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Go on a "night sky" reading adventure! Teachers can support reading together at home with Reading Rockets family literacy bags — designed to encourage hands-on fun and learning centered around paired fiction and nonfiction books. (Level: Third Grade)

Go on a "flying" reading adventure! Teachers can support reading together at home with Reading Rockets family literacy bags — designed to encourage hands-on fun and learning centered around paired fiction and nonfiction books. (Level: Third Grade)

Reading Rockets has packed a "virtual beach bag" of activities for teachers to help families get ready for summer and to launch students to fun, enriching summertime experiences. Educators will find materials to download and distribute as well as ideas and resources to offer to students and parents to help ensure summer learning gain rather than loss.

Discover the importance of early language, listening, and speaking on literacy development. If you suspect that your child or a student is struggling with speech, language, and/or hearing problems, learn more about testing and assessment, accommodations, and additional professional help. You'll also find tips on reading aloud with children who have speech and language problems or who are deaf or hard of hearing.

Explore how carefully supervised and well implemented tutoring programs can make a difference to struggling readers. Learn about finding the right tutor, tips for tutoring, evidence that tutoring works, how you can help, and even an easy-to-use assessment tool to make the most of a child's tutoring experience.

The Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts (ELA) and Literacy are rigorous, internationally benchmarked, and aligned with college and work expectations. The standards set requirements not only for English language arts but also for literacy across the content areas, including history/social studies, science, and technical subjects.

Get the basics on the Common Core State Standards — what they are, who created them, goals, how they address content-area literacy, and what they offer for ELLs and special education students.

Tips for teaching environmental literacy to English language learners.

Science fiction is a type of fiction where the stories revolve around science and technology of the future. Science fiction texts are often set in the future, in space, in a different world, or in a different universe or dimension. As exciting as these books can be, it's useful to remind your child that while science fiction may be based loosely on scientific truth, it is still fiction.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) provides the opportunity for all students to access, participate in, and progress in the general-education curriculum by reducing barriers to instruction. Learn more about how UDL offers options for how information is presented, how students respond or demonstrate their knowledge and skills, and how students are engaged in learning.

All children with learning disabilities need "charismatic adults" in their lives at school. These are educators who enthusiastically and purposefully accept students for who they are and identify and reinforce the strengths of all students. They perceive all students as being capable of succeeding at academic and social demands as long as they are provided with appropriate interventions.

Students with learning disabilities often feel lonely and socially isolated in school. Learn more about how families can help their children build resilience, self-esteem, motivation, and family relationships.

Go on a "bees" reading adventure! Teachers can support reading together at home with Reading Rockets family literacy bags — designed to encourage hands-on fun and learning centered around paired fiction and nonfiction books. (Level: Third Grade)

Go on a "river" reading adventure! Teachers can support reading together at home with Reading Rockets family literacy bags — designed to encourage hands-on fun and learning centered around paired fiction and nonfiction books. (Level: Third Grade)

Read and discuss poetry with nature imagery with students. Take students on a poetry walk around the school, neighborhood, or community to observe and collect sensory images from direct experience with nature: the sights, sounds, smells, and textures of things outdoors. Students can take a poetry journal with them to write down words as they observe, listen, smell, and touch things outside the classroom.

Poetry is full of joy, expressiveness, and the pure delight of language. Explore how to introduce poetry to young readers, the value of nursery rhymes in learning about language, writing poetry in the classroom, great poetry books for sharing, and interviews with beloved children's poets. Visit our National Poetry Month section for more resources. As poet Carl Sandburg said, remember that with poetry you're stuffing "a backpack of invisible keepsakes."

Dysgraphia is a learning disability that affects a child's handwriting. Children with dysgraphia usually have other problems such as difficulty with written expression. Learn more about causes, the importance of early assessment, dysgraphia and spelling, and effective instructional strategies that strengthen written language skills.

Creativity is an important characteristic to foster in your child. Fostering a creative spirit will give your child experience identifying a problem and coming up with new ideas for solving them. Here are four ways to encourage creativity in your young child.

