Tag Archives: early literacy

This article was originally published on PBS SoCal’s At-Home Learning, an early childhood education resource (for ages 2-8) providing families, educators and community partners with at-home learning activities, guides, and expert advice.   Each Thursday morning at 10 a.m., kids and grown-ups across Alaska’s Southern Kenai Peninsula join me for an hour-long storytime—on the radio. Yes, radio. For some, that means an actual AM radio and for others that means a mobile device with the local public radio station’s free app…

Claudia Haines, librarian at Homer Public Library in Homer, Alaska, describes a recent Storytime with Robots event that she hosted in which children and their parents had the opportunity to think about computational thinking along with early literacy. This post was originally published on Claudia’s blog, Never Shushed, and appears here with permission. I’ve been reading and thinking A LOT about computational thinking (CT) and coding this winter as part of my work on the Libraries Ready to Code initiative.…

This partial transcript of the App Fairy podcast has been edited for length and clarity. Visit appfairy.org for more information about Tinybop. Carissa Christner: Hello and welcome to the App Fairy podcast! Today we’re going to be talking with the makers of Tinybop. These guys make great apps for school-age kids, a slightly older audience than some of the other app makers that I’ve spoken with. For this episode, we’re going to try something a little bit different. About a year ago I was…

This partial transcript of the App Fairy podcast has been edited for length and clarity. Visit appfairy.org for more information about Originator. Carissa Christner: Hello and welcome to the App Fairy podcast. My name is Carissa Christner and today I’m very excited to bring to you an interview with Rex Ishibashi of the Originator apps. Originator is most well known for the Endless apps, like Endless Alphabet and Endless Reader. They are great apps for teaching reading, vocabulary, and math skills. When…

During a recent visit to a local public library, a kindergarten class took over the children’s room. Many in the group were already familiar with the space thanks to storytimes and regular visits with family members to check out books or DVDs. For others, this visit was not just fun, but also a vital introduction to the many opportunities that the library offers. The kindergarteners may have initially come for storytime or a class visit, but the librarian’s not-so-secret plan,…

During my teaching career, I taught pre-K in high-poverty areas in the District of Columbia, but I also taught for a year in a high-income, suburban area in Maryland. There was a stark difference in students’ vocabulary and background knowledge. Most of my students from a low-income background didn’t have the breadth of vocabulary that some of my higher income students possessed. Although this was my own personal experience, it is backed up by research which says that by the…

What really matters for early-grade reading? That’s a question we tackled in a recent paper for policy makers and other non-academic audiences, titled “Launching Successful Readers:  The Role of ICT in Early-Grade Literacy Success.”  Our aim was to help guide and frame discussions about how to have more effective investments in technology for early-grade literacy, in both developed and developing countries, based on research about what really matters for literacy growth. No one disputes that many investments in technology for…

Marilyn Jager Adams’s report, “Technology for Developing Children’s Language and Literacy: Bringing Speech Recognition to the Classroom,” was released this fall by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center. This commentary was recently published by Education Week.   As everyone who follows such things knows, U.S. students, as a group, do not read very well. Yet, if you are among those who have read about this-indeed, if you are among those who are reading this Commentary, then you (and most of your…