Literacy

Audience: All K-2 teachers

Student learning thrives on structured routines. This presentation brings together proven, reliable, quick routines to use in every K-2 classroom. These daily include:

phonics & spelling routines - 15 minutes daily

phonological awareness routines - 5 minutes daily

fluency/prosody routines - 5 to 15 minutes daily

comprehension routines - 5 - 10 minutes daily

These routines are ones that can be done efficiently in addition to those found in classroom reading programs. If done regularly, all students will make more progress in foundational reading skills and develop more confidence as readers and writers.

Audience: All elementary reading teachers, and secondary teachers with disfluent students

Virtually every elementary teacher works with students on fluency, but there is a crucial part of fluency that is not being taught - prosody, or the rhythmical, expressive aspect of reading. Prosody aids in reading comprehension; in fact, it is doubtful that any student can comprehend text without good prosody. Carol’s program for teaching prosody to students of all ages is simple, clear, and needs no materials beyond those found already in the classroom.

Audience: Any K-5 educator working with students who struggle with very poor reading comprehension.

Do you have students who often answer comprehension questions with answers that seem completely off topic, or who answer a different question than the one being asked? If so, those students could most likely benefit from explicit interventions dealing with question words. This training walks teachers through a three-part process. It results in students who understand for the first time the relationship between questions and their answers.

Audience: Teachers of grades 2-5 and teachers of secondary students with decoding challenges .

Decoding multisyllabic words separates skillful readers from struggling readers in many 2nd grade classes, and often results in lifelong decoding difficulties. There is a quick and very streamlined process for decoding new long words available that is not found in the most widely used reading curriculums. Every student can learn to use this decoding process; all students will find it entertaining and fun..

Audience: all teachers K-12 .

Nearly every teacher in every classroom teaches vocabulary. But how many vocabulary words do your students actually understand well enough to use appropriately? How many do they use a year later? Using information from proven research, Carol demonstrates how to select important academic vocabulary words, teaches strategies and techniques to build understanding and retention of the words and gives teachers time to practice and develop materials for their own classroom use.

Audience: K-5 teachers of low-performing students with comprehension difficulties.

Memory deficits are commonly observed in students who are very weak in reading comprehension. Sometimes, however, what seems to be a neurological deficit in memory is actually complicated by a lack of understanding of the purpose of reading. As counterintuitive as it may seem to good readers, poor readers are often not cognizant of the need to remember what they read. Carol has some straight-forward recommendations for helping students build their “memory muscles”, and thus the ability to remember what was read.

Audience: All K-5 reading teachers, and secondary English teachers.

Multi-session training

Students in university education programs often do not receive explicit training in phonics or training in how to teach phonics. Sadly, educators who have not learned to use used an explicit phonics program with their students may not themselves have the phonics knowledge that is necessary to be an exemplary teacher of language arts. Even high school English teachers will benefit from knowing the “rules” of phonics and spelling used in English, so that they can explain them to their students. Teachers taking this multi-session training often are amazed to find the logic and beauty in the study of the structure of the English language, and will discover knowing the “rules” makes reading and spelling much easier for their students.

Audience: K-5 reading teachers and paraprofessionals.

Sight words are an important part of any early reading program. However elementary teachers are often frustrated when students have difficulty remembering these words. Teachers and paraprofessionals alike can discover in this presentation reliable methods to assist students in learning and retaining sight words (both the reading and writing of them). Using multiple learning paths (aural, visual, and kinesthetic) and unique inner visualization methods, even students who find sight word learning challenging will have more success.

Audience: any educator using a scripted language arts program.

Does your school or district have adopted materials that use scripted lessons? Does your staff need help in delivering the scripted lesson in a way that is engaging for both the students and instructors? Does the program need any enhancements or supplements? Does it call for unison responses on the part of the students? Although scripted programs appear at first glance to be exceptionally easy to deliver, many teachers become frustrated with student participation and the effectiveness of the instruction. This is because scripted direct instruction can be counterintuitively difficult. This training touches on many of the challenges experienced by educators and ways to address them in the classroom.

Audience: All K-5 teachers, and secondary teachers of Tier2-3 students who are still struggling to decode or spell one-syllable words accurately

Decoding, the structural foundation of reading skill, is easily and quickly learned by some students in the early years of school. However, many students need extra instruction and much extra practice in order to gain automaticity in the sound/symbol relationship and to be able to flawlessly decode any new word. The use of nonsense words allows teachers to build a very large bank of available words for focused phonics/decoding practice, whether in reading or in spelling. In this session you will see how nonsense words used intentionally and in a focused way can make for more interesting and varied practice, one in which students can enjoy word play AND learn at the same time.

Audience: All K-5 teachers, and secondary teachers of Tier 2-3 students who are still struggling to decode or spell one-syllable or multisyllabic words

Word Tracking as a strategy is one of the most powerful activities in a reading/language arts teacher’s toolkit. In this session teachers learn how to build tracking lists, what traps to avoid, and how to utilize the tracking lists in the classroom.