Resources
ABeCeDarian Videos
Visit the ABeCeDarian Reading Program channel on Vimeo.com and find a number of videos with detailed explanations and demonstrations of how to conduct ABeCeDarian lessons and some examples of typical student performance.
Useful and Interesting Links
The Reading League providesprofessional development to thousands of educators through bimonthly live events, and through an annual conference that features reading experts from across the US and around the globe. They also partner with individual schools and districts to disseminate research findings on approaches to teaching reading that achieve maximum instructional impact, and provide school-based coaches to support educators as they refine their practices.
International Dyslexia Association For basic information about reading disability, this site is an excellent place to start. Explore the content under the "Information" link at the top of the home page. There are also a number of outstanding, reasonably-priced pamphlets and books under the "Publications" link.
LD Online This site also contains excellent general information about reading disability in particular, as well as about all manner of learning difficulties.
Well-Trained Mind Interesting blog and forums for home-schooling families that complement the information contained in the book: The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Eduation at Home. Take a look at the link to Susan Wise Bauer's The Story of the World Series.
Core Knowledge Classics This is part of the Core Knowledge website associated with the cultural literacy proponent, E.D. Hirsch. One of Hirsch's central points is that reading comprehension requires a significant amount of background knowledge, and current teaching practice often emphasizes the development of comprehension skills at the expense of teaching essential content. This link takes you to a page offering classic texts suitable for use by fourth and fifth grade students.
QuickReads The QuickReads program makes an outstanding companion to ABeDeDarian. The QuickReads material provides an enormous amount of reading of topics in social studies and science for students in first through sixth grades. Each unit focuses on a particular, general topic such as . . .and each chapter is one-page long. The text has been designed to foster fluency development by having difficult vocabulary words repeated multiple times within each essay and unit.
Touchstones Touchstones is a discussion program developed in the 1980's by professors at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. The original materials were designed for high school students, but now they have programs for students of all ages. The mission of the Touchstones project is to build critical thinking, communication, and leadership skills through respectful and engaged discussion-based programs.
Word Generation Here you will find a relatively new middle school academic language program developed under the direction of Harvard University professor Catherine Snow. The program is designed to give students sustained exposure to the academic language they need for succes in school. Because the program is in development, the materials are currently available free of charge to schools will to discuss their experiences with the researchers.
Academic Word List Averil Coxhead developed this list as part of her work for a Master's thesis at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. The list contains 570 word families represent the words that occur in a wide range of academic texts from a variety of subject areas. The corpus of words used to develop the list included journal articles, book chapters, course workbooks, laboratory manuals, and course notes. Common and basic words were excluded from the list. An excellent resource to help teachers focus on the most important words for academic success.
Barchowsky Fluent Handwriting Barchowsky Fluent Handwriting is an outstanding handwriting program that teaches simple, easy to learn letter forms for manuscript with no change in letter formation when moving to cursive.
Good Books
Beck, Isabel, Margaret McKeown, and Linda Kucan. Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction (2002). New York / London: The Guilford Press. Blevins, Wiley.
Blevins, Wiley. Teaching Phonics & Word Study in the Intermediate Grades (2001). New York, NY: Scholastic.
Dehaene, Stanislas. Reading in the Brain (2009). New York, NY: Viking Penguin.
Dale, Edgar and Joseph O'Rourke. Techniques of Teaching Vocabulary (1971). Palo Alto, CA: Field Educational Publications, Incorporated.
Foer, Joshua. Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. (2011). London, England: Penguin Books.
Foorman, Barbara, Ed. Preventing and Remediating Reading Difficulties (2003). Baltimore, MD: York Press.
Henry, Marcia K. Unlocking Literacy: Effective Decoding & Spelling Instruction (2003). Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes.
Hochman, Judith and Natalie Wexler. The Writing Revolution (2017). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Boss.
Jones, Thomas Baldwin. Decoding and Encoding English Words (1997). Timonium, MD: York Press.
Lemov, Doug. Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College (2010). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Lemov, Doug, Erica Woolway, and Katie Yezzi. Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better (2012). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
McGuinness, Diane. Why Our Children Can’t Read (1997). New York, NY: The Free Press.
Seidenberg, Mark. Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can't, and What Can Be Done About It. (2017). New York, NY: Basic Books.
Shaywitz, Sally. Overcoming Dyslexia (2003). New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf.
Venezky, Richard L. The American Way of Spelling (1999). New York, NY: The Guilford Press.
Willingham, Daniel. Raising Kids Who Read: What Parents and Teachers Can Do. (2015). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass
Witt, Joe and Ray Beck. One Minute Academic Functional Assessment and Interventions. (1999). Longmont, CO: Sopris West.