Oh, they look like they are doing what the teacher assigned, or they leave the impression that they have gone blissfully to bed, or they sit quietly in the back seat, apparently playing a not particularly exciting video game. They go by many names. Amid the din and bustle of the school bus, the driver […]
Books have a complex and magical “Shelf” life. They sit there on a shelf, compact, dormant, unblinking(!) Waiting, even. But the instant they are pulled down and opened, they wonderfully spring to life in our hands. For first-time readers of a book, what emerges is all new and exciting, full of surprises and unexpected connections to things […]
Enough with reading, let’s do some math here. Surely you’ve noticed the trend across blogs and websites to have numbers in their title these days. So, let’s run some of those numbers… My current favorite reading campaigns (You didn’t really think I’d write about anything but reading-focused math did you?) are 1000 Books Before Kindergarten […]
Parents and older siblings are the young child’s first teachers… but they are not school teachers. What they do for a child is much more important than what happens in school. There is a single critical role for family and friends to play in the joyful development of children, especially between birth and the beginning […]
That’s depressing, isn’t it? …but actually it isn’t. No really, it’s not. This notion was spawned when I read an article about a teacher who gives students a “second chance” . It was a very uplifting argument by an excellent middle school teacher that understood children and childhood and academic standards for particular grades and […]
There are two kinds of assessments that are pertinent to teachers of reading and their professional decision making about children and learning. We hear about “Summative” assessments through news outlets. These yearly tests of achievement also end up on the transcripts of our students / children. They are used to gather evidence of a child’s progress […]
Gotcha. Of course, just about everybody cares, for a range of reasons…but not everybody. A HUGE number of the KIDS don’t care. …and that’s a massive problem for us and an even bigger one for them. Proficient reading is a marvelous accomplishment of which children should not just be proud, but also be glad. It […]
Let’s call her Emma. Emma is a school counselor that blurted in a conversation with two literacy teacher / professors (I was one of them) that she hated to read. We were standing in the middle of a lovely elementary school library of all places! Dang, girl! When she said that, in full voice, my […]
Here at Unite for Literacy we are constantly being asked the following question, ‘Hey, you folks have created a library of free books for people all over the world who are learning to read. So, you’re a non-profit, right?” Well, actually, no. In fact, we are what is called a “social enterprise.” A social enterprise is an organization that […]
November is Picture Book Month! These familiar kinds of declarations are about often subtle, but uniquely important things in a culture, like religious holidays, family celebrations and community traditions. Each one declares that for this community, it’s unique… there’s nothing quite like it. It should be no surprise that here at Unite for Literacy we […]
