Greetings from the Oakland Schools Literacy Team. We hope you had a relaxing spring break that allowed you to recharge! The newsletter for this quarter is packed with information about upcoming literacy events and useful resources that will support your teaching this spring. We hope you find these helpful and encourage you to get in touch if you have any questions.

Oakland Schools and about 25 district representatives met last month to begin work on creating recommendations for best practices in word study. The group analyzed information from a recent survey sent out to all Oakland County districts regarding current practices in word study. The next steps are:

• to create a working definition of word study,
• to identify effective instructional practices, and
• to create a scope and sequence for word study instruction.

For more information regarding this work, contact Literacy Consultant Michele Farah.

MDE’s Low Incidence Outreach office is presenting a session on May 14, 2015 at Oakland Schools on the Unified English Braille (UEB) code. This new braille code will be implemented in the United States on January 4, 2016. The content is appropriate for teachers of students with visual impairments that use braille. More information is available on the MDE Website. For more information and to register, follow this link

Many of you are already administering the M-STEP test. However, if you would like more resources about M-STEP, they are available on our website. We've included sample test items and a technology readiness checklist, as well as an explanation of student growth percentiles (the method by which students’ results will be compared to one another). The Oakland Schools Literacy Team will offer webinars in the fall on preparing your ELA students for taking the M-STEP test.

Kylene Beers recently tweeted a must-read research article on student choice and volume of reading. Independent Reading and School Achievement by Bernice E. Cullinan of New York University was published in 2000 in the School Library Media Research Journal and is a great read!

Interested in deepening your understanding and instruction around teaching argument? A great, recently published text is Jennifer Fletcher’s Teaching Arguments: Rhetorical Comprehension, Critique, and Response. Although Fletcher focuses heavily on high school and higher education learners, middle school teachers could find the book useful. Fletcher places audience and purpose front and center in the work of argument and reasoning. Her book helps bring together both the important reading and writing work learners need scaffolded. The book provides key threshold concept understandings for the teaching of argument along with model activities and student artifacts.

What Really Matters for Struggling Readers by Richard L. Allington is recommended by two of our highly respected experts in the field of literacy for students with significant disabilities: Dr. David Koppenhaver and Dr. Karen Erickson. Using non-technical summaries, nationally recognized scholar and author Dick Allington delivers a concise and balanced introduction to reading remediation and intervention programs that shows teachers how to use a variety of best practices with children who are struggling readers in order to transform them into proficient readers. This new edition includes new findings on reading achievement and instruction, reading volume as it relates to reading proficiency, reader-text match, fluency development, comprehension strategies, and instruction for struggling readers.

Interested in using more audio texts in your classroom? Check out these two posts for a plethora of resources on how to teach podcasts and which ones to consider to boost students' speaking, listening and writing skills.

Podcast Power, part 1: Boosting Listening Skills

Podcast Power, part 2: Listening Skills & Curiculum

AARI is an accelerated expository reading initiative focused on academic literacy and critical thinking. It is designed as a short term intervention to drastically improve academic outcomes in students in grades 3-12. Please join us for the Summer Institute, which will begin on August 10.

Facilitator: Dalyce Beegle, Special Education Consultant

Format: 7 full days in the summer and 4 after school sessions during the year.

SPACE IS LIMITED- RESERVE YOUR SPOT TODAY!

Need a refresher?

If you are an educator that attended AARI training prior to 2013, please join us for the AARI Booster. This is more than a refresher. It's an opportunity to continue your learning and understanding of the initiative to push students' thinking for success.

Facilitator: Dalyce Beegle, Special Education Consultant

Format: Two 2 day sessions, one in the fall and one in the winter

Want more information?:

AARI Booster Summer Session

AARI Booster Fall Session

Oakland Schools Literacy and the Oakland Writing Project have sponsored a new webinar series this year. If you weren't able to attend, you can access archived webinar recordings and materials at the links below.

Small Bites: Research in the K-5 Classroom

Facilitator: Professor Kristin Fontichiaro, University of Michigan School of Information

Small Bites: Research in the 6-12 Classroom

Facilitator: Delia DeCourcy, Secondary Literacy Consultant, Oakland Schools

Digital Technologies and Expectations for Writing in College
Facilitator: Professor Jeff Grabill, Michigan State University

Crafting Writing in an Information Age

Facilitator: Troy Hicks, Central Michigan University

How Student Blogs Support Literacy Learning

Facilitator: Stephanie Dulmage, West Bloomfield School District

Reinventing Classroom Reading: What Digital Media Offer Us

Facilitator: Sara Kajder, University of Georgia

REGISTER for the last webinar in the series: Integrating Bring Your Own Device in Secondary Literacy Learning. This session is FREE. SCECHs are available for Michigan educators who have attended two or more of the two-hour sessions.

The Dynamic Learning Maps (DLM®) Alternate Assessment System Consortium offers professional development modules and a virtual community of practice to support educators who teach and assess students participating in the DLM system. Although Michigan has not adopted the DLM as our Alternate Assessment for students with significant cognitive disabilities, the modules are a phenomenal resource for educators looking to improve literacy instruction for their students. The modules are available for free on the DLM website.

NewsELA has a broad, searchable database of articles, assigns anchor CCSS standards to articles, and allows you to change the Lexile level of articles depending on your students' reading levels. There's also a teacher tool that allows you to select and assign articles to your classes/students. Some articles include reading quizzes. NewsELA has recently added text sets. Free to register and assign articles.

Epic Digital Books is an online resource for free digital books for students in grades K-12. It’s especially useful for elementary readers. With a wide selection of popular titles, Epic can be used on a laptop or iPad.

Flipgrid - With this online tool, teachers create grids of short questions (using text or video) that students respond to through recorded videos. Flipgrid boosts community and social presence in face-to-face, hybrid, and online classrooms. You can also invite people outside your classroom to answer questions relevant to the text that you’re reading or unit you’re studying to bring the real world into your classroom.