Entertain Your Brain Blog

Family Literacy

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 9 Jan 2008 10:43:00 -0800

You have probably heard of the term “family literacy”, but what does it really mean as it relates to your child’s development as a reader and writer? In addition to the blog below that addresses "family literacy", we encourage you to listen to our podcast that relates to this subject.

What happens in your home is so important to your child’s development as a member of the literacy community. The environment in which your children are raised impacts them in so many ways, especially as they are learning to read and write. Do you have books available on your bookshelves? Do your children see you reading? Do you take your children to the library? Do you give your children books as gifts? Do you read aloud to your children everyday? Do you make writing materials available to your children? Reading is Fundamental gives some good guidelines for creating a reading environment at home. If you really want to give your home an evaluation, download this checklist from Get Ready to Read and see how literacy-friendly your home is. Use the results from the checklist to make simple changes in your home that will make big differences in the literacy development of your children. For a really fun activity, click on Scholastic’s virtual tour to see all the ways you can include literacy activities in your home.

Some things you can start to do right away are to build a family library, encourage your child to set up a personal library, subscribe to a children’s magazine, listen to audiobooks in the car, and choose just the right books for reading aloud for children of all ages.

You are your child’s first teacher. The best activity you can engage in to foster literacy development is to read aloud to your children. They learn that reading is an enjoyable activity, and they associate the reading with their relationship with you. They learn how stories work. They gain valuable background knowledge that will help them with comprehension. They build a repertoire of known stories. They expand their vocabulary knowledge. United Through Reading offers some good resources on reading aloud to your children. Watch this informational video from Get Ready to Read for some ideas for reading, listening, and writing ideas that you can easily do with your children. Colorin Colorado offers some excellent ideas for reading with your children too. ProfessorGarfield.org can be an important part of your family literacy activities. You can read along and enjoy the Garfield comic strips with your children in the Reading Ring where your child can practice comprehension and sequencing. You can help your child defeat another player in the G-Cubed trivia game where background knowledge can be built.

Early reading skills of phonemic awareness and phonics can be practiced in interactive game formats in Orson’s Farm and the Fishing with Phonics games. If you need some print materials, visit the Easy Readers section of the site and print out wonderfully engaging stories for your children to read over and over again. You can even have them color the illustrations. Don’t forget to print out and play the bingo games and play memory with the word cards to build sight vocabulary. For writing practice spend some time creating a comic strip with your child in the Comics Lab. Visit the Word Wall section of the site for alphabet letters and simple ABC books. Finally, for Science, Social Studies, Language Arts, and Math activities, there are enough activities to last all day in the Knowledge Box section of the site. Please make literacy an important part of your everyday activities. Enjoy the time you spend reading, talking, and writing with your children, and let Professor Garfield help you in fostering the literacy development of your children in fun and exciting ways!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 2 Oct 2007 11:32:00 -0700

Welcome to the ProfessorGarfield.org Blog! I hope you didn’t miss the first entry, but if you did, you can access it from the Blog Archive in the right frame. In this entry, I will give you some information about the Professor Garfield Teachers’ Lounge, a place where you could get (happily) lost for hours! We also encourage you to listen to the new podcast that accompanies this Blog.

Purpose of the Teachers’ Lounge

The purpose of the Teachers’ Lounge is to provide free, user-friendly, and standards-based learning materials for the classroom teacher, parent, tutor, or mentor. The materials are intended to support and supplement the ongoing work of the classroom teacher by providing level materials that are retrievable by grade level or standard.

Grade Levels

The materials on the Professor Garfield site range from grades pre-kindergarten to eighth grade in terms of difficulty. Please use these grade indicators only as suggestions. That is, feel free to try the activities with children who are both older and younger than the suggested grade level. If you are a teacher, using the activities “out-of-level” is an efficient way to differentiate your instruction.

We have posted this graphical site overview to display a broad perspective of the subject matter covered on the Professor Garfield site. You might find it helpful to print it out and keep a copy on your desk as you write your lesson plans. The Graphical Site Overview is interactive, providing a direct link to the various sections of the site. The upper portion of the flowchart outlines the curricula covered in the kids' section of the Professor Garfield site, while the lower section reflects the content addressed in the Teachers' Lounge portion of the site.

