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Worksheets and activities to support articulation in young children.  Incredible articles as well.

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SeeSaw

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Showbie - the Paperless Classroom App for Teachers

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Showbie is a free educational app for teachers and students that makes creating and completing assignments, providing assessments, and storing grades easy.

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Shadow Puppet
http://get-puppet.co

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http://classtechtips.com

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Adobe Spark was featured at #actem16 by Monica Burns of @classtechtips

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Explain Everything-

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Book Creator- Create just right books with your students and inspire student author and illustrators!

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http://www.heinemann.com/products/E07473.aspx

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Meeting students needs and meeting them where they are at.

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http://wonderopolis.org/​

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From Mrs. Weber's Classroom

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Yet early-childhood teachers point to the pressures associated with the Common Core State Standards and the accompanying standardized testing culture as deeply affecting classrooms, often characterized by a heightened focus on teaching young children to read and write as early as possible.

Early Indicators of Literacy

It is not uncommon to hear stories of materials that once embodied the early-childhood classroom -- building blocks, water tables, play manipulatives -- being replaced with worksheets, letter tiles, and homework reading logs. With such pressure, early-childhood teachers are forced to change the ways that they assess and qualify children's abilities and learning processes. A child once described as a risk taker, imaginative, or a leader is now described as a level-B reader or conventional speller. And all too often, this means that before parents hear any other impactful messages from teachers or school, they might hear the words: "Your child can't read."

While the early years of school are critically important to short- and long-term academic success, children enter school inherently curious and intellectually ready, such that being a reader should be just one part of their academic identity. So, before describing a young child as a "non-reader," consider these three suggestions for honoring our longstanding commitment to developmentally and culturally responsive pedagogy, even as the ground under our feet shifts.

1. What do you know about the child's oral language development? Does the child bring an understanding of more than one language to his or her learning?

Increasingly more young children are entering kindergarten with an understanding of more than one language. While both research and human experience demonstrate the value of multilingualism, the benefits are often attributed to adult characteristics like future employment or global travel. The misconception that I most often hear about early childhood is that it's confusing for multilingual children to communicate or learn to read and write. This statement is anything but true! As young children navigate uncharted cognitive pathways, they make sense of their world through the filter of more than one language, and research suggests that requires sophisticated social and critical thinking skills. So think of multilingualism as an opportunity. Inquire about the child's language diversity, and use the opportunity to meet with the parent and make a chart like the one below to deepen your understanding of the family's linguistic diversity:

2. Does the child "pretend" to read and write? How does this relate to his or her literacy development?

Play is the blueprint that young children develop to construct meaning within their world. In addition, play can be a linguistically rich space for children, as their desire to participate in a playful experience supports a learning context to engage in more sophisticated language use. For this reason, play becomes a powerful means for young children to develop and expand on their understandings of reading and writing.

One way that children often do so is through pretending to read and write in their social interactions and play. Rather than dismissing these practices as non-conventional literacy knowledge, teachers should carefully observe a child as he plays. Is he making strings of letter-like formations and saying that it "reads" as a story that can be shared? This is profoundly symbolic, revealing his understanding that a story is something represented in text, narrated, and communicated with others. Does a child "memorize" a book but have difficulty decoding a word in isolation? Praise her for expanding her memory, recognizing that words work together to produce meaning, and use that memorized text as an opportunity to teach her about the concepts of print like directionality, letters, and words.

So watch that child at play, whether on the playground or in class, and be ready to record the many ways that you might connect the play with your reading and writing instruction and goals.

3. Is the child interested in printed text both in and out of school? How can a teacher and parent build on that interest?

For some children, reading and writing instruction in school can be difficult. However, children come to school with many different life experiences and often reveal interests that can support our traditional reading and writing instruction. Rather than limiting our knowledge of early literacy to letters and schoolbooks, a deeper understanding of children's out-of-school experiences can serve as a resource for uncovering their literate lives. For example, does the child enjoy playing video games or cell phone apps? What print accompanies those apps, and how might a teacher use that knowledge to support her reading instruction? Does a child love a particular toy collection with an accompanying leaflet that describes the figure in detail? How can such an expository text be used as leverage into a discussion about nonfiction reading and writing? While the curricular programs used in our schools often govern our instruction, by understanding our students' literate lives, we begin to understand how we can become more fully inclusive.

