Here find materials from our teacher institutes in January in Valdosta and Cartersville.

Here are the presentations from the November 2016 Georgia Striving Readers Institute in Athens, Georgia.

Here find the presentations from the Summer, 2016 Georgia Striving Readers Teachers Institutes.  Presenters are happy for you to share with colleagues, but please remember to credit their work.

Materials from the January 2016 conferences in Valdosta and Brasstown are archived here.

Many of you joined us in June, 2015 at Unicoi and at Lake Blackshear.  Here are the presenter materials and contact information from those sessions.

Here find documents from the Brasstown kick-off meeting for Cohort 4 of Georgia Striving Readers.

Here the powerpoint presentations that Sharon Walpole and Mike McKenna used for the Georgia ELA Summer Literacy Academies.  Feel free to use in your school.

These are the handouts from the January 2015 conference sponsored by Georgia Striving Reader.

Here are the powerpoints presented by Sharon Walpole and Mike McKenna at the GRA meeting in Macon.   Feel free to download and share.

Here find all the materials you need for the Elementary and Middle School/High School Summer Leadership Institutes for Georgia Striving Readers grantees.  Remember that we are using a Bring-Your-Own-Device format, so either save or print the materials for the 6 presentations you will be attending.  We look forward to working with you!

This is a lighthearted test of your school’s technology capacity.  Use this brief module to get the hang of the format and to ensure that you have a computer connection where you can view content, listed to audio, and view video. The trick is to let the content load for each page, and then click or double click on the videos to start them. When you see a black line player, that is an audio file.  You will also get to meet our design team.

Please find here the handouts from our presentations in Athens, GA, in November 2015.

If you are ready to build a literacy program, this module will present get you on your way.  You will be able to think about how children’s needs change over time and how teachers can change the way they use time.  We will present a model for scheduling time in the ELA block that you can use to make a great start to your school year.

This module is designed to help administrators and teacher leaders understand the role of foundational skills (print concepts, phonological awareness, phonics and word recognition, and fluency) in the overall design of the Common Core State Standards.  We provide a rationale for reexamining your existing instructional materials for their match to the accelerated grade-level expectations of the CCSS and several choices to consider if they are not.

Interactive read alouds are more important than ever — especially for elementary-aged students.  In this module you will see how read alouds allow you to provide children access to challenging text and interesting content and support their understanding.

This module is for those of you who want to explore strategies for grade-level shared reading consistent with the Common Core State Standards’ requirements for increased text complexity.  You can use the instructional model in this module with an existing core program or with trade books that you choose yourself.

This module, designed for principals and for those team members who work closely with them, provides information about linking professional learning to program design and to observation.

Here are lesson plans for shared reading and interactive read alouds for the entire year.

After another year of field work, we are working on lesson plan revisions, with a July 31, 2017, goal.  In the meantime, if you are considering using our approach, here are the books that we’ve selected.

In this module, we illustrate part of the ELA block in kindergarten.  You will see an excellent teacher engages children in the shared reading segment of then kindergarten day.

Take a look at what shared reading can look like in a kindergarten classroom.

Watch how natural an interactive read aloud is in a kindergarten classroom.

This module will give you a peek at the instructional procedures we recommend in shared reading for first grade, including word study.

This module shows instructional procedures for shared reading in second grade.  You will see that both the teacher and the students are comfortable and confident.

This module contains a demonstration lesson for grade three shared reading.  The students are in the first day of Because of Winn Dixie.

Sharon Walpole is demonstrating a fourth-grade shared reading lesson:  Day 5 of Blood on the River, by Elisa Carbone.  You’ll get a sense that shared reading is a simple way to engage students in challenging text every day, building fluency and comprehension and ending with text-based writing.

In this module you will see shared reading in a fifth grade classroom.  Notice the instructional pace and the evidence of student engagement.  We are grateful for the chance to show you our lesson plans in action.

This is day 1 of Oceans, by Seymour Simon.  Sharon Walpole is demonstrating in a fifth grade.

