Helping Parents Grow Lifelong Readers with resources for 0 to 13+ years of age.

The Building Literacy with Technology in Elementary guide provides articles, samples, and lessons to find new ideas and approaches to engage learners in building skills in reading, writing, listening, and speaking.

In the Building Literacy with Technology in Elementary guide you will explore:
- Ways to get students making in language arts,
- Take a creative approach to student work with informational text,
- How to motivate students by creating their own comics, cartoons, and graphic novels.

The guide includes lesson plans where students:
- Design a new cover for a book they are reading to demonstrate comprehension and explore character, plot, setting, symbolism, and conflict.
- Create a digital scrapbook that showcases the viewpoint of the main character of a novel.
- Illustrate and translate the meaning of an idiom to help others learn these examples of figurative language.
- Write and produce an animated tall tale about a famous person.
- Explore character, plot, and theme and learn to write persuasively as they develop a movie-style trailer for a book they have read.
- Learn and practice persuasive writing and presentation skills.
- Personify an object and write a story as part of an online book or animated adventure.
- Analyze verse and explore meaning by creating a visual poem.

These articles, lessons, and strategies engage students through creative technology to maximize student literacy skills.

The Building Literacy with Technology in Primary guide provides articles, samples, and lessons to find new ideas and approaches to engage your students in building skills in reading, writing, listening, and speaking.

In the Building Literacy with Technology in Primary guide you will explore:
- Engaging new readers and writers with creative technologies
- Using digital storytelling in the primary classroom
- Inspiring every student to be an author

The guide includes lesson plans where students:
- Explore initial sounds through the creation of a classroom ABC book.
- Learn to write using alliteration and create illustrations that support and reflect their writing.
- Practice writing and illustrating as they create a page in your class’s adaptation of their favorite pattern story.
- Write a letter to their parents, or classroom teacher, to persuade them to get a new pet, supporting their opinion with reasons and examples.
- Research an animal and create a riddle to showcase their knowledge and engage other students in the natural world.
- Create a book review on a card or 3D cube to help others choose books they will enjoy.
- Learn about the haiku poetry form and write and illustrate their own haiku poems.
- Write how-to stories about getting ready for school and publish them to share with their families and to use at home.

These articles, lessons, and strategies engage students through creative technology to maximize student literacy skills.

A combination of focused activities and creative, open-ended technology projects can help you take a new approach to building literacy with your secondary students. Use these articles, samples, and lessons to find new ideas and approaches that will work for your learners.

The Building Literacy in Secondary guide includes:
- Articles
- Reading, Literacy, and Digital Creativity
- SPLAT...POW...WOW! Motivating Readers and Writers
- More Than Just a Writing Prompt
- Supporting 6+1 Trait Writing

Lesson Plans
- Create a Video Poem
- Design a Book Cover
- Character Scrapbook
- Not Your Average Portfolio
- MyBook (Fakebook) Page
- Digital Book Trailers

These articles, lessons, and strategies engage students through creative technology to maximize student literacy skills.

Child-Led, Hands-On, Active Learning for Kids including:
Math
Reading
Writing
Sports and Recreation
Colors
Multilingual Teaching Tips (lots of Chinese resources)

This Module outlines Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR), a strategy for helping students to improve their reading comprehension skills. In CSR, students work together in small groups to apply comprehension strategies as they read text from a content area, such as social studies or science (est. completion time: 1 hour).

The Can Do Kids website is full of ready-made resources to support teachers and learners in their study of orthography.

You have to sign up for an account, then can download free resources, including beautiful posters, that are connected to picture books supporting a variety of orthographic lessons. Please note, some items have a cost, but there are still many free resources on this site.

This lesson provides teachers with support for using text-dependent questions to help students derive big ideas and key understandings while developing vocabulary using the modern fairytale, Cendrillon. In this Caribbean Cinderella story, Cendrillon is treated as a servant by her step-mother and half-sister. Nannin, the gogmother, uses a magic wand to ready Cendrillon for a ball, where Cendrillon meets a rich man's son, Paul, who falls in love with her and finds her when she is lost to him.

Young Jose Mendez is a terrific centerfielder but a weak hitter. Jose wants his father to be proud of him. When his father calls him a "Born Outfielder," Jose realizes that his father is proud of his abilities on and off the field.

