Our Blog

Parents as Partners in Literacy

When we engage with families in literacy education, we send a message to students and parents alike that this learning matters. There is no shortage of rituals that educators can put in place to help rally the community and support important home and school connections.

Three Tools to Support Reading Comprehension with Jump Rope Readers or Any Book!

We all know how important it is to help readers build their comprehension skills. Yet sometimes, our usual methods need a boost to spark kids’ excitement and engagement. So, I’m sharing a few of my favorite tried-and-true strategies and tools to help students monitor for comprehension; make inferences; and envision while reading – guiding them on their journey to becoming active and proficient readers.

Staff Developer Spotlight: Lauren Gould

Get to know our wonderful Staff Developers as they share some of their favorite things! This week we are shining the light on Lauren Gould!

Leap into Literacy with Jump Rope Readers

All of us know that learning to read is hard work for kids, but we also believe that it should be joyful. So when we place those very first books into children’s hands, we have a great responsibility. For books to accomplish these goals, they must satisfy various criteria. They need to be interesting (so that students are motivated to read), comprehensible (so that students can understand the content), and instructive (so that students can learn key reading skills from them). This is a tall order that the Jump Rope Readers’ 66 high-interest decodable books and six accompanying read-alouds were specifically designed to tackle.

Ideas for Using Jump Rope Readers in the Classroom from Series Editor, Michael Rae-Grant

Jump Rope Readers support effective and efficient small group work. Before planning a group, you will want to match students with the right book. To do that, the document titled, “Matching Students to Jump Rope Readers,” explains how to use data from the Phonic Decoding Assessment to match students with books. This document is available on the online resources on Heinemann’s platform, Flight. Or, you can use another decoding inventory to determine what letter-sound correspondences students know and what kind of words they can read.

Staff Developer Spotlight: Phil Seyfried

Get to know our wonderful Staff Developers as they share some of their favorite things! This week we are shining the light on Phil Seyfried!

Celebrating Excellence: Our Partner Schools Earn Blue Ribbon Awards!

We are thrilled to celebrate the achievements of our partner schools that have recently been honored with the prestigious Blue Ribbon School Award! This recognition highlights these schools’ commitment to educational excellence and learning and reflects the hard work of their teachers, students, caregivers, and communities involved.

Staff Developer Spotlight: Cynthia Satterlee

Get to know our wonderful Staff Developers as they share some of their favorite things! This week we are shining the light on Cynthia Satterlee!

Building a Reading Community

Creating a community of readers matters. Especially at the beginning of the school year, it’s critical that you take time to build a classroom community full of respect, with appreciation for each person and all their differences, and with a commitment to kindness.

Reflections on Learning: Reflective Writing in the Classroom

Reflective writing can serve as a powerful tool to help students cultivate critical thinking, self-awareness, and a deeper connection to learning. We think of reflective writing as students thinking, talking, and writing about their learning experiences in a way that helps them to work with more agency and independence. This sort of thinking and writing can be powerful at any point in the learning process, and it can be especially useful at the end of units.

Teacher Toolkits: What They Are, and How to Use Them

In order to maximize flexibility and responsiveness, teachers can benefit from a toolkit filled with the tips, tricks, and resources they can use to support the diverse needs of their students. Our teacher toolkits are designed to help you do just that–respond to the challenges your students might face by providing some of the resources and instruction each child might need to accelerate their progress across a particular unit, and across the school year.

Staff Developer Spotlight: Sarah Mann

Get to know our wonderful staff developers as they share some of their favorite things. This week we are shining the light on Sarah Mann!

Paul Bloomberg Supper Club Highlights

Join Paul and Lucy as they unpack the complex issue of efficacy in the educational sphere and explore how educators, armed with salient evidence and data, can set attainable goals for their classrooms and their schools.

Maurice Sykes Supper Club Highlights

Maurice Sykes has decades of experience under his belt, advancing high-quality early educational reform, teacher professional development, advancement and compensation. Join Maurice and Lucy and their Supper Club guests as they discuss the challenges faced by educators today – challenges that include toxic stress, burnout and depression.

Engaging Caregivers in Their Child's Reading Development

Helping a child build a reading life is an honor… and a major undertaking. As teachers, we value the home-school connection for all aspects of learning, but perhaps most especially when it comes to reading. Research shows that inviting caregivers to establish or deepen reading relationships with their children has benefits that go far beyond the academic, from enhancing empathy to strengthening familial bonds. And because the work of learning to read involves a complex matrix of skills, increased practice outside the classroom is always a plus.

Staff Developer Spotlight: Jepilyn Matthis

Get to know our wonderful staff developers as they share some of their favorite things. This week we are shining the light on Jepilyn Matthis!

Steven Ventura Supper Club Highlights

Supper Club guest Steve Ventura is an expert in implementing effective professional development across schools, districts and non-profit organizations throughout the country. Join him, as well as Director of Publications at RWP-M, Katie Clements, and longtime principal of PS 249, Dr. Elisa Brown, as they discuss how to best help school based leaders instill a culture that's grounded in collective teacher efficacy, especially through work with achievement teams.

Letters From Lucy: New Frontiers in Reading and Writing Institute Reflection

In this 'Letter from Lucy', Lucy recaps the intimacy and experience from our in-person New Frontiers in Reading and Writing Institute in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Building a Classroom Library on a Budget

Every classroom teacher understands the immeasurable value of a well-stocked library. After all, one of the things growing readers need most is to spend lots of time reading lots of books! However, curating a classroom library can be a real challenge, especially with limited resources. Here are 5 ways you can build your classroom library on a budget.

