ILA DIGITAL EVENTS

The pandemic, virtual and hybrid instruction, and the complexities of distanced, masked phonics instruction have produced a need to reimagine early literacy instruction.

In this ILA Webinar, Heidi Anne Mesmer, author of Letter Lessons and First Words: Phonics Foundations That Work, will highlight specific techniques that can be used to accelerate foundational skills instruction. Participants will learn which patterns to prioritize, which activities are both engaging and effective, and what time-consuming activities to avoid.

Heidi Anne Mesmer

Educators who understand the fundamentals of the reading process—meaning, sound, and spelling—are able to not only identify why reading difficulties arise but also know how to prevent them from happening.

During this ILA Webinar, author and educator Mark Weakland will explain the fundamentals of reading; link classroom instructional practices to interventions that benefit students who struggle; and explore the rich connections among meaning, sound, and spelling. Participants will learn engaging and effective activities and routines that will help them teach pre-K to grade 3 students the foundational skills they need for authentic reading.

Mark Weakland

No more talk about learning loss—it only reduces the impact that our expectations have on students’ learning. Instead, what if we talk about learning leaps? What if we identify where students are in their literacy learning and the critical skills that they must learn now to accelerate their performance in the future? And what if we raise our expectations for students rather than lower them?

In this ILA Webinar, Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey will discuss some of their biggest priorities as educators make the transition back to face-to-face learning.

What do decades of research tell us about the nature of comprehension and how to develop students’ comprehension in schools? Kia Brown-Dudley hosts a session with Nell K. Duke about the forthcoming article “The Science of Reading Comprehension Instruction,” coauthored with Alessandra E. Ward and P. David Pearson. Attendees will receive advance online access to the article and learn specific research-tested instructional practices for developing students’ understanding of text.