Professional development Opportunities

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Children benefit from evidence-based instruction in developing phonological awareness and pre-reading skills through engaging, age-appropriate activities that includes identifying the individual sounds in the English language. Practicing letter-sound connections is another component of their work in addition to phonemic segmentation (for spelling), world building, handwriting, vocabulary and comprehension. Children learn gross motor strategies for reading and spelling they can carry with them into lower elementary.

New readers in early elementary need regular, explicit, cumulative, multi-sensory reading instruction to grow their skills over time. WSR trains teachers how to use the Brain Friendly Reading™ curriculum to continue to work toward phonemic proficiency, automaticity will all of the letter-sound combinations along with syllable division for reading and arm spelling multi-syllable words.   

Tier 1 and Tier 2 intervention benefits older struggling readers and spellers. When reading skills improve often fluency and comprehension follow. Children become better readers by teaching systematic phonics through spelling Tier 1 which is helpful for all children. This work includes single and multi-syllable word work, beginning linguistics and vocabulary development. Tier 2 differentiated instructions allows for targeted word study. The instructional strategies and sequence of instruction for Tier 1 and 2 yield significant growth on the NWEA, DRA and Words Their Way Spelling Screeners while building foundational skills. The program can be layered on to any existing Tier 1 ELA curriculum and is flexible by design. Morphology and vocabulary study are woven into the curriculum. 

Teens who are years below grade level reading need to revisit foundational reading skills: phonemic awareness and letter-sound connections. While becoming proficient with single syllable words in the beginning, teens also build the pattern recognition in the brain for the six syllable types for both reaching and spelling. This opens the door to multi-syllable words with the goal that the child can write any word they have in their oral vocabulary and decode (read) any word they come across in text. Improving oral reading fluency scores and comprehension is the expected outcome of engaging in an intensive systematic phonics program. The Brain Friendly Reading™ Level I and II programs are both used to address the wide-ranging needs of teens. 

Children in special education for a specific learning disability in reading are often dyslexic. Those children absolutely must be taught using a systematic phonics approach like Brain Friendly Reading™ in order to see significant gains. BFR™ provides flexibility for scaffolding at all levels. The straightforward, engaging instructional strategies enable the child to repeat the work up to 200 times stress free in order to move it into long-term memory. When a child's competence begins to grow, so does their confidence. Special education teachers report multi-year gains on DRA testing with just 14 weeks of intervention. Teachers learn how to utilize highly-effective strategies in the first training session.

What do children need you are learning to read English? These children and adults need to stimulate the brain in the same ways as every other person learning the language: chart tapping for letter-sound correspondences, arm tapping for phonemic awareness and segmentation, explicit lessons and repeated reading of words, phrases and sentences. What is different is the significant need to quickly build vocabulary. The most straightforward way to teach vocabulary directly is with pictures. The Brain Friendly Reading™ work for this population is scaffolded beginning with single words, phrases and then sentences. Words are repeated to build decoding and comprehension skills. See examples of these materials at brainfriendlyreading.org.  

Teachers and tutors benefit from on-going support in learning how to implement the strategies they've been taught. We Shall Read provides free virtual weekly group coaching online. In class demonstration lessons are only available currently in Michigan when schools purchase a PD package.