Oh my goodness, can we at Alive Studios
just tell you guys how much fun we had at NAEYC’s Annual Conference! It was so awesome. We got to see and meet so many dedicated educators, it was truly inspiring. For all in attendance we hope you guys were able to get to Follett’s booth and see Letters Alive in action. We offered TWO Letters alive giveaways while there and had a phenomenal turnout for both giveaways.
Our first winner was Nikki Moeller from Victoria, TX. Nikki is one of three Pre-K teachers at Hopkins Magnet Academy. Victoria is a town whose population is majority Hispanic, with the town’s major employment industry being manufacturing. Historically many of Victoria’s students have underperformed in the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS), with African American children and children with special needs performing below state average in reading. A program like Letters alive has the opportunity to bring great value to Ms. Moeller’s classroom.
Ms. Moeller in previous years applied through adoptaclassroom.org for additional funding for supplies. As many know school budgets are being reduced throughout the country. Alive Studios giveaway at NAEYC will provide this classroom with an engaging program that can supplement their established reading curriculum and help to engage the students who maybe falling between the cracks.
Letters alive offers a supplemental reading curriculum that can help to engage all student and give academically at risk children a better chance at success. With the use of augmented reality this program helps to give early learners a better foundation for reading comprehension and helps to build a strong academic foundation, which is essential for success.
Congratulations again to Nikki Moeller and her lovely Pre-K class.Letters alive has found a good home!
The average teacher spends up to $1,000 of their own money on supplies for students every year. Adopt A Classroom allows crowdfunders to partner with a teacher to ensure students have what they need to succeed. Here’s how it works:
Kickstarter and IndieGoGo are the two most popular crowdfunding sites on the internet, however, none focus specifically on education. We’ve heard mixed reviews from teachers using these tools and the one thing they all have in common is this: both crowdfunding tools draw far more out-of-network (possible donors who you did not invite, who found you because they were searching for similar projects or stumbled across you on the home page) traffic than education-specific pages. The main difference between the two? IndieGoGo allows you to capture funds from projects that do not make their total fundraising goal, while Kickstarter will only release a fully-funded project.
Sharon Campbell recently retired from an illustrious teaching career of over 30 years. Her teaching story stretches from Napa County Juvenile Offender programs, to alternative high school, to Youth Employment programs, and on to her last stretch of 23 years was as a Middle School teacher. Winner of several A+ for Education grants, she is best known for designing classrooms that meet the needs of today’s students. Her spacecraft (classroom) was used as the model for Project Based Education at the Global Educator’s conference in London, and featured in the Taiwan Commonwealth Educators Journal. In 2009, she was named California School Master: the oldest most prestigious California education award.
“The scores from the AIMSweb® Letter Naming and Letter Sound Fluency Assessments (the quantitative data from this study) suggest that the Letters alive® curriculum positively impacts students’ early literacy skills. 100% of students in the full implementation classroom experienced gains on the Letter Naming Fluency Assessment, while 84.2% of students in the partial implementation classroom experienced gains on that assessment, followed by only 78.6% of students in the classroom with no exposure who experienced gains on the Letter Naming Fluency test. Additionally, 100% of students in the full implementation classroom and the partial implementation classroom experienced gains on the Letter Sound Fluency Assessment, while only 64.3% of students in the classroom with no exposure experienced gains.”
The most common reason teachers believed the Letters alive curriculum had been so effective was its power to engage even those students with the most notable attention difficulties. One pre-K teacher even admitted that it was nearly impossible to use the augmented reality features of Letters alive with a single student without catching the attention of the entire classroom.