Altitude Check – Developing Early Literacy Skills is Essential to Later Student Success
Developing Early Literacy Skills – Building A Strong Foundation for ‘High Flying’ Learners The Thomas B. Fordham Institute recently released a study entitled “Do High Flyers Maintain Their Altitude? Performance Trends of Top Students.” I was intrigued to look through the findings since the education world often seems more compelled to study low-performing students rather than those at the upper end. With so many government initiatives focused on increasing the performance of struggling students, I can certainly understand...
read moreA New Activity Page for Your Young Explorers!
We have a new activity page for your kids today! Today’s page features a friend from our Fluency Level III series of books. Kids always love glow-in-the-dark creatures, and we know yours will have a great time making art with today’s free download! This Activity Page is From ‘Firefly Forest’ a Fluency III...
read morePlaying with Purpose to Save Kindergarten
Several of my Ooka Island colleagues were able to travel to the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) conference this past week in Florida. There, they got to share the Ooka Island Adventure with hundreds of education professionals as well as attend events like the keynote speech by renowned educator and author Vivian Gussin Paley. Ms. Paley’s address was entitled “Who will save the kindergarten?” and focused on what she sees as the lamentable loss of play-centered early childhood education. With the...
read moreIt is Wonderful Wednesday on Ooka Island! (Free Activity Page)
We have a new activity page for your kids today! And we bet they’ll get a kick out of seeing Kayla jumping into a giant leaf pile! Hopefully you too have had a chance to enjoy some wonderful fall weather. Get out there and rake up your own giant leaf pile and jump in! It is the first Wonderful Wednesday of fall, after all! The image is featured in an Ooka book from the Beginning Book Collection, ‘The Leaf...
read moreMotivational Tools
Spend even just a few minutes with us on Ooka Island and you’ll notice that we love to give incentives and rewards to our Ooka Adventurers. We know that children benefit greatly from encouragement along their hero mission, and also love to see proof of their accomplishments. That’s why we developed–in addition to all the in-game components offering positive reinforcement–a collection of downloadable motivational tools for parents and teachers to use! Our motivational tool collection includes printable Book...
read moreReading Instruction for At Risk Children
THE WHITE PAPER Reading Instruction for At-Risk Children, on Ooka Island What does effective reading instruction look like? The National Reading Panel, which conducted the most comprehensive evidence-based review of research on how children learn to read, determined that effective reading instruction includes the following: Teaching children to break apart and manipulate the sounds in words (phonemic awareness), Teaching them that these sounds are represented by letters of the alphabet which can then be blended...
read moreThe Ooka Island Adventure Featured in
Scholastic Parent and Child
Check out Ooka Island in the November, 2011 Print Issue of Scholastic Parent and Child! “Scholastic Parent and Child magazine knows that motherhood is a role of a lifetime. But we also understand that mom defines herself as so much more. Our creative content helps mom nurture, support, and advocate for her whole family both at home and in school while also providing the woman inside with inspired thinking to meet her own needs. Each issue of Scholastic Parent and Child features practical articles on child development, health and...
read moreOoka Island At NAEYC 2011
Tomorrow, Ooka Island will be taking off to Orlando to attend and exhibit at the annual NAEYC conference. NAEYC conferences bring together early childhood educators representing many roles — teaching staff, program administrators, students, researchers and teacher educators — to discuss the latest ideas and learn from one another. The NAEYC Annual Conference & Expo is the largest early childhood education conference in the world, where tens of thousands of educators choose from hundreds of presentations and exhibits. The...
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