Raising Readers: Literacy Activities for Parents and Children

PBS KIDS Raising Readers is a great resource to share with parents of preschoolers and rising kindergarteners. The site states:

Kids love to learn. And with your help, they’ll learn to love reading with resources from PBS KIDS programs Between the Lions, Sesame Street, SUPER WHY, and WordWorld.

With PBS KIDS Island, children ages 2-5 can play reading games, earn tickets, and collect prizes. Then, track your child’s progress and get activities, lesson plans and tips just for parents, caregivers and teachers with PBS KIDS Raising Readers.

We’re adding new features often, including a Word of the Day and games for children 6-8. Come back soon to see what’s new!

I spent some time scoping out the site this morning and was pleased with its contents. For example:

1) I like that the site has extension activities based on characters from popular children’s shows and stories. Of course this is to be expected from a site created by PBS, but having children think and talk about character they love and relate to goes a long way when it comes to motivating them to read! Take a look at Fairytale Memory. This is a terrific game to play after doing an at-home “unit” on fairytales! For a list of stories to start with, click here.

2) I’m a big fan of WordWorld, so when I saw the Build a WordThing Activity on Raising Readers, I had to give it a shout out! This activity is a nice way to begin exposing children to the alphabetic principle.

3) I absolutely love the online read alouds! Take a look at Night in the Country and Spicy Hot Colors.

4) Practicing literacy related activities every day is important, but it can be tough to think of new ideas day in and day out. With these suggestions from the PBS KIDS Reading Activity Calendar, parents will be inspired to try all sorts of new and interesting literacy activities. For example, during the month of July make sure to do literacy-related activities in celebration of Independence Day, Read an Almanac Month and Chocolate Day!

Another nice thing about PBS KIDS Raising Readers, is that the site comes in Spanish.

May your month be filled with many interesting literacy activities!

Anna

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Snug as a Bug in a Rug!

Last week I visited the office of WordWorld. WordWorld is an animated show on PBS where the main characters (WordFriends) are both animals and words. For example, one of the characters is a duck, Duck not only looks like a duck, but his body spells duck as well. As you might imagine with a title like WordWorld, the show aims to foster a love of words and reading in budding readers.

I am a fan of WordWorld cartoons and toys, so as one would expect, it was a thrill to learn how their animations and scripts are produced!

Anyway, during my visit, I discovered a new Word World initiative–their online e-books. Imagine a pop-up book in an online format with lots of WordFriends! How fun?! Check out this month’s e-book here. (Note: Make sure your computer volume is on when you view the e-book!) In addition, WordWorld has a number of word games for children posted on their site. This is a good site to pass along to budding readers and their parents this summer!

Happy Word Reading!

Anna

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PBS Teachers–Online education resource central!

While browsing through the Missouri Project Success Education Links, I came across the link to PBS Teachers. I love this site because it contains tons of lesson ideas, videos, online and offline activities you can do with your students to build comprehension, grammar, critical thinking and more. Searching for storytelling lessons, I found the lesson Story Magic–Telling Stories from Pictures:

Use new vocabulary and the three basic elements of a story: character, setting and plot to create and tell a story based on visual clues. Develop skills in cooperation and storytelling.

PBS Teachers is impressive! Feel free to pass this link along!

Anna

Reading Rockets!

While surfing the Net today, I found the website for Reading Rockets–a fun TV show on PBS that teaches educators and caregivers about the stages of early literacy development. I love this site because it is filled with straight forward articles on how to teach reading and reading research. In addition, it is filled will streaming videos of teachers in real classrooms across the States modeling best practices around reading pedagogy. Check out this video on spelling and word families. I also like this video on invented spelling! -Anna