Standards

Due to the variability of state academic standards, we have chosen to link the activities on ProfessorGarfield.org to the standards developed by Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL). The McREL standards are a compendium of a number of related documents produced by organizations such as the International Reading Association and the National Council of Teachers of English, and thus represent a synthesis of vital standards and benchmarks for student achievement in reading. We feel that teachers using the content provided on the Professor Garfield.org website could easily match a McREL standard or benchmark to one within the prescribed standards for their locale. In addition, using a universal format allows teachers to have a common framework that will facilitate collaboration across state and international boundaries.

Professional Development

Our hope is that in addition to interactive activities for children and high-quality instructional materials, we can provide a measure of professional development for educators who are using the Professor Garfield site. For each of the major collections of activities and materials on the site, such as Orson’s Farm, The Garfield Think Aloud Series, and the Easy Reader Books we have provided instructions, a teacher’s guide, or some lesson plans to make your use of the materials easy, efficient, and beneficial for children. When possible we also offer assessment materials, such as the review questions and story retelling checklist for the books in the Garfield Think Aloud Series.

Finally, in each Teacher’s Guide we offer extensive helpful Internet links and recommended reading in case you want to learn more about an area of literacy development. You can also find those Internet links listed by topic under the Educational Links button in the left frame.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 11:46:00 -0700

Welcome!
Welcome to the ProfessorGarfield.org Teachers’ Lounge Blog! We are glad you found us! The Teachers’ Lounge section of ProfessorGarfield.org is where we offer user-friendly and standards-based learning materials for the classroom teacher, parent, tutor, or mentor.

The ProfessorGarfield.org (PGO) Blog is where we will offer current and helpful information about how you can support literacy learning using the materials and activities available on the ProfessorGarfield.org site. The PGO Blog is a place you will want to visit often to see what’s new on the PGO site, to give us some feedback, and to read what other educators have to say about how they are using materials and activities at ProfessorGarfield.org.

Blog Basics

If this is your first time reading a blog, here is a little information about what a blog is. Blog is short for weblog, which is defined by Wikipedia as “… a website where entries are written in chronological order and displayed in reverse chronological order.”

Because we will be posting new entries on a regular basis, reading the ProfessorGarfield.org Blog is an efficient way keep up-to-date about literacy and about how to supplement your reading instruction in our interactive learning environment. Blog entries will often be accompanied by an educational podcast, like this one, that will supplement the information on the blog.

One of the important features of any blog is the ability to interact with the writers and readers of the blog. You can do this through posting comments and reading the comments that accompany each entry. Let us know how you are using the activities and materials on the PGO site. Let us know what other types of activities you would like us to include. Ask us questions about the materials. Voice your opinion. We would love to hear from you!

Blog Creators

Susan Tancock, Ph.D.

My name is Susan Tancock, and I am one of the producers of the content for the ProfessorGarfield.org Teachers’ Lounge. I am a Professor at Ball State University where I teach literacy courses in the Department of Elementary Education. My teaching background includes working with struggling readers. I became involved in producing materials for ProfessorGarfield.org because I believe technology offers a motivational way to engage even the most reluctant reader. Add to that the appeal of Garfield, and you have a winning combination!
I will be writing the PGO Blog, so feel free to send me any comments you have about what I have written. I hope we will all learn from the blog.

Mike Putman, Ph.D.

My name is Mike Putman, and I am also one of the producers of the content for the ProgfessorGarfield.org Teachers’ Lounge. I am an Assistant Professor at Ball State University where I teach education courses in the Department of Elementary Education. My teaching background encompasses preschool through sixth grade. As I am interested in technology with an emphasis on literacy, working on ProfessorGarfield.org offered me a unique opportunity to combine my interests and produce content I hope you will find useful in your classrooms.
I will be creating the podcasts for the PGO Blog. While podcasts are a relatively new phenomenon in education, I believe they offer unique opportunities for teachers and students to take advantage of out of school time to continue learning.

TechnoStuff

We don’t want you to miss a single blog entry or podcast. All you have to do is click on the "Subscribe Now!" button at the top/right hand portion of this web page. Then just select the icon that represents the way you would like to receive this blog and podcast.