MARESA Literacy Monthly: March 2021 Edition

 

    This March, the MARESA Literacy Team is feeling "lucky" to work with each of you!  We hope you find our focus on collaboration with families to be helpful this month and beyond!

Spotlight on the Essentials

Every Month Is Reading Month:  High Quality Practices Last Throughout the Year

March has been celebrated as Reading Month for quite some time.  This tradition sets a school-wide focus on reading and often includes unique ways to embrace reading through activities, reading challenges, and the use of themes.  This month we offer a few ideas that grow out of the Literacy Essential Instructional Practice #10:  Collaboration with families in promoting literacy.  We hope that you consider adding these high quality research-supported practices to your school-wide programs and hang onto them throughout the year!  Equity!!!!!

• Provide families with ideas for incorporating literacy into real-world situations.  The purpose associated with reading a recipe, writing a letter to a family member, making a sign, reading to a sibling, reading to answer a question, etc. helps children see reading as life preparation.  
• Providing families with literacy-supporting resources.  Use the following questions to guide you towards building a system that supports quality home literacy-support:
• Do you have a system in place to allow children to borrow books from the classroom library?  If not, what could you do to make this manageable?  
• Have you considered sending families links from the Michigan eLibrary...perhaps a children’s magazine article of high interest could engage the whole family?  Please contact the MARESA Literacy Team to support you in this effort!  
• What do you do to encourage and support families in connecting to local library resources?  Your advice and encouragement matter!
• Providing families with skills to support their children in reading and writing while at home.  The MIFamily Engagement Framework suggests that offering workshops on learning strategies offers higher impact than sharing resources.  This pandemic has forced parents to engage deeply in helping their children learn, but for those without a background in education it has proven more difficult than one could imagine.  Workshops will add to whatever repertoire the family has and will connect home and school for the child.  Make this idea less daunting by collaboration with fellow educators to decide on who, what, how.  Could parents be a part of the planning process? See more great ideas and resources to support parent capacity below in Building Parent Capacity for Providing Literacy Support in the Home.

Reading Into Things

Motivating Readers

Generating excitement about reading is key to helping motivate young readers.  We must keep in mind that our end goals are to create independent readers who make meaning from text.  We want our readers to see reading as life preparation.  We DO NOT want our students to see reading as something to do only when told to do it.  We DO NOT want our students to see reading as a school thing and nothing more.  Reading is truly a gift that should be treasured and cherished in and out of school.  Use the chart below to guide the work of motivating elementary readers.  If you have other strategies that support student motivation and engagement, please comment below! 

Strategies to Increase Student Motivation and Engagement	Tactics to Avoid
Although rewards should not be necessary, if you do choose one, make sure it is related to reading...an extra book choice, book buddy time, a special book project, or even extra reading time.	Incentivizing reading through non-reading related prices such as stickers, coupons, or toys.
Wrap up a book that you have selected for a child like you would a gift.  Personalize it with a special message of why you chose the book for that particular student.  What parent volunteer would turn down this opportunity to support you?!	Using reading or writing as “punishment”.
Stay tuned into hot topics of interest in the classroom and search for books, digital text, or articles.
Interest inventories followed-up with text to match student interest.
Book blessings...the teacher shares just enough about a book to pique student interest before adding it to the classroom library.
Enticing book displays within the classroom...think book store!  Make book covers visible for students as often as possible.

Engaging Families

Connecting with families during a pandemic 

In a normal school year, March is Reading Month includes a Family Literacy Night in our schools and classrooms.  Below are some alternative options for engaging families in literacy during the pandemic. 

• FaceBook Live School or Teacher Read Alouds
• School or Class-Wide Pajama ZOOM or Google Meet Party
• Drive-Through Literacy Make & Take 
• One School, One Book 
• See also NEA’s post on 9 ideas for (virtually) Celebrating NWEA’s Read Across America

For the Love of Reading

Building Parent Capacity for Providing literacy support in the home

Inviting families to join our school or class read alouds is a great place to begin but research supports when we include teaching literacy skills and strategies for parents to use at home with their children, it has a greater impact on our students’ literacy achievement. 

St. Clair RESA’s Student Success Calendar includes not only monthly literacy strategies for families but also additional resources for teaching the strategies with families: 

Visualizing Strategy PSA 

Student Materials to send home (bookmarks & journal prompts) 

Visualizing Presentation slides           

Click to view the video presentation

Read-aloud examples  

* For additional literacy materials to use each month with families, check out the Family Engagement Resources.

        

Go! Go! Gaby!

Supporting reading and writing

This month I'll be sharing some information about copyrights we need to keep in mind regarding virtual storytelling and read alouds as well as a few resources to help our young readers. I'll also be sharing some of my favorite google slide templates for storytime projects!

Click here to access these resources

Need a writing project for your students or their families?  Here is a great activity from the Children's Theatre Company Education, the Group Storytelling | 5-step story, this activity can be done as a collaborative project in google slides or as a multimedia project using Flipgrid