Tag Archives: Literacy By 3

Mock wedding ceremony joins math and reading at annual family night

Fleming Middle School recently hosted its annual Family Math Night for parents and students. This year’s event combined mathematics along with the district’s Literacy by 3 movement. The highlight of the evening was a mock wedding ceremony between “numeracy” and “literacy” in an effort to help parents and students understand how reading and math can be combined in the classroom to create academic success. Parents also got to actively participate in a variety of hands-on activities that reflected the daily work that their scholars are engaged in.

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Students learning how to pick ‘just-right’ books as part of Literacy by 3

HISD students learn the ‘five finger rule’ to ensure their selections aren’t too hard or too easy

HISD’s Literacy By 3 movement is now well underway, and teachers across the district are using fun and innovative methods to share critical concepts with students, such as the importance of choosing a “just-right” book to avoid frustration or lack of growth.

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District’s new literacy program reshaping student instruction

Fall is always a time for adjusting to new routines, as the regular academic year gets underway. But in HISD, many students also spent the first five weeks of the new school year adjusting to a new method of reading.

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“Principled habits,” which are a part of the district’s Literacy By 3 movement, are designed to allow students to build literacy skills independently while their teacher works with smaller groups of students. Continue reading →

Literacy By 3 gets a boost at Neff with donation of 4,500 books

HISD’s Literacy By 3 movement got a big boost on Oct. 31, when four organizations joined forces to help students at Neff Early Learning Center start or build a home library.

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The Greater Houston First Book Volunteer Board (GHFB), partnering with Disney, First Book National, and the Rotary Club of Sharpstown, distributed 4,500 books to Neff students that day, with each student receiving seven books to take home. Continue reading →

Rodriguez ES and Student Assessment prove good neighbors also make good reading buddies

Betty Garcia from HISD’s Student Assessment Department reads aloud from “Nugget & Fang,” by Tammi Sauer, to Rodriguez ES students.

On the last two days of every work week, between the hours of 11 a.m. and 1 p.m., you’ll find members of HISD’s Student Assessment Department making their way across the busy intersection of Chimney Rock and Glenmont.

Why are they braving the lunch hour traffic? To get to Rodriguez Elementary School, on the other side of the street.

Last month, Rodriguez Principal Elena Martinez-Buley launched a new Reading Buddy Partnership with Student Assessment in support of the district’s Literacy By 3 movement, and now, more than a dozen volunteers from that department visit the school twice a month to read to students during their lunchtime. Continue reading →

Fifth-graders learning the difference between texting, every day, and academic language

ALIAS vocabulary program helping students build literacy skills, understand the concept of ‘code-switching’

For students to be successful in the Digital Age, they must learn to distinguish between the abbreviated syntax they use in texting, the casual way they speak to their friends in person, and the more formal style of communication called for when writing school essays or drafting a business memo.

Fifth-graders at more than three dozen HISD elementary schools will soon be making those distinctions while building their academic vocabulary this year, thanks to a partnership the district forged with two educators from Harvard University. Continue reading →

Teachers get tips on maximizing resources at Personalized Learning Institute

The first day of school is right around the corner, but teachers are still busily preparing for its arrival, learning about the many new resources available to them and their students at the Personalized Learning Institute (PLI).

The annual event, which concludes this week, provides content-specific training to teachers at each grade level in advance of the new school year. The 2014 Institute also featured an overview of the district’s Literacy By 3 initiative, a new approach to reading instruction. Continue reading →

Meet HISD’s new Literacy Director, Cindy Puryear

On June 9, Cindy Puryear became HISD’s new director of literacy. We sat down with her recently to talk about how she overcame her own reading difficulties as a young person, when she first knew she would be a teacher, and what her goals are for the first year of Literacy By 3. Following is a condensed transcript of that conversation.

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Consistency, support make all the difference in HISD’s Literacy By 3 initiative

HISD’s focus on literacy may be nothing new, but according to Elementary Curriculum & Instruction Officer Lance Menster, many components of the district’s Literacy By 3 initiative are.

“The difference is in the districtwide alignment and the resources and support that will be available,” said Menster. “This is one of the most exciting things happening right now in HISD.”

Menster appeared alongside Elementary Reading Manager Malene Golding in the July 2014 edition of HISD Up Close (a district TV program hosted by the Board of Education President Juliet Stipeche) to discuss Literacy By 3 and to talk about what sets it apart from the district’s previous literacy efforts.

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Reading Institutes preparing teachers to make the most of Literacy By 3

This summer, thousands of HISD elementary teachers are boning up on the best ways to conduct Guided Reading lessons, manage their students’ independent reading efforts, and even set up their own classrooms to better facilitate learning, as a part of the district’s new Literacy By 3 initiative.

The office of Professional Support and Development is offering multiple sessions of a four-day Reading Institute to teachers in grades K-3 over the next three months so that they’ll be ready to hit the ground running when regular classes resume again in August. Continue reading →