Every year or so I run a post about what this blog is about. Here’s one from around this time in 2008.
This is as much for me to clarify and rethink my purpose for writing here as well as for readers.
Who Am I?
My name is Mathew Needleman and I’m the author of this blog. Sometimes I’m referred to as “the folks at Creating Lifelong Learners” but really it’s just me. I write this with occasional contributions from others which are credited when appropriate. I am a elementary teacher and a literacy coach working in LAUSD. The views presented here are my own and not necessarily those of my employer. I do not work for Open Cout Reading, I have a web site dedicated to supporting teachers who are teaching the program but I created that site on my own without the endorsement of the publisher.
This cost of hosting and running this blog is partially offset by generic advertisements that I run. If you don’t like the advertisements, the easiest way to get rid of them is to subscribe to the blog. The RSS feed runs ad-free.
What Is This Blog About?
If you arrived here from Open Court Resources, you may be expecting me to write exclusively about language arts. If you arrived here from Video in the Classroom, then you may be expecting me to write exclusively about video production.
I don’t teach either language arts or video production in isolation and so this blog reflects that. I try to balance my writing between the two but really I try to be more spontaneous than that. If something particularly is on my mind then there might be more posts about one than the other.
I also have more than a passing interest in classroom management, educational policy, and educational technology. These subjects appear in posts regularly.
Are there subjects that you’d like to hear more about?
I thank you for reading.
Dear Matthew,
I am a kindergarten teacher in Santa Ana and have struggled with this program over many years. Much of the literature is inappropriate and difficult for our children. I’ve noticed that very little has been presented for this grade level. I wondered why. OCR is a struggle for our teachers to implement with ELL’s and
we are always looking for ideas.
Dear Fran,
As you read above, I’m a teacher and I don’t represent the Open Court Reading program. All of the resources on the Open Court Resources site are submitted by teachers. So if there aren’t many resources then it’s because teachers haven’t submitted them.
If you’re talking about this blog, I do not teach kindergarten so I may not focus on it especially. However, last week, for example, I wrote no less than four articles about writer’s workshop which apply to kindergarten. If you go back a little further, there are articles on literacy help for parents, teaching comprehension strategies, and making movies in your classroom. I will consider opportunities to write about teaching kindergarten more directly in the future, however, all of these articles are applicable to the kindergarten classroom.