The Opp Blog

We are happy to announce a complete success for this summer’s Teacher Training Institute.  We want to again thank our presenters; Marcia Fries, Gina Lems-Tardif, Dan Gurney, Glenda McHale, Diana Jones, Jeanne Ruiz, and Katie Kent.  They all provided us with a wealth of information and our “schema” will never be the same! (inside joke for those of you who weren’t there)

Please take a moment to enjoy photos from the training on our TTI-2009 page… though pictures fail to capture the energy of the presenters and the great discussion that was had in each session.

We’d like to leave you with just a handful of the many comments from the teachers that attended.  Hope to see you next year!

Their excitement was contagious!

…very applicable…

I loved this seminar.  The Daily 5, yea!!!

The training really was so very relevant and important for each and every teacher.

Wonderful information… great ideas.

The presenters were awesome!

Usually I dread conferences or trainings because they are boring, but this one was so great because it was so interactive and very hands on!

I appreciate making the visual materials during the workshop.  They will be put to good use right away!

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.