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  • Welcome to Literacyhead!

    A Literacyhead is someone who is intensely serious about exercising creative literacy, making connections across multiple literacies, pursuing thoughtful literacy as an individual and as a teacher, and constantly searching for ideas. Literacyheads may have expertise in different areas of literacy, but all are committed to children's literacy, passionate about the arts, incessant thinkers, and display a propensity for having fun

  • What is Literacyhead?

    We wanted to help teachers nurture their creative lives while they meet the demands of high accountability to which they are subject. We saw that art naturally differentiates lessons leading to more student engagement and less time planning. We love children's books and art, and the connections between the two make us positively giddy.
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  • Vocabulary Lessons

    In our "Visual Vocabulary" we select five words from a featured book in our Reading Lessons and provide four images that illustrate the meaning of each word. In accordance with vocabulary research, three of the images are examples of the word's meaning and the last one is a "non-example." In addition, we present a definition simple enough for students to remember and really "get" what the word means.
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  • High-frequency Word Lessons

    Here we've created sets of images and discussion prompts designed to help you teach high-frequency words with visual art. Use the six images and accompanying sentences to make concrete connections to these abstract words. These lessons pair wonderfully with vocabulary words, reading lessons, and writing lessons.
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Our Blog

  • Four Advantages to “Real Books” Over E-books

      Summer is here and we know how teachers will spend their summers. While some time will be spent unwinding, relaxing, and enjoying their families, most teachers will also spend a chunk of their summer thinking about next year! From reading a book about writing conferences to reconsidering your room arrangement, next year begins before [...]

  • Weekend Round Up May 17

    Monday The Power of Memorable Learning Experiences In this post, we compare traditional methods of building background knowledge to using read aloud to engage students in learning new content. Tuesday Building Background Knowledge: Who’s Doing the Work?  In this post, we explore our pre-Common Core approach to helping students negotiate difficult text and consider the [...]

  • Thursday Thought: Who’s Doing the Work

      This week, we have been reflecting on building background knowledge and how to support students without shouldering the weight of the work (and the learning). On Tuesday, we raised the question, Who’s doing the work? As we look back on old posts, we realize that certain questions surface as themes for us and this [...]

  • Building Background Knowledge: Harnessing the Power of the Internet

        In yesterday’s post, Building Background Knowledge: Who’s Doing the Work?, we shared a story of fifth grade students working with Cyrus Cassells’s “Soul Make a Path Through Shining,” a sophisticated poem about the Civil Rights Movement. Containing words like “minotaur,” “hydra-headed,” and “maelstrom” the difficult vocabulary presented itself as the most obvious obstacle [...]

  • Building Background Knowledge: Who’s Doing the Work?

    In yesterday’s post, The Power of Memorable Learning Experiences, we discussed the importance of building background knowledge by searching for companion texts to read aloud and share with students.  As we continue to think about this idea, we have a question for you: How many times have you read something and thought to yourself, “I [...]

  • The Power of Memorable Learning Experiences

    Oftentimes, as teachers, we face the dilemma of wanting students to read an article or story when we know they have little or no background knowledge about the topic. For example, maybe we’d like to share Patricia Polacco’s Pink and Say with students. We want them to marvel at the relationship between Pinkus and Sheldon, [...]

  • Weekend Round Up May 10

    Monday April Favorites 2013 This post describes our most popular posts for April 2013. These posts drew the most traffic to the site and were tweeted the most during the month of April. Tuesday The Quintessential Learner In this post, Kim recounts a story she heard Gail Boushey and Joan Moser tell about meeting Donald [...]

  • To Be Decodable or Not to Be Decodable

    by Jan Burkins Having crossed the bridge from emergent to somewhat fluent, my fourth and last son seems to have made it to the other side of learning to read. All early signs indicated that it was likely that he would be successful with the literacy milestone, but with each child I have harbored the [...]

  • Them’s Fightin’ Words

    When one thinks of the divisions in education or of the reasons educators bicker over pedagogical issues, we are hard pressed to come up with a more contentious topic than that of phonics instruction. No Child Left Behind placed explicit phonics instruction front and center. In contrast, the authors of the Common Core State Standards [...]

  • The Quintessential Learner

    A couple of years ago I saw the sisters, Gail Boushey and Joan Moser, present at the New York State Reading Association conference.  They shared many great ideas and teaching strategies that day, but the thing that stuck with me most is a story that they told about a chance encounter they had with the [...]

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