• 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

  • As we mentioned last week, we are working with Lerner Publisher to help them reorganize their catalog. We are also aligning their books to the Common Core State Standards. When we received ALL the Lerner books (about 1200 titles) we were quite excited by the quality. We were originally concerned that we would be trying [...]

  • Despite writing about balancing students’ reading diets, I have recently come to terms with the imbalance in my own reading life. While I read constantly and collect books like a mad woman hoarding canned goods for the end of the world, I read nonfiction almost exclusively. On a given day you will find 2-5 in-progress [...]

  • Monday The Query of Summer Readers: To Read or Not to Read In this post, we remind teachers to carve out time to talk about books as the school year draws to a close to inspire children to read over the summer. Tuesday Honing the Reading Radar with the Power of Suggestion In this post, [...]

  • Yesterday’s Thursday Thoughts have become today’s Friday Favorites, as the pseudo-summer schedule has thrown our internal clocks off. Time feels a little loose and, despite being busy with tasks, we are beginning to run into the summer luxury of occasionally forgetting what day it is. This week we have written about independent reading, both that [...]

  • As this school year winds down, I feel myself slowly exhaling as I downshift into a less frenetic pace.  I am very much looking forward to lazy days at the beach when I can poke around in some of the books that have accumulated on my night stand. I find that I have two categories [...]

  • As summer vacation beckons, we have been thinking a lot about summer reading.  In yesterday’s post, we mentioned the importance of continuing to share book blurbs and excerpts of books that might pique children’s interest and increase the likelihood that they will read over the summer. As we think about “salting” readers, we also turn our [...]

  • The end of the school year signals different things to different people, but if you’re at all like us, you might be thinking about the progress your students have made as readers and worried about what will happen to their good reading habits once you release them from your care. Your hope is that those [...]

  • Monday May Favorites In this post, we re-share the most popular blogs posted on Burkins and Yaris during the month of May 2013. Tuesday Educational Innovation: Pushing Ourselves to Go “Above and Beyond”   In this post, we share Peter Reynolds’s video “Above and Beyond” to inspire teachers to think more deeply about their beliefs about [...]

  • In this week’s posts, we introduced you to Maya and Charlie from Peter Reynold’s short film Above and Beyond. Thinking about these two characters set us about thinking about many things, one of which involves how we partner and pair students.   Traditionally, partnering students happens in one of three different ways: 1. The teacher [...]

  • Yesterday, we asked you to watch Peter Reynolds’s short video titled “Above and Beyond” and list the qualities you thought characterized Maya and Charlie. As we thought about these learners, our list evolved to look like this:   Maya Charlie observant innovative willing to take risks creative confident curious idea driven confident collaborative eager diligent [...]