In this article written for Colorín Colorado, Dr. Diane Staehr Fenner and John Segota discuss the ways in which language proficiency and teaching standards can help shape the instruction of English language learners. They also discuss the relationship between these different sets of standards and their connection to the implementation of the Common Core State Standards.

In this article written for Colorín Colorado, early childhood expert Karen Nemeth discusses the policies at the state level that impact English language learners (also known as dual language learners), as well as policy considerations for educators who want to become more familiar with their own state's policies.

The following survey is an excerpt from Chapter 3, "Policies and Accountability Requirements for English Language Learners," from English Language Learners at School: A Guide for Administrators, 2nd Edition.

This excerpt by Rebecca Freeman Field from English Language Learners at School: A Guide for Administrators, 2nd Edition answers the following question: How do we develop a language policy that is appropriate for our school and community context?

Explore two ways you can help your child begin to develop information literacy: learning to tell the difference between fact and opinion, and figuring out if a source of information is reliable.

Interactive writing makes the writing process visual to the whole class. Reading literature is an excellent way to initiate interactive writing in the class, and the teacher can continue using literature as the class does interactive writing with any new book that is read throughout the year.

In this excerpt from Foundations for Teaching English Language Learners: Research, Theory, Policy, and Practice, Wayne Wright offers an introduction to No Child Left Behind legislation for English language learners, including information on accountability, assessments, English language proficiency standards, and implications for ELL identification and instruction.

Share music and playful rhythms to help students generate and organize writing ideas. Kick off Music In Our Schools Month on Dr. Seuss's March 2 birthday with this pre-writing activity.

Parents are a child's first teacher, and there are many simple things you can do every day to share the joy of reading while strengthening your child's literacy skills.

Writing in journals can be a powerful strategy for students to respond to literature, gain writing fluency, dialogue in writing with another student or the teacher, or write in the content areas. While journaling is a form of writing in its own right, students can also freely generate ideas for other types of writing as they journal. Teachers can use literature that takes the form of a journal by reading excerpts and discussing them with students.

Research has shown the positive effects of improvised story dramatization on language development and student achievement in oral and written story recall, writing, and reading. Learn how to integrate story dramatizations into the classroom, using stories that students are familiar with.

Go on a "building" reading adventure! Teachers can support reading together at home with Reading Rockets family literacy bags — designed to encourage hands-on fun and learning centered around paired fiction and nonfiction books. (Level: First or Second Grade)

Oral history is a method to learn about past events from the spoken stories of people who lived through them. When students conduct oral history research with members of their families or community they are participating in active learning rooted in the student's own experience. Students are actively engaged in collecting data when they do oral histories. Not only are they learning history, they are learning to be historians.

Winter vacation is a great time to read with your kids. It's also a good time to make reading (and writing) fun! Try some of the ideas below — and remember that it's ok to do these activities in your home language!

Many kids love to read about science and nature as well as real people, places, and events. Nonfiction books present information in engaging and interesting ways. Find out how you can help your child learn to navigate all the parts of a nonfiction book — from the table of contents to the diagrams, captions, glossary, and index.

A nationally representative sample of 213,100 fourth-graders participated in the 2011 assessment. Learn more about the key findings and trends in this Reading 2011 snapshot.

Learn the answers to 10 commonly asked questions that families and educators of students with disabilities have about charter schools. You'll also find links to state-specific resources that can help you better understand how charter schools work in your individual state.

Almost every week there is a news story about a new finding or discovery in science. These news stories are one of the exciting steps in the science world: sharing what you find! Helping kids share their own scientific findings will make them feel like part of the scientific community.

Learn about the common signs of dyslexia, how parents can support their child and celebrate their strengths, the role of assistive technology, how the latest brain research can help kids with dyslexia, and more.

Real-life scientists use charts and graphs as a way to organize and understand the information they have gathered. Young scientists can do the same! These activities will help you and your child create simple bar charts together, learn the vocabulary of graphing (axis, scale, labels, etc.), and have fun building "on-the-ground" graphs using real objects.

