Ever wonder how important your interaction with your student can be? Here’s video from LD Online that quickly recounts a story from Patricia Polacco about her teacher first diagnosing her with dyslexia. All these years later and she is still impacted by that moment.
Find more stories like these at LD Online. A great web resource.
Soundabet is the name of the program started by Dan Gurney in the late 1990′s to help teach his kindergarten class phonemes. Research has shown that successfully teaching children to read requires five areas to be thoroughly taught; and phonemic awareness is the starting point followed by phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension.
Here is a video of one of Dan’s kindergarten classes “performing” the Soundabet song, where they sound out the letters of the alphabet.
Dan has taught kindergarten in Northern California for over 25 years. You can follow him online, both at his Soundabet blog, as well as his Mr. Kindergarten blog for his school.
We are excited to have Dan present Soundabet at our Teacher Training Institute this summer, July 17th.
You may be interested to check out this WestEd webinar online on May 21st from 10:30 a.m. – 12 p.m. The topic is: Math Pathways & Pitfalls: Jump-Starting Effective and Equitable Instruction:
In this webinar, Carne Clarke and Alma Ramírez, Senior Research Associates at WestEd and developers of MPP, will identify several powerful strategies that all teachers can apply to their mathematics lessons, regardless of their adopted curriculum. Clarke and Ramiréz will provide an overview of the MPP research foundation and give examples of how these strategies boost learning in the MPP Intervention Curriculum.
You can sign up for the webinar by clicking on the topic title above and following the instructions on their website. We’ll be watching… hope to “see” you there. And don’t forget to drop back by here to share your thoughts on the presentation. If you can’t make it live, then check back at their archives to watch it later.
–Thanks to Gayle for the tip!
If you have time you may wish to watch this video of Nanci Bell delivering a lecture at the M.I.N.D. Institute about the nature of reading difficulties. It is not training per se, but rather a discussion about the research behind reading problems and the intervention techniques that are being used to reach these students.
Opportunity Schools uses Lindamood-Bell’s research-based intervention as part of our program’s curricula, so Nanci’s lecture may be especially interesting to our parents and teachers alike. It is a little over an hour long, so be prepared… it’s academic, but well worth the watch.
“Navigating the Maze of Autism” is a 2-day workshop being presented by Autism Partnership U.S. The workshop will be conducted by Dr. Ronald Leaf on May 13th-14th in Seal Beach, CA.
Ronald Leaf is a licensed psychologist who has over 35 years of experience in the field of autism. He earned both his Bachelor’s and Doctoral degrees at UCLA, working closely with Ivar Lovaas. Dr. Leaf was extensively involved in many of the Young Autism Project research investigations, contributed to The ME Book and is coauthor of The ME Book Videotapes, A Work in Progress, It’s Time for School and It Has to be Said.
This is the last workshop from Autism Partnership until August, and we encourage you to check it out. Registration info and forms can be found here.
Location: 200 Marina Drive, Seal Beach CA 90740
$125/Person · $100 for Parents (Lunch provided)
Welcome to the new blog for Opportunity Schools. We are very excited about this venture as we hope to build a community made up of parents, educators, and anyone who has been impacted by the needs of helping students who struggle with learning challenges.
We hope you make this blog a regular visit of yours. Our hope is that as we use this space to share what we are doing, learning, and experiencing on a regular basis that you will find it informative, comforting, and engaging. We encourage you to make comments on everything we post, and share your thoughts, agreements, disagreements, and suggestions.
Here’s to making a more effective impact on the lives of students, AND parents, AND educators.
