Beginning Reads – Bringing Children into Reading

Back in the summer, a number of us from the Best Practices team had the opportunity to attend an early childhood education conference in Salt Lake City.  We brought back many, wonderful things that we have been able to share with teachers in our training sessions.

While at the conference, we had the opportunity to learn from Elfreida Heibert, a well-known and well-respected researcher in the literacy field.  She shared with us information about her latest work, the launching of Text Project.  There is an amazingly large amount of information and resources on the site, and one resource in particular may be of interest to many teachers of Georgia’s PreK: Beginning Reads.

From the website: “The Beginning Reads program supports teachers, parents, and tutors in bringing children into reading. Before children learn about written language, they have developed a substantial oral language word bank. The goal of Beginning Reads is to connect student’s oral language knowledge with written language. The texts do this by placing a premium on words that are both highly concrete and phonetically regular—words such as dog, cat, pet, and big. Each level has 12 4-page books that share a set of concepts, which allows young readers to see the same words in many different texts. Each book is provided as a double-sided PDF ready for printing.”

Possible Connections to Georgia’s PreK
Free books!  Even better, the books are great for those students who may have mastered many of the skills in the PreK Communication, Language, and Literacy domain and are ready to be introduced to some of the Common Core Georgia Performance Standards.