Boost Your Teaching: How to Meet Teachers’ Needs with an Early Literacy Collection

When I was a first-grade teacher at a Title I school on the east side of Michigan, I often spent time with the media specialist and librarians at the local public library trying to find a wide range of books to use for interactive read-alouds that also connected to science or social studies content and standards. I would walk away with many engaging recommendations and titles that made my heart sing. Not to mention the incredible relationships I came to foster with those talented and knowledgeable librarians! I tapped into these resources because I knew my classroom library collection wasn’t robust enough, the provided science and social studies curricular resources were not always high quality or were missing, and getting funds to cover the cost of new resources was sometimes a challenge.

Dr. David Kilpatrick Presents on Overcoming Reading Difficulties

“Individuals with reading problems commonly display difficulties in both phonic decoding and instant word retrieval. Phonic decoding and orthographic mapping are so central to the development of proficient reading that research on both of these word-level reading process should drive our assessments, instructional practices, and intervention efforts.” (1)

On September 19th, Dr. Kilpatrick will be presenting (based on his book) to literacy coaches, reading specialists, curriculum directors, and special education directors at the Prince Center at Calvin College.

The presentation will focus on how children learn to read words and why some children struggle. Understanding the nature of word-level reading development and word-level reading problems will guide both assessment and intervention.