The end of the year is approaching quickly, and it’s a great time to celebrate progress, reflect on the learning, and start planning for the upcoming year! Thankfully, there are lots of great tools available to the Fountas & Pinnell community to help show off all the hard work you and your students have done!

Every classroom has a wide range of student needs, and the practices we use must allow us to be responsive to them. This is why guided reading is truly the anchor of literacy instruction. It requires teachers to know their students, the texts, and ways to respond to student needs that will move each child forward in becoming an independent reader.

A student’s growth is not a matter of luck or chance. It is brought about by informed instruction. Continual assessment provides the foundation for the assess-analyze-inform cycle of instruction. Assessment can be both formal and informal, and both can help to make good instructional decisions. Knowing HOW to use assessment data is a key to responsive teaching. Fortunately, the Benchmark Assessment System (BAS) resources provide a virtual pot of gold for helping educators know how to turn data into instruction that gets results!

It’s February, and love is in the air! This is the time of year when we often see significant growth in our early readers, and we all LOVE that! This time of year can also be disheartening if we don’t see the growth that we expect.

Noticing and responding to the literacy behaviors we see is a the heart of responsive teaching. The Literacy Continuum is a tool that helps to understand what behaviors to expect and notice at different stages of literacy development so that we can make better instructional decisions for students. This month, take some time and get to know The Literacy Continuum. You just might fall in love!

It’s hard to believe it is 2020, but here we are! With the new year comes new opportunities to help students succeed.

Assessment is a key component in our ability to equip our students with the tools they need. Assessment allows us to diagnose needs, evaluate progress, and even motivate students as they become aware of their development as readers and writers. As a new semester begins, it provides the perfect opportunity to administer mid-year assessments and determine the adjustments that may be needed as you move forward into the new year!