Over the past several weeks many schools have begun formal distance learning plans with their students. Resources abound and it’s not always clear to what extent these align with evidence-based practices. We wanted to share a few resources with you that we trust.

FreeReading provides a library of actual sequenced, systematic instruction and other curricular resources for literacy development. It was developed by a reliable group of researchers and practitioners and adheres to the science of reading.

There are two links at the top left of the home page (Find Activities and Teaching Tools) that offer a wealth of instruction and resources. The Teaching Tools link provides an organized week by week set of lessons, while the Find Activities provides separate activities taken from the same sequence.

UFLI Virtual Teaching Resource Hub provides assistance to teachers as they explore new ways to teach foundational reading skills using technology.  The site has tools for reading instruction and intervention with children in the elementary grades. The materials are designed to be used with videoconferencing platforms for distance education and to create video lessons for asynchronous learning.

Resources from Achieve the Core

• Foundational Skills Practice Strategy resource: This document is filled with free, open-source activities to support K-1 foundational skills practice.
• Text Set Guidance: This two-page guidance document shares several sources of free text sets as well as guidance on how to use them.
• K-8 Learning Activities for Math: A curated selection of grade-level-specific math activities (enough for four weeks of remote learning) that support a balance of conceptual thinking and reasoning, fluency practice, and application.
• Math Modeling Tasks: Help students see the practical ways they can use their math skills to solve complex challenges in the real world.

Sites to help develop world knowledge

• The Best National Parks to Visit—Virtually
• Smithsonian for kids
• Museum Tours (by museum)