Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff!

FREE online resources and downloadable programs for learners and their teachers.

Right on the heels of my last post about a wonderful early literacy resource, here’s another one. This one uses a wiki, the quintessential Web 2.0 application, for a collaborative approach to developing and sharing reading curriculum.

Free Reading is a wiki built on the Mediawiki platform, and it provides a forum for creating and sharing early literacy resources. There is already an impressive foundation here with great growth potential.

The Free Reading community defines itself as:

“…an ongoing, collaborative, teacher-based, curriculum-sharing project. We’re looking to provide a reliable forum where teachers can openly and freely share their successful and effective methods for teaching reading in grades K-1.

The stated underlying premises of the project are clear:

• The research on how students learn to read is well-established.
• The research on which instructional techniques work is well-understood.
• The voices of those who know what works best — the classroom teachers — are rarely heard in instructional design.
• The power of “we” is far greater than the power of “you” or “I. (underlining added)

Free Reading is truly an open source curriculum development community. The wiki already contains a repository of links to relevant research, a complete 40 week K-1 reading intervention program, phonics activities, vocabulary development exercises based on quality children’s books, audio and video supports, and more.

This is a community that welcomes participation. It is worth a look by anyone involved in teaching early literacy.  If you teach early literacy, this may even be a place where you want to invest.  In my own experience, there is nothing more rewarding than sharing!