Tim Rasinski Supper Club Highlights

Tim eats, sleeps and breathes fluency. For over four decades, he has been actively studying literacy and fluency, first as a classroom teacher and later as a professor of literacy education at Kent State University, where he is now a professor emeritus. Tim has devoted his career to the building of literacy and – having written over 200 articles and authored, co-authored or edited over 50 books or curriculum programs on reading education.

Essential Tips for Teaching Letter Writing to Young Students

From letters of recommendation to emails between friends to direct messages with strangers on social media platforms, strengthening written communication and letter writing practices is beneficial and relevant, perhaps now more than ever.

Naomi Shihab Nye Supper Club Highlights

About Supper Club guest Naomi Shihab Nye, the poet William Stafford has said: “her poems combine transcendent liveliness and sparkle along with warmth and human insight.” The same might be said of this award-winning Palestinian-American’s author’s intimate Supper Club talk with Lucy Calkins

12 QUOTES WE LOVE ABOUT WRITING

At The Reading & Writing Project at Mossflower, we love that the craft of writing can be harnessed as the sincerest form of storytelling. Through writing, we are able to express our innermost thoughts and share our creativity in order to better connect with others. In this post, we have compiled 12 quotes we love about writing.

Where to Find RWP-M Tools and Resources

This post is intended to walk you through where key pieces of information live across our channels (website, various social media, email, etc) so you always have access to the tools, resources, and documents you may need from us to support you.

Help Students Plan for Summer Reading

Much has been written about the importance of summer reading (and the risk of “the summer slide”). If you think of summer as Yuyi Morales does, you see “the days stretched out like a blanket of warmth and possibility,” and the chance for the school year’s learning not to slip away, but to deepen and expand. Summer reading can solidify skills, grow knowledge, and unlock passions. Reading is portable too–perfect for summer adventures near and far! Here are some ways to help students maintain their reading lives across the summer and beyond.

Matt de la Peña Supper Club Highlights

It’s not every day we get to hear the thoughts and inner workings of a thoughtful and brilliant writer, but this is exactly what we have the opportunity to do when we listen to this Supper Club conversation between New York Times bestselling and Newbery Medal winning author Matt de la Peña and Lucy Calkins

2024 Summer Institute Overviews

Yasmina, a colleague at RWP-M, walks us through the topics and details of each of our 5 Institutes this summer.

Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert Supper Club Highlights

Freddy Hiebert has been a pioneer in the field of literacy, advancing strong and evidence-based reading instruction over the course of her career. In this informal conversation with Lucy, Freddy discusses her thoughts and views on the vitally important issue of the teaching of reading.

Staff Developer Spotlight: Alicia Luick

Get to know our wonderful staff developers as they share some of their favorite things. This week we are shining the light on Alicia Luick!

Staff Developer Spotlight: Casey Maxwell

Get to know our wonderful staff developers as they share some of their favorite things. This week we are shining the spotlight on Casey Maxwell!

Empower Young Poets: A Teacher’s Guide to Boosting Poetry Writing

Whether you’re teaching poetry with our resources like our “Poetry: Writing, Thinking, and Seeing More” in the Grades 3-5 If…Then… Curriculum Guide, “Poetry: Immersion and Innovation” in the Grades 6-8 If…Then… Curriculum Guide, using our Grades 7-8 Curriculum Calendar, “How to Eat a Poem,” or designing your own poetry unit, we’ve got tips to help!

Staff Developer Spotlight: Jessica Mazzone

Get to know our wonderful staff developers as they share some of their favorite things. This week we are shining the spotlight on Jessica Mazzone!

Staff Developer Spotlight: Logan Fisher

Get to know our wonderful staff developers as they share some of their favorite things. This week we are shining the spotlight on Logan Fisher!

Features of New Writing Units of Study, Grades 3-5

In this post we are breaking down the new features of our Grades 3-5 Units!

5 Tips for Supporting Your Priorities Amid Budget Cuts

This post breaks down 5 different ways to help support your educators professional development while balancing the reality of budget cuts.

20 Quotes about Reading & Books

The gift of reading is so profound; the ability to share stories, recount history, and express emotions can help us build empathy for those around us. In this post, we have compiled 20 quotes about reading and books that inspire us.

Literacy Professional Development

Five Ways To Learn With The Reading & Writing Project

3 Tips For Students Reading Below Benchmark

Today we are sharing 3 tips to help your students who are reading below benchmark handle complex texts.

6 Tips to Writing a High-Scoring Extended Response

If you’re looking for some quick tips to make the extended response more approachable, you’re in the right place. Below are 6 strategies to help you and your students achieve a high score.

3 Comprehension Strategies for Reading

Here are 3 comprehension tips to help your readers approach test passages with confidence and to hold onto what’s most important.

Vocabulary Success: How Elfrieda Hiebert’s Four C’s Can Transform Your Classroom

This post breaks down best practices, built around Freddy Hiebert’s four C’s, that could help transform vocabulary learning in your classroom.

Rebalancing Literacy Instruction: Key Talking Points and Research

This post aims to establish more common ground between Science of Reading and Balanced Literacy, while also clarifying some of the ways in which the two approaches continue to differ.

AI Learnings in the Classroom

Last month, Holly Clark, a leader in technology integration and the author of The AI Infused Classroom, came to visit us for a few days at The Reading & Writing Project at Mossflower. This post shares our 3 takeaways from the session.

From Boxes to Bins: Unpacking Classroom Libraries

Wondering how to process your RWP-M classroom libraries as quickly and efficiently as possible?

Celebrating National Poetry Month

The poet Lucille Clifton said, “Poetry comes out of wonder, not out of knowing.” In honor of National Poetry Month, consider the power of poetry to capture the varied, nuanced, complex range of human emotions and experience.

Jump Rope Readers Are HERE!

Have you heard? Jump Rope Readers are here and ready for you to order now!