Since this is my second official post, I suppose I should introduce myself as well!
My name is Anna and I work at Wireless Generation, a New York-based education technology company that focuses on developing early literacy and math instructional tools and curricula. As a developer of early literacy products, I spend a lot of time in K-3 classrooms across the United States observing teachers working with budding readers. I then take ideas and feedback from teachers back to my office where I work with a team of developers to create useful products that help teachers teach young children how to read. Before becoming a product developer, I taught early literacy classes to children and English conversation classes to adults in Osaka, Japan.
I would like to share with you a web site that is near and dear to my heart, as I have been working on it for the past year with my colleagues, as well as with many teachers across the States, but particularly in New York…
www.Free-Reading.net is a free online early literacy program that helps educators teach early literacy skills—in particular phonics and phonological awareness. The activities and sequences can be used to support a typical core or basal program or as part of word study time for teachers using a balanced literacy curricula. In addition, the site provides an opportunity for teachers to share their great ideas and activities.
Here are a few links on the site that I think literacy teachers will find particularly useful:
- Picture cards that contain illustrations of words for every letter of the alphabet.
- Sounds pronunciation guides for words broken into onset-rime, phonemes, etc.
- Hip hop music by Flocabulary that can be used to teach vocabulary words from popular books.
- Videos of teachers demonstrating lessons on the site.
- Dozens of fun decodable passages that can be used to help children learn how to sound out CVC words and words with letter combinations such as th, kn, oa, etc.
- Lots of cool lessons (for an example click here) added by teachers like you!
I hope you enjoy the site!
Thanks for all of these resources!
Hi Anne,
I just wanted to let you know that I loved this website so much that I wrote a review/article about it at Bright Hub. I like to spend time at this blog. Like I said before, I think that it is wonderful. One day while on the blog, I saw this message and followed the link to Free Reading. Well, I just couldn’t believe it. I listened to the webinar to learn more about the program and I tried to summarize it in my article as best as I could. The program is absoulutely amazing and I cannot wait to pass it along to other teachers. You can read my article here:
http://www.brighthub.com/education/k-12/reviews/5489.aspx
I hope that you enjoy it.
Best Regards, Laurie
Thanks Laurie! Your comment made my day. FreeReading is a project that is near and dear to my heart. I only hope that more teachers will find the site not only to use the resources, but to share their own ideas and best practices!
Have a great day and thanks for sharing a link to Bright Hub!!!
Anna