Watch an interactive read aloud in an upper elementary classroom.  You will see that nonfiction provides many opportunities for building knowledge.  In our lesson plans, the very same procedures are used in all grade levels.  What changes is the complexity of the text.

Our procedures for fiction interactive read alouds are easy to see in this video of an upper elementary classroom.  Watch to see how many instructional opportunities these read alouds afford.

Here are a series of videos of the four sentence composing activities in action.  Sentence composing is the grammar instruction that follows each day of interactive read aloud.

Response to Intervention is a crucial component of the reading program, yet misconceptions persist about how to implement an effective RTI system. This module examines the ideas underlying RTI and provides practical suggestions for making it work.

In this module, you will learn that a simple set of assessments will go a long way, especially if you consider them carefully by type.  You will learn that not all students need all assessments.  You will see that you can use your assessment time wisely to target your instructional time.

This module is designed for instructional leaders in schools or districts new to DIBELS.  In it we provide a description of the tasks and our own analyses.  Use this module to check whether your teachers are using this assessment well.

This module provides an overview of the differentiation modules that can help you to build children’s basic skills quickly so that they can do the reading that complex texts require.  You will learn that there are different ways to differentiate. The model developed here is very low cost.

Have you ever wondered how children actually learn so many words so quickly?  This module describes the research on sight word development and provides a very simple procedure that you can use to hone you large-group instruction and target your small-group instruction.

When students achieve basic skills in word recognition, some will need additional help with automaticity and prosody.  They can also begin to answer good questions about their reading.  This module targets those skills in natural text.  We will introduce basic lesson plan formats and show examples of instructional procedures.

This module is the first of four introducing a model for small-group instruction based on assessment data.  This module targets the most basic skills necessary for reading and writing:  basic alphabet knowledge, letter-sound knowledge, and phonemic awareness.  We will introduce basic lesson plan formats and show examples of instructional procedures.

We believe that all students deserve differentiation — not just students with skills deficits.  In this differentiation module, we will present a framework for serving your students with strong basic skills so that they can continue to grow in their vocabulary and comprehension.

This module builds the model introduced in Differentiation for Phonemic Awareness and Word Recognition.  The target now is decoding skills and automatic word recognition.  This is most appropriate for first and second-grade teachers and for those who provide interventions for children who struggle to recognize words.

What happens when students move from single-syllable words to long ones?  For many, the move is natural and simple.  For some, though, we need to be able to provide strategies for breaking long words into bite-sized pieces.  This module will help you to do just that.

Here is a series of video clips to illustrate the parts of a differentiation lesson (Walpole & McKenna, 2009) for a basic alphabet knowledge group.

This series of videos shows two differentiation lessons for students who know their letter names and sounds but need to learn how to blend sounds to read words.

Here is a brief look at our decoding instruction for kindergarten.  You’ll get a good sense of how quick and easy it is.

This module provides video examples of a differentiation lesson (Walpole & McKenna. 2009) for students who know letter sounds and can decode synthetically but need to learn patterns.

This module contains video support for teachers differentiating instruction for children who need to master consonant blends and digraphs.

This module provides video examples of a differentiation lesson targeting R-controlled vowels.

This module shows what happens after shared reading in our first-grade classroom.  We show one of three small groups.  To find out more about our approach to differentiation, explore the modules for Building Foundational Skills.

This module provides video clips for a Vowel Teams lesson.  Students are learning to decode by analogy.

This video shows a fluency and comprehension lesson with a pair of third-grade students.  Teachers were asking us to model procedures.  You will see how easy this type of lesson can be.

This module shows instructional procedures that we use for students who need to build their multisyllabic decoding skills, their oral reading fluency, and their comprehension.  We are pleased to show you video of high-quality regular classroom instruction.

Watch Steve Amendum demonstrating a small-group lesson focusing on comprehension for a group of fluent students.

What is this site?  How might you use the resources stored here?  This brief module may provide you some ideas.

