MyView Learning Letter #22 - Missing Conferencing?

One thing that was beloved by all with American Reading Company were the conferences. Conferences were one one one times with a student that were guided by the IRLA assessment to specifically teach what a student needed for reading skills and they afforded a time to listen to each child read aloud to you. 

Well, there are still things in MyView that do just that! 

Online, these resources provide you with a ton of options for kids to read aloud to you AND many provide you with lessons. (The exception is the Games and Digital Practice.) 

Other options include - 

- the Foldable Readables in grades 4 & 5

- the MyFocus Readers (this is like Scholastic News)

- the decodables in the Foundational Skills Toolkit for grades K-2

- MyFocus Intervention Passages 

Lexia Core 5 Intervention Program

 No more Waterford! No more Freckle Reading! 

Instead, we have Lexia Core 5 for grades K-5! This is also what interventionists will be using in their groups for students needing a tier 2 or 3 intervention. 

In order to support intervention, students need to be on the computer program, Lexia Core 5, for about 20 minutes a day. This will also be the tier 2 intervention for students NOT in reading intervention with a teacher. 

Isle of Wight County has access to several professional learning opportunities including asynchronous modules, pre-recorded sessions, and the Virginia Live Online Professional Learning Series. (While it may say Core 5 Grades 3-5, it is for K-2 as well.) These sessions are designed to help teachers, tutors, and parents understand how Lexia can support student literacy development, the materials available to support tutoring sessions, how to navigate the myLexia data platform, and how to successfully implement Lexia programs and resources. Each calendar details the specific sessions offered. I encourage you to learn about Lexia’s Core5 student programs. All the resources you need are linked below!

Lexia Professional Learning Series Flyer (with clickable links to calendars): https://view.highspot.com/viewer/667ad8597507b9443770beca

Core5: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vwsj1v6XhAZoGezkvHI2XzeeWldtgOxG/view

We are using Lexia Core 5 because it was approved by VDOE as an intervention program. Other technology programs like Freckle, Dreamscape, Prodigy, and IXL were NOT approved and cannot be used. 

If you are comfortable, start day 1! If you want to learn a bit more, the expectation for use will start on September 30th. 

Both/And

Some folks think in terms of black and white. There is not gray in their world. I have always appreciated the finite thinking of, "It is this or it is this. There is no in between." My world has ALWAYS seen both sides of the coin. My world has ALWAYS seen gray. My world has always though, "It could be this or this. So much in between." I am not an either/or girl. 

Image from: https://medium.com/creating-the-life-you-want/either-or-vs-both-and-2490611b5a5

Because of this, my heart and mind struggle immensely against all the controversy in reading currently.  It is not balanced literacy OR science of reading. It is not word walls OR sound walls. It is not kids should only read leveled texts OR kids should never read leveled texts. To be honest, these are just a few of things that are not either/or for me. I could have kept going forever....

My both/and thinking really roared it's head when I listened to this podcast, "A Little Bit of Myth Busting: The Pet Peeves of Reading Experts" by Literacy Talks. 

How about you? Are you either/or or both/and? 

Did you know there are 44 phonemes in the English language?

The answer is most likely, nope! And, you may not even know what a phoneme is. Guess what? That is a-ok. You weren't really taught what a phoneme was in your undergrad unless you have a speech and language degree. 

A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound heard by our ears. We associate phonemes or sounds with letters. Wanna know something else? Those letters that spell the phonemes are actually called graphemes. Here is an example. The short /i/ phoneme can be spelled with the grapheme i as in pig. The long /I/ phoneme can be spelled with the graphemes i, igh, ie, and then of course iCe like in the words hi, light, pie, and nice. 

Students need to know all 44 phoneme sounds and their corresponding graphemes in order to spell and read. Here is a great 2-pager that lists the most common phonemes and their corresponding graphemes. How many did you know? How many do your students know? 

Happy Learning!