This lesson provides teachers with support for using text-dependent questions to help students derive big ideas and key understandings while developing vocabulary using the children's novel, Charlotte's Web. A story of friendship and loyalty between Wilbur, a spring pic and a grey spider named Charlotte. Wilbur learns that he is being fattened for slaughter in the fall. Wilbur is at first disgusted by the fact that charlotte eats flies, but comes to both appreciate and love her.

This Module explores in detail the assessment procedures integral to RTI. It also outlines how to use progress monitoring data to determine if a student is meeting the established performance criteria or if more intensive intervention is needed (est. completion time: 1 hour). Note: This Module is part of a series dealing with methods of classroom assessment and focuses specifically on reading assessments.

"Cocoa Ice" is set in the early 1800s and describes the exchange that occurs when a trading ship from Maine travels to the Caribbean village of Santo Domingo. The story is told in two parts, each part narrated by a girl who lives in one of these locations.

"CommonLit delivers high-quality, free instructional materials to support literacy development for students in grades 3-12. Our resources are:
Flexible;
Research-Based;
Aligned to the Common Core State Standards;
Created by teachers, for teachers.
They believe in the transformative power of a great text, and a great question. That’s why we are committed to keeping CommonLit completely free, forever." (CommonLit site)

"CommonLit delivers high-quality, free instructional materials to support literacy development for students in grades 3-12. Our resources are:
Flexible;
Research-Based;
Created by teachers, for teachers.
They believe in the transformative power of a great text, and a great question. That’s why we are committed to keeping CommonLit completely free, forever." (CommonLit site)

Teachers can search for content by grade, theme, content type, genres, literary devices, and more. Alternative options are offered for students that may require adaptations for reading an easier level.

Parent guides are also provided.

Benchmark and ongoing assessments are available.

360 Curriculum provides full integrated units E.g., Unit 1 Characters Who Change and Grow which includes a baseline assessment, vocabulary activities, reading lessons, writing lessons, quiz, grammar activities, media exploration, discussion, and a culminating task.

Please watch the following video tutorial from Rob Fleisher from CommonLit to guide you through using the post-assessments avaiable in CommonLit. 

Sun West:
To access the Professional Development Portal, it is suggested that you log into CommonLit via the Clever portal.

Once you are logged into CommonLit, you will see a link the Professional Development Portal in the top right corner of your screen.

If you would like to access CommonLit without using clever request a a link to reset your password to get the credientials you need to log in.

(Copy and paste this link into your browser:
https://app.salesforceiq.com/r?target=62acedc67260dc45de29089f&t=AFwhZf0hDGdDp4kDCoHpzT7yyc10ty62GxL8NwsnB36QfxvhDyAhDeKV0625nlY6biBXvmYpdKW5HOfQDIMNv-n_ItuD6QR1CLMn2cEoa3FBxdLQpC-7lEegNAvH0-R4zEkj_qWqoOUn&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commonlit.org%2Fen%2Fpassword_reset_requests%2Fnew

In this work of fiction, Rooster and his eager friends set out to make strawberry shortcake, a recipe from Little Red Hen's cookbook. Rooster is glad to have help, but none of his friends know how to cook, so Rooster forges ahead to teach the helpers the basics of cooking and baking, with very funny results

Free Online Math Games, Cool Puzzles, and More. Also check out out language, memory, jigsaw, geography and science games on the site.

From the document:
"The Countdown Passages are strictly controlled stories that align with the phonics skills and Heart Words taught in Countdown. Aside from the
Heart Words in the passages, all of the words included are decodable according to the Countdown Scope & Sequence; however, due to the use
of some Heart Words that have not been explicitly taught in Countdown according to the guidelines described below, we consider the passages
to be “strictly controlled” rather than completely “decodable."

There are 12 fiction passages: one for each unit in Countdown, beginning with Unit 17. The passages provide students with longer, connected-text
opportunities to apply the skills they are learning in Countdown. In the Countdown workbook, students practice reading words, phrases, and
sentences. With the Countdown Passages, students extend their practice to longer sections of text. As students develop mastery and automaticity
with the skills taught in Countdown, the Countdown Passages can be used to reinforce these skills, to provide opportunities for practice, and,
ideally, to build fluency. Students will also gain confidence as readers. Reading text controlled for the specific skills students have already
learned allows them to read with success, leading to confidence and the willingness to tackle more difficult text in the future."

"Cows in the Parlor: A Visit to a Dairy Farm" is an expository article about the daily running of a dairy farm. Students learn about a day in the life of a cow, Maggie, including what she eats, how shes milked, and other interesting facts.