The Language We Use

With each of the examples discussed above, it's critically important to have a range of different data, acknowledging the variance of demonstrated reading and writing skills and knowledge from child to child. Assigning the harmful label "he cannot read" is an example of why this matters so much. It's also important to recognize that some children have legitimate learning and reading difficulties. However, when these cases arise, it requires even greater attention to these types of considerations, as well as sensitivity to the language that we use with parents. Let's establish a safe and inclusive space to partner with them -- for the good of the child.

How do you encourage young learners to explore and embrace literacy?

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Don't Say "Your Child Can't Read" | Edutopia

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Yet early-childhood teachers point to the pressures associated with the Common Core State Standards and the accompanying standardized testing culture as deeply affecting classrooms, often characterized by a heightened focus on teaching young children to read and write as early as possible.

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Listen to famous actors read children's picture books!  Remember to turn on the subtitles to provide both visual and auditory supports.

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The SAG-AFTRA Foundation's Daytime Emmy-nominated, Storyline Online, features celebrated actors reading children's books to inspire a love of reading in millions of children worldwide.

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Learn about visual tracking and try these exercises to build tracking skills.

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The purpose of this website is to provide parents with fun eye exercises to enhance their children's visual processing skills for better school performance and sustained attention. If you know a child who struggles, the underlying cause may be vision-even if the child has 20/20 eyesight. Visual processing skills like tracking, eye teaming, and visual perception are developmental skills that all children need in addition to seeing clearly. If these skills don't develop normally, children can struggle with demanding visual tasks like reading. Each year as print gets smaller, school performance drops, and as visual fatigue sits in, children become easily frustrated and distracted. All too often, these children appear to have a learning disability or attention problems when the real culprit is poor visual processing skills. Glasses can't help, but eye exercises can! This website will give you good information on vision-based learning problems, and we have even provided you with a great assessment tool to determine if your child is at risk. However, children do not have to have poor vision skills to benefit from these eye exercises. Even children with adequate visual processing can sharpen and improve the learning-related vision skills they already have!

Please Read: The exercises on this website are not vision therapy. Vision therapy is a medical treatment prescribed by developmental optometrists and involves a much wider scope of remediation procedures involving the use of lenses, prisms, filters, and special instruments to train the visual system to work efficiently. Decades of research support the effectiveness of vision therapy to remediate disorders in visual processing. The vision exercises on this website are designed for visual enhance- ment and are not a substitute for professional care. Like any exer- cise program, we encourage you to check with your eye doctor before beginning. These exercises can improve and sharpen visual skills important for reading, learning, and sustained attention. However, if your child has difficulty with these activities, it could indicate there is a more significant problem. Talk to your family eye doctor or contact a developmental optometrist for further evaluation. To locate a doctor in your area, contact the national certifying board for optometrists who specialize in vision therapy at covd.org. It should also be noted that these vision exercises are not meant for children with strabismus and/or amblyopia. If your child has either condition, do not begin even a simple eye exercise program without the advice of your eye doctor. Vision therapy is highly successful in treating both these conditions, but amblyopia and strabismus require strict supervision by a trained professional. Want to learn more about vision-based learning and attention problems?

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Eye Can Learn | Eye Exercises for Visual Health and School Success

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The purpose of this website is to provide parents with fun eye exercises to enhance their children's visual processing skills for better school performance and sustained attention. If you know a child who struggles, the underlying cause may be vision-even if the child has 20/20 eyesight.

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Speech Therapy exercises and screener.

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If you want to know how to nurture young writers, order this book!  It's all about bookmaking!

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Want to learn more about special needs and learning struggles?  This site will give rich information that you can share with families!

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Understood - For Learning and Thinking Differences

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Understood.org is the resource that helps the 70 million people with learning and thinking differences anticipate the challenges, barriers, or opportunities in life and confidently reach their potential.

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Create your own Padlet.  Share ideas and resources with the families of children in your care.  Organize your online resources for different themes you are exploring with your youngsters.  Take pictures of your children reading their favorite book to serve as a book recommendation tool. The uses are limitless!

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A case for Nursery Rhymes!

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Literacy/Vocabulary/Language Development