Useful and Interesting Links
International Dyslexia Association For
basic information about reading disability, this site is an excellent
place to start. Explore the content under the "Information" link
at the top of the home page. There are also a number of
outstanding, reasonably-priced pamphlets and books under the
"Publications" link.
LD Online This site also contains
excellent general information about reading disability in particular,
as well as about all manner of learning difficulties.
Well-Trained Mind Interesting
blog and forums for home-schooling families that complement the
information contained in the book:
The
Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Eduation at Home. Take
a look at the link to Susan Wise Bauer's
The Story of the World Series.
Core
Knowledge Classics This is part of the Core Knowledge website
associated with the cultural literacy proponent, E.D.
Hirsch. One of Hirsch's central points is that reading
comprehension requires a significant amount of background knowledge,
and current teaching practice often emphasizes the development of
comprehension skills at the expense of teaching essential
content. This link takes you to a page offering classic texts
suitable for use by fourth and fifth grade students.
QuickReads The QuickReads program
makes an outstanding companion to ABeDeDarian. The
QuickReads material provides an enormous amount of reading of topics in
social studies and science for students in first through sixth
grades. Each unit focuses on a particular, general topic such as
. . .and each chapter is one-page long. The text has been
designed to foster fluency development by having difficult vocabulary
words repeated multiple times within each essay and unit.
Touchstones Touchstones is a
discussion program developed in the 1980's by professors at St. John's
College in Annapolis, Maryland. The original materials were
designed for high school students, but now they have programs for
students of all ages. The mission of the Touchstones project is
to build critical thinking, communication, and leadership skills
through respectful and engaged discussion-based programs.
Word Generation Here you
will find a relatively new middle school academic language program
developed under the direction of Harvard University professor Catherine
Snow. The program is designed to give students sustained exposure
to the academic language they need for succes in school. Because
the program is in development, the materials are currently available
free of charge to schools will to discuss their experiences with the
researchers.
Academic
Word List Averil Coxhead developed this list as part of her work
for a Master's thesis at Victoria University of Wellington, New
Zealand. The list contains 570 word families represent the words
that occur in a wide range of academic texts from a variety of subject
areas. The corpus of words used to develop the list included
journal articles, book chapters, course workbooks, laboratory manuals,
and course notes. Common and basic words were excluded from the list.
An excellent resource to help teachers focus on the most important
words for academic success.
Barchowsky Fluent Handwriting
Barchowsky Fluent Handwriting is an outstanding handwriting program
that teaches simple, easy to learn letter forms for manuscript with no
change in letter formation when moving to cursive.
Family Reading Partnership
Family Reading Partnership is an outstanding organization located in
Ithaca, New York devoted to promoting reading to pre-school
children. Their numerous programs are a great boon to the
community and they are always looking for new ways to increase their
reach. One of their more recent and powerful programs is called
Read-Along-Songs, and involves providing books, CD's, and live
performances of a set of rhyming songs to hundreds of young children in
the community, giving them not only materials that draw the children to
books, but also a wonderful shared experience. In additon to
providing these services to the community, they also provide
information to other communities about how to set up similar programs.
Andrea Hazard Andrea is the author
and illustrator of the set of Storybooks for ABeCeDarian Level A.
She has a wonderful blog with information about children's craft
projects.
Good Books
Beck, Isabel, Margaret McKeown, and Linda Kucan.
Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary
Instruction (2002). New York / London: The Guilford Press.
Blevins, Wiley.
Teaching
Phonics & Word Study in the Intermediate Grades
(2001). New York, NY: Scholastic.
Dehaene, Stanislas.
Reading in the Brain (2009). New York, NY: Viking
Penguin.
Dale, Edgar and Joseph O'Rourke.
Techniques
of Teaching Vocabulary (1971). Palo Alto, CA: Field
Educational Publications, Incorporated.
Foorman, Barbara, Ed.
Preventing
and Remediating Reading Difficulties (2003).
Baltimore, MD: York Press.
Henry, Marcia K.
Unlocking
Literacy: Effective Decoding & Spelling Instruction
(2003). Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes.
Jones, Thomas Baldwin.
Decoding
and Encoding English Words (1997). Timonium, MD:
York Press.
McCardle, Peggy and Vinita Chhabra, Eds.
The Voice of Evidence in
Reading Research (2004). Baltimore, MD: Paul H.
Brookes.
McGuinness, Diane.
Why Our
Children Can’t Read (1997). New York, NY: The Free
Press.
Moats, Louisa Cook.
Speech to
Print: Language Essentials for Teachers (2000).
Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes.
Shaywitz, Sally.
Overcoming
Dyslexia (2003). New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf.
Snow, Catherine E., Susan Burns, and Peg Griffin, Eds.
Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young
Children (1998). Washington, D.C.: National Academy
Press.
Venezky, Richard L.
The
American Way of Spelling (1999). New York, NY: The
Guilford Press.
Witt, Joe and Ray Beck.
One Minute
Academic Functional Assessment and Interventions. (1999).
Longmont, CO: Sopris West.
******************
A set of links to interesting articles on topics in education will be
coming soon.
