functioning in the emergent literacy stage and require intervention aimed at establishing and strengthening these skills that are essential to learning to read and write.

For the purpose of this assignment I attended several sessions of the Letter, Sounds, and Words. This is a community-based literacy intervention program from students from Kindergarten to grade two, which is designed to provide one-on-one literacy support for students in their school setting. Classroom teachers use specific assessments in order to identify students in need for this program and based on the results program volunteers design an intervention plan for the student. The program supplies a large amount of high quality, evidence-based games and activities designed to target early literacy skills. The program volunteers are highly trained on early literacy development and skills as well as how to implement the resources provided.

ABCYa is a site that has valuable learning activities for Pre-K literacy children. The site is found on http://abcya.com/ . The website further possesses essential learning activities for children up to grade 5.

Constructive early language and literacy development can be an ally to opening a child’s (ren) imagination; this will enhance and empower their potential to become successful readers. As the children grow (birth to 3 yrs. old) their brain goes through an extradinary developmental process and they begin to think, learn, communicate and rationalize things. When this early developmental stage is not being nourished the child will feel the affects of it in the long run. Children that come from low-income families that are enrolled in schools are affected the most. Educators and parents can assist these children by giving them the support (early-on) that they need to sustain a healthy learning environment. As educators it is our duty to create an environment that will help in this process.

Literacy consists of a range of ways to understand and decode symbols for communication in a community (Barratt-Pugh & Rohl, 2000, p. 25). Emergent literacy is a term used to describe how young children interact with books, reading and writing (What is Emergent Literacy, 2006, p.1). Emerging literacy is an ongoing process and to ensure this process is successful children need to be stimulated through active engagement with books and writing opportunities.

Session one is our introduction to the program and our goal is to stress the importance of early literacy for children to new parents. Our first session would focus on the following objectives: 1- Parents will learn the dynamics of literacy; 2-Parents will learn the importance of literacy in early childhood; 3-Parents will watch an informative video on early childhood reading strategies. We will meet these objectives by actively engaging participant in a group discussion and activity this session. Additional resources for this session will include age appropriate books, a YouTube video, What More Can We Do? The Importance of Early Literacy Exposure by Lisa Danielle, and applications for library cards from the local library. Therefore we will open our session with the regular opening circle asking participant to answer the following question “What is literacy?”. We will then move on to a group