PD Event: Ahead of the Curve presented by Heidi Anne Mesmer

Grade Level: K-2

Price: $119

Credit: You will receive 3.75 general credit hours and 0.37 general CEUs.

Who Should Participate: Classroom teachers of grades K-2, literacy specialists, literacy coaches, administrators, and curriculum coordinators.

Date and Time: Three 75-minute sessions from 4:00pm to 5:15pm *Eastern Time (ET).

• Tuesday, October 22, 2024
• Tuesday, October 29, 2024
• Tuesday, November 5, 2024

*Please note that this webinar series is scheduled for Eastern Time (ET). If you are in a different time zone, please plan your schedule accordingly.

Overview

Effective teachers strive to stay ahead of the curve with research, yet keeping up can be overwhelming. Amidst the ongoing discourse on reading instruction methods, this workshop will translate reading science in ways that truly benefit the youngest (K-2) students. Led by Heidi Anne Mesmer, this workshop presents highly effective techniques for teaching phonics and reading multisyllabic words, as directly informed by the latest studies. Each session provides practical, classroom-ready tips to refine your teaching approach immediately. Join us to bridge the gap between research-based methodologies and classroom practice, enhance your impact as an educator, optimize student reading outcomes, and leave feeling undaunted!

Each of the three sessions will cover a major shift in K-2 literacy instruction and include a “Do It Tomorrow” component to use in the classroom.

Learning Objectives

SESSION 1 - Clarifying Context: What does research say about using context for word recognition?

• Understand three reasons why context-free, automatic word recognition is essential, even when someone is reading connected text. 
• Understand how skilled readers use context during text reading. 
• Do it tomorrow: Design a series of word prompts to support word recognition during text reading. 

SESSION 2 - Beyond Sound it Out: Research that supports recognizing ALL words

• Analyze the word recognition demands of different types of words including words with a) consistent spellings; b) consonant clusters; c) variable vowel spellings (great, meat, head) d) highly irregular patterns (debris, colonel), and e) morphologically complex words (incredibly, disheartening).
• Learn research-based word recognition strategies: left-to-right blending, vowel flexing, mispronunciation correction using a set for variability, and techniques for decoding big words. 
• Do it tomorrow: Design a word chain based on known vowel graphemes that adds in opportunities to vowel flex and decode inflectional and derivational suffixes along with compounds. 

SESSION 3 - Phonemic Awareness: How much? What skills?

• Review the range of phonological tasks and sound units found in standards and curriculum.
• Analyze the research that informs dosage, the sound units and tasks most closely aligned with learning, and research-based techniques. 
• Examine dosage research to inform the time devoted to phonemic awareness daily. 
• Do it tomorrow: Design a brief lesson sequence that supports appropriate tasks for decoding or acquiring letter-sounds.