Solving America's Literacy Crisis is All in the Science

Written by Open Up Resources | Jan 31, 2020 2:44:22 PM

Teachers: Join this free, 8-week webinar series on K-3 literacy. Now through March 18.

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, research-backed 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 on the foundational skills that make high-quality K-3 literacy instruction easier for teachers. Her book, How to Teach Differentiated Instruction (Second Edition), was recently named by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) as an as an exemplary text covering the science of reading's five elements of effective reading instruction.

Over the course of 8 weeks, Walpole will walk you through this text and answer your questions live. Topics 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

Miss a week? Don't worry. Sessions are provided on Open Up Resources' GoToWebinar Bookworms Channel for viewing until March 31, 2020.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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