This module is intended as a starter kit for making book studies an effective means of professional learning. In it we offer guidance for choosing books, as well as for scheduling and conducting studies. We also provide recommendations for specific titles related to a range of important topics. 

If you are engaging in an instructional improvement project, you may consider improved student achievement your goal.  But you can’t go right from ideas to achievement.  This module will give you some strategies for designing observations so that you can see whether your professional development ideas are being implemented in classrooms.

This module, designed for principals and for those team members who work closely with them, provides information about linking professional learning to program design and to observation.

As we learn more about students’ need for enhanced vocabulary, we have become more sensitive to the types of vocabulary they need.  We have also learned how to target specific types of vocabulary during regular instructional routines.  This module will help you understand what academic vocabulary.  We will contrast it, in particular, with technical or domain-specific vocabulary.  Once you see the difference, it will be easier for you to build both types.

This module presents several high-utility strategies that can be used to teach central concepts and to teach words related by category.  These skills are essential to building content knowledge in all disciplines, so this module is appropriate for any teacher at any grade level.

This module provides background information about how vocabulary develops.  It addresses issues in selecting words for instruction and presents strategies for teaching words.  Since vocabulary instruction is important across the grade levels and content areas, we think that this module is appropriate for any teacher.

Providing effective writing instruction requires a knowledge of how writing develops. In this module, David Coker provides the foundations of that understanding so that teachers can plan and deliver the most appropriate instruction.

In this module, we build on David Coker and Kristen Ritchey’s new book, Teaching Beginning Writers. It is a must-read for grade-level teams considering writing in the early primary grades.

Drawing on ideas from Coker and Ritchey’s 2015 Teaching beginning writers and from Philippakos, MacArthur, and Coker’s 2015 Developing strategic writers through genre instruction: Resources for grades 3-5, we describe a reasonable approach to attending to genre.  You’ll want to buy both of these books.

This is the third of three modules drawing on the work of Coker and Ritchey 2015 Teaching beginning writers and Philippakos, MacArthur, and Coker 2015 Developing strategic writers through genre instruction: Resources for grades 3-5. This module will walk you through standards-based rubrics for writing and also invite you to read more in these two excellent professional books.

Do you have questions about grammar instruction?  We do.  In this module, we present an approach to grammar instruction connected to reading instruction and consistent with research.  We will show you that sentences provide a rich context for developing writers.

The Common Core State Standards require that we give writing its due, and this module will help you to get started.  We will argue that there are many ways to link reading and writing, and that doing both together is better than doing either one on its own.

Teaching children to form letter correctly and fluently has an influence on their writing quality.  Learn the basics of handwriting instruction here, and access a free curriculum if you don’t have one.

Now more than ever, children’s success in school is related to their access to high-quality print materials of all types.  In this module, we present you with possibilities for designing and organizing your classroom library.

This module is designed to help administrators, teacher leaders, and classroom teachers understand effective language and literacy practices designed to support English language learners (ELLs) in the classroom.   There are growing numbers of ELLs in elementary classrooms, and providing effective instruction based on the Common Core State Standards is vital to schools’ success.   We provide an overview of issues relating to ELLs in schools along with key strategies to build students’ language and literacy skills.

This module examines five common misconceptions about teaching children to read. Each of them persists despite an abundance of evidence that they’re ineffective. Caution! You may find one or two of your own beliefs challenged.

One of the challenges of our new standards is that we must motivate students to read more — and to read more proficiently.  There is more art than science to building motivation to read and a positive attitude about reading.  In this module we share what we know about the art of motivation.

In this module, you will learn how poetry instruction relates to the Common Core, how best to teach poetry, and how to choose the best poems to teach. The module provides a resource guide, a lesson plan template, and links to valuable web sources.

This module explores the many uses of technology in effective literacy instruction. Organized around IRA’s position statement, the content includes professional learning networks, classroom applications, the TPACK framework, and technology requirements of the Common Core.