Greetings from the Learning Bridges Team!

We want to provide YOU with FREE resources and focus on special opportunities that might be helpful for your school improvement efforts.

We invite you to print the resources that you can use in your classroom or school. We also hope you will share the newsletter with your colleagues so that they might also receive the FREE resources. When it is possible, we will connect the resources to your state's content standards - whether those are research-based instructional strategies/interventions or parent activities.

We will feature one of the powerful online courses, an instructor, and a teaching resource - all connected to your state standards and assessments.

WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU!

When you try an instructional strategy, share a parent activity with parents, complete online professional development, or use one of the teaching resources, we hope you will come back and share your thoughts with us online. Read what other teachers have said, too!

We invite you to join our team as a Bridge to a New Way of Teaching and Learning!

Greetings from the Learning Bridges Team!

We hope you are keeping cool and finding time to enjoy yourself this summer. Many of you are already preparing yourselves for new challenges that you'll face next year. We've been preparing this summer too - for new teachers and schools to join the Learning Bridges team... from New York, Maryland, Arkansas, Michigan, New Mexico, California, Texas, and Hawaii!

New Learning Bridges! We've been putting the final touches on the new "look and feel" of the Learning Bridges System, creating a much more user-friendly desktop for teachers and administrators with everything in one place for you. It'll be ready when you come back to school. We're sure you'll like it.

Common Core Standards - Besides having the MOST effective instructional strategies aligned to State Content Standards and Assessments, they will also be aligned to the Common Core Standards when you return to school. For those of you who are using the Learning Bridges System to improve achievement, you have access to the alignment to the Common Core Standards as well as to your State Standards as we transition to new content. The new alignment of the Aligned Instructional Database will be complete!

As always, we'll be providing you monthly with a FREE instructional strategy to try out, a FREE parent activity to share with parents, a featured course, a featured resource, and featured instructor with an opportunity to discuss your experience with them. We'll include a relevant discussion item and hope you contribute your thoughts with your colleagues.

Read more

Featured Online Class - EDCI 607B – Classroom Management

EDCI 607B Classroom Management

Participants in this course will gain knowledge of and a rationale for utilizing positive classroom management techniques. This class will promote teaching students to become self-managers of their behaviors through classroom participation in procedures, expectations and consequences; problem solving; decision making and communication methods. In addition, teachers will gain an understanding of various causes of misbehaviors, appropriate techniques for dealing with those behaviors, and the impact that positive classroom management has on academic success.

Read more

FREE Instructional Strategy - Reading - Grade 1: Phonemic Awareness ES - 1.63

Standard: Concepts of Print

Benchmark: Phonemic Awareness - Develop ability to hear and say separate sounds (phonemes) in words (phonemic awareness) produce rhyming words, isolate consonant sounds, blend onset and rime, and blend spoken phonemes.

Phonemic awareness is the awareness that speech consists of sounds. It is critical to early reading instruction and a precursor to decoding. Providing students with stimulation in the form of storytelling, word games, and rhyming games are way to begin the process of this awareness. Teachers will want to move from rhyming words to smaller units of sound, and finally to the individual phonemes themselves. It is a natural part of language acquisition

This strategy will allow students to:

• Listen to and reproduce the blending of sounds (e.g., phoneme production, isolation, blending, rhyming, deletion,substitution)
• Recognize the relationship between print and speech.
• Interpret the meaning of symbols, sounds and words when reading.
• Blend and split syllables.
• Perform phonemic segmentation (e.g., counting the number of phonemes in a word)
• Perform phoneme manipulation. (e.g., adding or deleting a particular phoneme and generating a word from the remainder)

When using Phonological Awareness, the teacher will:

• Develop awareness of the connection between sounds and letters, presenting the letter and modeling the sound.
• Model the blending of separate sounds together to make words.
• Correct errors promptly with explicit instruction and modeling, sequencing reading tasks from easy to more difficult.
• Practice and review phonological tasks, according to individual student needs

For a sample lesson created by Sara Dennis-Shaw of Avon, Massachusetts as a recurring lesson...

Read more

FREE Parent Activity - Language Arts - Reading - Grade K

Language Arts - Reading- Grade K

Standard: Concepts About Print

There are many activities that parents can do with young children to support classroom lessons with this standard. Besides daily reading with children, parents can make learning about print fun. Children must first notice print and become interested in wanting to learn how to unlock the secrets that print holds. Children are surrounded by print in their daily lives - in video movies that they watch, on their breakfast cereal boxes, on the treats that they want to eat. Even preschoolers recognize these...

For two activities to share with the parents of your Kindergarteners...

Read more

Featured Instructor - Lynn Morrison

Hello Everyone! I am Lynn Morrison and I have facilitated professional development courses for Learning Bridges since 2006. With each course I teach I come away with new ideas and strategies to use in my own fourth grade classroom. Learning from other teachers is what it is all about!

I am a veteran elementary teacher of 33 years having taught every level from kindergarten to fifth grade! I currently teach fourth grade at a private school in The Woodlands, Texas, where I reside with my husband of 36 years. We moved to the Houston area eight years ago from Orlando, Florida, where I was a gifted resource teacher in the public schools for five years. My greatest honor was being awarded a Disney “Teacheriffic” award for innovative teaching in Florida schools.

Read more

Featured Teaching Resource - Best Practices for Teaching Reading

Enrich your reading instruction with 40 classroom-tested best practices from award-winning teachers!

Read more

Discussion Topic - What do YOU think?

Common Core Standards

Nearly half the states have adopted the Common Core Standards with little or no opposition. The learning expectations of the Common Core Standards emphasize both procedural and declarative knowledge, as well as higher level thinking skills Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation. Most State Standards now in existence now focus primarily on declarative knowledge at the Knowledge, Comprehension, and Application levels of the Taxonomy of Thinking. How is your district or state planning to transition to the new standards? What is the plan for supporting teachers in unpacking the standards and finding appropriate pedagogy to teach them? Do you feel ready to teach them? If not, what do you need to feel confident?

Read more