Summer is a great time to refresh your skills or expand them. Annenberg Foundation has a great selection of free classes for teachers such as Learning how to help students in grades 3-5 engage with literature; expand writing skills in grades 9-12 or how to improve your teaching of reading. For those of you who teach other content areas in addition to literacy, there are also excellent choices in other content areas as well. You can view the workshops using their VoD technology and be ready to apply your new skills when you return to school in the fall. Check out their classes at Annenberg Foundation . If you need college credits, for a fee you can also earn college credits as well. These are informative and nicely designed classes that can definitely add to your professional knowledge over the summer.

Children love to be read to so a great way to expose children to a plethora of wonderful language that can build those verbal skills is by having them listen to stories online or on their iPods. Listening to oral stories can also strengthen visualization skills in young children. There are many free podcasts and even phone aps on iTunes that you can download for children to enjoy over and over again. Two of my favorite websites for great primary stories are www.storynory.com and www.thestoryhome.com. Both of these websites have wonderful selections of oral stories that can help stretch imaginations and build those important vocabulary skills. Be sure to check out the wonderful materials available there.

A great way to build student interest in words is to develop as a class an oversized or “Big Book” class thesaurus. Throughout the year as students learn new words, have them look them up and generate some additional synonyms for each word. This can help students expand both reading skills as they search for new words and think about their meanings, but also enhance writing by learning about the subtle shades of meaning for various words. The students love making the book and finding new words. It is also a great way for English Language learners to expand their understanding of English words as well.

Students who have difficulty seeing relationships may also have trouble drawing conclusions, making predictions or drawing inferences. Teachers can help students develop their abilities to see patterns and relationships by giving students many opportunities to classify and visualize data. Classification activities can be as simple as asking students to create a simple wheel with spokes to generating a complex concept map. Once students have organized the information, be sure to have them explain the relationships and why they organized the data in the way they did.

The research is strong that parents are helpful allies in building children’s literacy skills if they know what to do to help the teacher. Since many teachers are now meeting with parents for parent-teacher conferences, this is a good time to think about the literacy growth each child is making and how to strengthen that partnership.

A complaint that I often hear from parents is that they want teachers to provide them with more direction on exactly what a child’s strengths and weaknesses in reading are and what they can do to help. Parents often need some specific directions on how to do more than just “listen to the child read.” As you think about your upcoming meetings with the parents of your students, try to think about 1 or 2 strategies that you can share with each parent about their child’s reading skill needs. Would practice with flash cards be helpful? Does the child need to practice sounding out words? What skills can you quickly share with the parent that would increase the support the parent is able to provide to the child on a regular basis.

When home and school communicate about the child’s specific behaviors and needs, the child stands to make much greater gains than when parent and teacher each operate independently. So, take a few minutes to reflect on the needs of each child and how you can communicate these needs during your up coming parent-teacher conferences.