Curriculum Based Measurement (or sometimes Assessment)

I was lucky enough to attend a workshop on Curriculum Based Management yesterday with the brilliant Jim Wright. Jim is the guru who created Intervention Central. Intervention Central is an awesome website which contains tons of materials, probes, graphing downloads, instructions for training peer tutors, for the teacher of reading, math, or writing to learn and track struggling students' progress to the tiniest degree, thus monitoring the student to be sure that whatever interventions are in place, are being effective.

For fun, let's say I teach reading. (I know, I actually do, but bear with me.) I have a student who is in 6th grade, but can only read fluently at a much lower level. CBM is designed that I would

1. Be able to figure out the student's independent, instructional, and frustrational reading levels
2. Find ideas as to how to intervene and increase that student's fluency
3. Create reading probes so that I can have the student do timed reading once a week using appropriate instructional level materials.
4. Download and insert the information from the reading probe into a graph to check to progress or lack there of.

I like the idea of CBM, because how many times do students slip through the cracks because they receive intervention, but at the end of the school year did not progress? One of the ideas behind CBM is that by tracking this information we can see trends of progress or regression and know if the current invtervention strategy is working or needs to be changed.

Beautiful website! Kudos to you, Jim Wright!

NPR-WAMC (90.3FM)

I was listening to Garrison Keillor's 'Writers Almanac on Tuesday, May 23, 2006, and found this very apropo....
It's the birthday of Margaret Wise Brown, (books by this author), born in Brooklyn, New York (1910). She wanted to become a writer as a young woman, and she once took a creative writing class from Gertrude Stein. But she had a hard time coming up with story ideas, so she went into education. She got a job researching the way that children learn to use language and found that children love language with patterns of sound and rhythm. She also found that young children have a special attachment to words for objects they can see and touch, like shoes and socks and bowls and bathtubs.
She eventually began to write books for children based on her research and in 1938 she became the editor of a publishing house called William R. Scott & Company which specialized in new children's literature. The Great Depression had made children's books into luxury items, and most other publishing houses had phased out children's literature. Margaret Wise Brown helped make children's books profitable, because she invested in high-quality color illustrations, and she printed her books on strong paper with durable bindings, so that children could grab, squeeze and bite their books the way they did with all their toys.
But we know Margaret Wise Brown for one book she wrote, and that was Goodnight Moon (1947), which includes the lines "Goodnight room / Goodnight moon / Goodnight cow jumping over the moon ... Goodnight stars / Goodnight air / Goodnight noises everywhere."
The New York Public Library gave it a terrible review, and it didn't sell as well as some of Brown's other books in its first year. But parents were amazed at the book's almost hypnotic effect on children, its ability to calm them down before bed. Brown thought the book was successful because it helped children let go of the world around them piece by piece, just before turning out the light and falling asleep.
Parents recommended the book to each other, and it slowly became a word-of-mouth best-seller. It sold about 1,500 copies in 1953, 4,000 in 1955, 8,000 in 1960, 20,000 in 1970; and by 1990 the total number of copies sold had reached more than four million.

Ch vs. Sh Sound

I am trying to find games on the internet to play with my adult literacy student. I think in the Spanish language it is hard to distinguish between the Ch and Sh sounds. But this website, www.quia.com seems to have a lot of helpful games. I don't know if you come across the need for these types of exercises in your job, but maybe you would be interested in checking it out...
http://www.quia.com/ws/306682.html

English as a Second Language

I didn't have much time to research, but I did find a neat website for teachers and second language learners: ESOL Links. I seems to have articles about all teaching many aspects of English. It appears to be well organized into areas such as grammar, vocabulary, writing, pronunciation, and listening.

I hope this helps!

And by the way, I know the picture barely has anything to do with the topic, but it was so awesome, I had to use it.

Welcome!

Welcome to Literacy Geeks! This, I suppose, will be a blog for Reading Specialists, Literacy Coaches and those who see the Literacy profession in their near future! Although, anyone with an interest in reading, whether it be as a classroom teacher or parent are welcome to chime in!

Let us know of any topics you'd like us to discuss on this blog! Fluency, comprehension, Dyslexia, you ask, we'll try to post on it.

Introducing Literacy Geeks

Welcome to Literacy Geeks!
www.lvorc.org is the volunteer group I am in, if you want to check it out.