Access foundational skills that make high-quality K-3 literacy instruction easier with research-based curriculum taught by the author.

Jump to webinar registration.

With the growing conversation around recent NAEP scores, what excellent reading instruction looks like, how teachers foster a deep understanding and love of reading, and the science behind it all, it’s easy to see the problems—and equally challenging to surface the solutions. 

At Open Up Resources, we’ve been talking internally about how all of this ties back to equity and district accessibility to highest-quality materials and effective professional learning. 

In discussing with Sharon Walpole, the author of Bookworms K-5 Reading and Writing, we agree we need to act with urgency to ensure that we can get highly-effective curriculum and professional learning into the hands of as many teachers as possible as soon as possible.

"Teachers need answers. District and school leaders need research-backed, cost-effective materials. And kids need to learn how to read." Jessica Sliwerski - CEO, Open Up Resources

With that, Walpole is offering a free, 8-week webinar series beginning January 29 on the foundational skills that make high-quality K-3 literacy instruction easier for teachers. Over the course of 8 weeks, topics will include:

  • A birds-eye view of reading development
  • A simple system for assessing and grouping
  • Building basic alphabet knowledge
  • Teaching children to blend sounds and recognize patterns, synthetic decoding, compare and contrast phonics, decoding by analogy
  • Text-level fluency

To Get Started

1. Sign up—it's free.

Each Wednesday from January 29 - March 18 at 7 PM ET, Sharon Walpole will walk educators through foundational skills for high-quality K-3 literacy teaching and learning. K-3 educators can sign up and learn more here. The entire 8-week series is freely accessible through March 31, 2020 to all who register, and you will be able to access all videos after each weekly webinar takes place until that date. 

2. Get your materials.

It’s highly recommended that participants purchase Walpole’s  How to Teach Differentiated Instruction (Second Edition), as all webinars will be derived from this book and the necessary classroom materials are also contained within this book (~$25 on Amazon).

Open Up Resources also offers a convenient Bookworms Reading and Writing Differentiation Kit bundled with Walpole's book for teachers if they prefer not to photocopy materials out of the book ($109 from Open Up Resources). The comprehensive Differentiation Kit is a large set of color-coded cards, that includes assessment protocols, resources to implement all assessments, and lesson plan templates for differentiated instruction. The Differentiation Kit and the companion book provide a teacher with an all-inclusive package for differentiated reading instruction.

 

3. Share the series with other K-3 educators.

Please share this series with other K-3 educators. We strongly believe, and research shows, participants will see gains in reading proficiency when they apply the teachings correctly—regardless of the student's background, language, or abilities. Districts like Seaford, DE have seen marked improvement.

Week 1: January 29

Webinar-card-1
A Birds-eye View of Reading Development

We will use the Cognitive Model of Reading Assessment (Stahl, Flanigan, & McKenna, 2019) to nest foundational skills within an overall view of reading development.  Then we will address the nuts and bolts of skills children need in each elementary grade. Finally, we will see the simple, multiple-entry intervention that teachers can use to meet their students’ needs.  Participants will be able to think about the range of needs in a single classroom or grade level.

Week 2: February 5

Week2
A Simple System for Assessing & Grouping

The differentiation model we are going to learn together requires a very small set of informal assessments.  This week we will learn how and why they work together to comprise an actionable assessment system. Participants with the book How to Plan Differentiated Reading Instruction:  Resources for Grades K-3 (Walpole & McKenna, 2017) will be able to get right to work forming groups.

Week 3: February 12

Webinar-card-3
Building Basic Alphabet Knowledge

Our first set of lessons will be for students who need to learn their letter names and sounds.  We will view this not as a problem, but as actionable information to begin a particular set of 30 lessons.  Those lessons will build initial phoneme segmentation skills, letter name recognition, and letter sounds recognition.  The lessons end with quick attention to concept of word in print.

Week 4: February 19

Webinar-card-4
Teaching Children to Blend Sounds & Recognize Patterns

Once children know their letter sounds, they need to learn how to use them to decode words.  Our next two sets of lessons, 15 days each, target automaticity in oral segmentation and blending and decoding, first sound-by-sound and then for a small set of high-utility short vowel patterns.  We will also work on building a firm set of high-frequency words, regardless of their spelling patterns.

Week 5: February 26

Webinar-card-5
Teaching Synthetic Decoding

Children with CVC decoding proficiency are ready to tackle more sounds.  We will learn to use two sets of lessons, 30 days each, to move them from three sounds to four and five, to introduce common blends and digraphs, and to process the r-controlled vowel sounds.  These lessons will also deepen each student’s cache of high frequency words recognized automatically. They end with a structured repeated reading of decodable text.

Week 6: March 4

Week6
Teaching Compare & Contrast Phonics

The English spelling system is easier to understand as a set of syllable-level patterns.  We will introduce the pattern concept with one rule – the rule of silent e – that provides a window into the pattern organization.  We will learn a different type of phonics instruction, comparing and contrasting the sounds and spelling of small sets of words. Participants will be ready to introduce 15 lessons to teach students to use the final e in single-syllable words.

Week 7: March 11

Week7
Teaching Decoding by Analogy

Once students understand that spelling patterns regulate vowel sounds, we can teach them to decode new words by analogy to known words. We will do this with a set of 30 lessons that target the most common vowel teams. For students who need this instruction, master of the concept of analogy will allow them to engage in extensive use of their own set of known words.

Week 8: March 18

Week8
Text-level Fluency

We end our attention to differentiation with a call to action.  Efficient teaching of foundational skills enables children to read real text, building knowledge and motivation.  We will provide a foundation for support of two groups of children: those with strong word recognition but weak reading rate, and those with strong reading rate.  Teachers will be able to advance the skills of both groups with a systematic lesson frame.

Get to know Sharon, Bookworms K-5 Reading and Writing, and Open Up Resources

Walpole_Sharon-2018-20
Sharon Walpole
Director, Professional Development Center for Educators
Professor, University of Delaware School of Education

Through her work as Director (Professional Development Center for Educators) and Professor (University of Delaware School of Education), Sharon has dedicated her career to fighting for equity through literacy and, in that process, has developed evidence-based reading and writing curriculum and professional development support for its implementation.

OUR__BW-lockup-cond-1

Bookworms K - 5 Reading and Writing

Bookworms K–5 Reading and Writing, developed by Dr. Sharon Walpole with support from her team at the University of Delaware, is a research-based curriculum designed to make excellent instruction and differentiation easier. Available as an open educational resource (OER), Bookworms makes accessible everything a teacher needs for high-quality teaching and lesson planning. With very carefully sequenced, simple daily instruction that follows a repetitive routine and uses only whole texts (trade books), Bookworms also offers a teacher-friendly differentiation toolkit for tailored instruction, embedded supports for intervention and remediation, and differentiated foundational skills for maximum vocabulary acquisition and comprehension. To learn more about Bookworms K–5 Reading and Writing, click here.

OpenUp_logo_RGB-vertical_logo_only

Open Up Resources

Open Up Resources is a 501c3 that exists to increase equity in education by making the highest quality curriculum freely accessible to educators and providing implementation supports to the broadest number of teachers, empowering them to effectively and sustainably improve student outcomes in pre-K-12 English Language Arts and Mathematics. To learn more about Open Up Resources' mission and work, click here.

Post Listing

Open Up Resources is a 501(c)(3) dedicated to broadening access to excellent content and materials, in order to empower all students & teachers.