Free and low-cost resources organized by topic areas
“A learning community shares and reflects on practice to enhance the learning of both students and teachers.”
Promising Literacy for Every Child: Reading Recovery and a Comprehensive Literacy System
RRCNA’s Professional Learning Toolkits help educators learn together while creating a shared vision and goals for literacy learning. The toolkits organize RRCNA’s videos, journal articles, audio files, and other resources by literacy topic areas.
The toolkits are designed as an extension of Promising Literacy for Every Child: Reading Recovery and a Comprehensive Literacy System, Second Edition (RRCNA, 2022). This guide connects self-evaluation tools with your staff’s current strengths and the essential components of a comprehensive literacy approach to promote high-quality literacy instruction for all children in your school.
Each toolkit suggests ways to involve your teaching staff and administrators in enhancing the comprehensive literacy system and should be adapted to meet the particular needs and interests in your school. Timeframes for each professional learning experience may vary, but most involve participation across several weeks.
Each toolkit is built around a guiding principle and includes session topics, free and low-cost resources including videos, reference guides, journal articles, web links, and audio files.
Available now to access and download
An Introduction to RRCNA Professional Learning Toolkits (PDF)
This two-page introduction provides background on the toolkits, guides leaders in setting priorities and expectations, and describes the resources and how to use them.
Toolkit #1 Assessing and Monitoring Children’s Literacy Behavior (PDF)
Assessment is central to knowing students’ progress and achievement. Emphasis is on assessing and monitoring literacy behaviors of primary-grade students over time.
Toolkit #2 Literacy Teaching and Learning (PDF)
All classroom literacy and intervention initiatives involve children in active, constructive learning during the process of reading and writing continuous texts.
Toolkit #3 Text Reading and Comprehension (PDF)
Because of the comprehensive nature of this topic, this toolkit differs from others in this library; it is divided into units that identify available resources for six topic areas: determining an instructional reading level, selecting the right texts, introducing texts, building understanding, phrasing in fluent reading, and general instructional support.
Toolkit #4 Writing (PDF)
The emphasis is on supporting children as they compose and write their own stories or texts. It is also about building a known writing vocabulary, hearing and recording sounds in words, constructing words from their parts, and using analogy to construct new words.
Toolkit #5 Oral Language (PDF)
The importance of oral language is well documented in research and through controlled observations with children.
Promising Literacy for Every Child: Reading Recovery and a Comprehensive Literacy System
A guide to support schools that are creating or examining current literacy plans is available through RRCNA.
Promising Literacy for Every Child: Reading Recovery and a Comprehensive Literacy System provides practical direction for assessing your school’s literacy practices, includes self-assessment tools for examining each of the six essential components identified, and shares ideas on how to design a plan to accomplish significant improvements in students’ literacy learning.
Suggestions for use
Learn how the guide came about and suggestions for use in this recent JRR article by Pat Scharer.
THE JOURNAL OF READING RECOVERY
Fall 2024
The Science of Language and Anti-Blackness: Accounting for Black Language in Reading Instruction, Interventions, and Assessment by Alice Y. Lee
Getting History Right: The Tale of Three-Cueing by Jeffery L. Williams
Unpacking the Science of Reading: A Collaborative Exploration of Research and Theories by Nancy Anderson, Katherine Mitchell, and Sheila Richburg
Transformations in Writing: Analyzing Structure and Vocabulary in Two Reading Recovery Students by Donita Shaw, Faith Winslow, Amy Dunn, Heather Cherry, Cheyenne Short, and Kris Piotrowski