Charter schools have become a hot topic across the country, with the number of charters exploding in recent years. In this info brief, we examine the challenges and successes of special education in charter schools, including issues related to enrollment, legal identity, infrastructure, school choice, and virtual charters.

Reading aloud is one of the most important things parents and teachers can do with children. Learn about how reading aloud builds many important foundational skills, such as introducing vocabulary and providing a model of fluent, expressive reading, and find tips on how to read aloud with children at home and in the classroom, while building comprehension and helping children recognize what reading for pleasure is all about.

John Wills Lloyd, who has been at the University of Virginia's Curry School since 1978, began his career teaching children with learning and behavior problems in southern California in the 1960s. He completed Ph.D. studies at the University of Oregon in 1976. His research focuses on improving students' outcomes. Below John writes about subtyping LD. You can follow all of John's posts at LD Blog.

As we observe the 10th anniversary of 9/11 this year, it's important to remember that our commemoration is more than a moment of silence — it's an important educational opportunity for students, including English language learners (ELLs). Here are some of the lessons we learned from our experiences, as well as ideas for engaging ELLs in discussions about 9/11 and related issues.

Keeping kids interested and motivated to read is sometimes a challenge. Learn how to effectively motivate young learners, including tips from kids for teachers and parents, classroom strategies that work, and guidance for motivating struggling readers, reluctant readers, and boys.

Go on a "weather" reading adventure! Teachers can support reading together at home with Reading Rockets family literacy bags — designed to encourage hands-on fun and learning centered around paired fiction and nonfiction books. (Level: First or Second Grade)

It's called lots of different things: Drop Everything and Read (DEAR), Sustained Silent Reading (SSR), and Million Minutes to name a few. Regardless of the different names, the intent is the same — to develop fluent readers by providing time during the school day for students to select a book and read quietly. Nearly every classroom provides some time during the instructional day for this independent silent reading. Despite its widespread use in classrooms, silent reading hasn't enjoyed much support in the research literature.

Discover some simple hands-on activities and games that can be done at home or in the backyard to help your child develop a deeper understanding of cause and effect — and strengthen reading comprehension and scientific inquiry skills.

Preschool teachers and child care providers play a critical role in promoting literacy, preventing reading difficulties, and preparing young children for kindergarten. Learn more about the characteristics of a quality preschool program, activities that build a solid foundation for reading, and how to advocate for your preschool child if you suspect learning delays.

Get the basic facts about what it takes for a young child to learn to read, best practices in teaching reading, the importance of oral language in literacy development, why so many children struggle, and more in this overview.

Get ready for a great school year. Discover ideas for planning a sparkling back-to-school night, creating a literacy-rich classroom that is welcoming to all students, establishing an effective 90-minute reading block, building parent engagement, and more.

Get ready for a really great school year. Find out what to look for during your school's open house and back-to-school night, tips for helping your child make a smooth transition from summer to school, how to establish homework routines, and even a booklist full of wonderful school-themed picture books to share.

As the final days of summer approach, is your child ready to head back to school? Creating a plan centered around health, school and homework, activities, and chores, will help your child find success.

Just as your children have schedules and expectations each day at school, it is important to have them at home as well. These five tips will jump-start your homework routine and make the process easier for everyone.

Helping children understand the concept of sequence develops both literacy and scientific inquiry skills. Here are a few simple activities that families can do together to give kids opportunities to observe, record, and think about sequencing.

Go on a "cooking" reading adventure! Teachers can support reading together at home with Reading Rockets family literacy bags — designed to encourage hands-on fun and learning centered around paired fiction and nonfiction books. (Level: First or Second Grade)

Reading intervention programs play an important role in helping all students become confident, skilled readers. There are lots of programs available to schools. If you are planning to purchase an intervention program for instruction, it is important to do your homework — and get as much information as you can about a program's benefits and effectiveness. This article provides basic comparative information about a range of commercially available intervention programs.

