Hello little teachers!
In today’s post I want to show you a web page I recently found where
there is a wide variety of resources for teachers concerning to reading.
The idea of creating this site came up from a non-profit organization
called The Melissa Institute. This organization is aimed to prevent violence
through education by proposing the application of a research-based knowledge on
it. Literacy experts from The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education,
school-based specialists and classroom teachers are in charge of these researches
and the application of them in a scholar setting.
The idea was born due to different researches about youth violence which
gave some surprising and shocking results. One
of them states that 85% of young people in troubles with the law have reading
difficulties. For this reason, this investigation states that children
unable to read or with severe reading difficulties by the age of 8 years old are
more likely to develop low self-esteem, to leave school and engage in antisocial
and aggressive behaviour.
You have to take into account that this study was made in the USA , however children development cannot be very
different in both sides of the Atlantic
Sea
In an attempt to prevent literacy failure and all it entails, The
Melissa Institute opened this site to provide educators all over the world a resource
to support the development of reading and writing in children.
The Balanced Literacy Diet
As you can notice, in the name of the page appears the word “diet” and
maybe you are wondering about the relationship between Literacy and food. Stop
breaking your brain looking for the relation, there is no such a thing. The
authors of the page have created a thematic framework based on cooking because
they want us to be aware of the importance of Literacy through the “ingredients”
of literacy, the importance of “nourishing” students with the different “recipes”
of lesson plans or the “food groups” of literacy.
Content
Moving on to the content of the page, we can find different tabs in the
upper part of the page. Here you have a glimpse of them:
Food Groups: in this section
it can be found all the aspects involved in literacy. It is divided into the
following 17 blocks. They are shown as they were food pyramids for reading and
writing.
|
Introduction
Stages of literacy development
Motivation for literacy
Oral language and ELL
Knowledge building
Vocabulary
Phonemic awareness
Letter-sound phonics
|
Spelling and word study
Concepts of print
Reading comprehension strategies
Writing processes and
strategies
Text structure and
genres
Writing conceptions
Classroom tips
Assessment
|
In each block, there are quotes of experts talking about the topic of
the block, an overview of it and how we can teach and assess it.
Recipe finder: in this section there
is a great amount of activities, resources and materials or how they call them “recipes”
divided by each primary grade and kindergarten. It can be found a lot of videos
explaining each activity or resource in every block.
Virtual tours: This section is
divided according to the three cycles and here you can make a virtual visit to
the classroom of all the teachers involved in this project. It can be helpful
for a teacher to organize the space in his/her class.
How to videos: This tab redirects
you to the YouTube’s playlist they have where you can find all the reading
strategies we were watching at class, do you remember?
Final reflexion
I hope I had been able to grab your attention to this webpage and make
you feel curios to discover all it has to offer. I STRONGLY RECOMMEND IT!
Nowadays, technological advances are amazing and sometimes difficult to
believe, but they are real. For this reason, we 21st century teachers
have an incredible box with many resources that can help us to develop our task
properly and in the best way we can to accomplish our mission. The only thing
that we have to do to open it starts by writing “www.”
Have you heard about this webpage? What do you think about the
relationship between literacy and youth violence? Have you find useful the
materials that the webpage propose? Do you think teachers should use online materials and proposals?
I would like to know your opinion about it so leave a comment! =)
Hello Cristina,
ResponderEliminarIt's a very interesting post and thanks to you we can discover this wonderful iniciative.
It's a very visual and near daily life, also help teachers to organize in his/her classes and to know that you are doing in the right way involving all aspects of the learning process.
About that literacy helps to avoid violence and antisocial behaviour, it's very debatable. There are a lot of investigations about violence in childhood and youth and some of them conclude that it is a part of the natural process of being a person. Then it is not so negative or strange as it is value in current society. I think literacy hastoo much more and better positive things that violence control, that it's to be inform about world vision and to think by yourself.
Thank you Cristina!