Media-rich and interactive websites can play an essential role in science instruction. They can encourage students to think critically, by providing tools for modeling, visualization, and simulation tools; discussion and scaffolding; and data collection and analysis.

Using students' questions as a basis for investigations in science education is an effective teaching strategy. Not only do students pose questions they would like answered, but they are asked to find ways to answer them. This article also recommends nonfiction science books that use a question and answer format to find information and model how to communicate what you know.

Keeping a science notebook encourages students to record and reflect on inquiry-based observations, activities, investigations, and experiments. Science notebooks are also an excellent way for students to communicate their understanding of science concepts, and for teachers to provide students with feedback.

Learn more about how very young children acquire the language and phonemic awareness skills that will help them become strong readers, warning signs of delayed development, and how parents can support their child's literacy skills through meaningful conversation and read alouds.

Find tips on how to read with your child from the time he is born, learn how to build comprehension and critical thinking skills during read alouds, browse our book-centered activity packs, and discover links to dozens of themed book lists.

By reading and writing about the lives of real scientists, students can learn more about the nature and history of science and how important scientific discoveries were made. Students may also begin to see themselves as scientists by trying on scientists' lives for size.

When students practice observing in science, they use their senses to collect information about objects and events related to a question, topic, or problem to solve in science. Learn some strategies to help students organize and analyze their data through presentations, sharing, and discussion.

When fiction and nonfiction books are integrated into the teaching of a content area such as science, graphic organizers are useful for organizing information and enabling students to classify observations and facts, comprehend the relationships among phenomenon, draw conclusions, develop explanations, and generalize scientific concepts.

Inquiry-based, discovery-focused science instruction is widely viewed as best practice today. Students learn science best when it is integrated with other areas of the curriculum such as reading, language arts, and mathematics. This includes reading textbooks, newspapers, magazines, online information, and children's and young adult literature, both fiction and nonfiction.

Children begin using their senses to recognize patterns and categorize things at a young age — skills that play an important role in early learning. This tip sheet provides some simple activities, as well as recommended books, that parents can use to help their kids build pattern recognition and categorization skills in science and math.

Go on an "ocean" reading adventure! Teachers can support reading together at home with Reading Rockets family literacy bags — designed to encourage hands-on fun and learning centered around paired fiction and nonfiction books. (Level: First Grade)

Thematic pairings of novels/short stories with movies can help students access difficult texts and can lead to deeper comprehension and lively classroom discussion. This article suggests pairings for some commonly assigned middle and high school texts.

The research is clear that children who don't read during the summer can lose up to three months of reading progress and that loss has a cumulative, long-term effect. The following resources and articles provide information about summer reading and summer learning loss. Plus you'll discover great activities to encourage kids to learn, read, and have fun in the summer sun.

Timelines are graphic representations of the chronology of events in time. While they are often used as a way to display information in visual form in textbooks as an alternative to written narrative, students can also become more actively engaged in learning the sequence of events in history by constructing timelines themselves.

Learning how to write individualized IEP goals is an important first step in developing your child's IEP. IEP goals should be SMART (specific, measurable, use action words, realistic, and time-limited) and based on research-based educational practice.

Go on a "rocks" reading adventure! Teachers can support reading together at home with Reading Rockets family literacy bags — designed to encourage hands-on fun and learning centered around paired fiction and nonfiction books. (Level: First or Second Grade)

Learn more about the English spelling system, how spelling supports reading, why children with dyslexia and dysgraphia struggle, which words should be taught, and instruction that works.

Young kids love technology, gadgets, and nature! While parents may be looking for ways to reduce screen time for their kids, here are a few helpful suggestions for integrating simple technology and books into your outdoor adventures in a fun and educational way.

This study of first and second graders looked at teacher-led read-alouds as a way to introduce science concepts. Results suggest that multiple exposures to a related concept across different stories gave students more time to build a mental representation of important ideas. This evidence suggests that moving beyond a single text as a source for building students' understanding is an important instructional approach.

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