Resources for Families & Educators
From Pushing Back to Driving Learning: Understanding the Engagement Continuum
From pushing back to driving learning, engagement isn’t just about following directions—it’s a continuum from resistance to full ownership. When we plan professional learning on positive and engaged learning communities, we know that we have to engage our teachers, and ‘walk the walk’.
Readalouds, podcasts, and more for families
Teachers say "read with your child every day" and we all know this is important for language and literacy development. But busy families ask "when!?" And "how!?". These resources (in English and in Spanish) are mostly audio that you and your children can listen to in the car, while cooking dinner, or waiting to pickup siblings.
From Exhaustion to Empowerment: Strengths-Based Behavior "Management" for All Educators
Too often, the children with the highest academic needs spend the least time in class. We have developed a process to understand, prevent, and address challenging behavior - with dignity. Based on our experience and outside research, this process can support or jumpstart a program- or school-wide system of support.
Grounding Word Analysis Through Nature Journaling
Field journaling is a tool for closely observing and documenting natural phenomena in order to more deeply understand it. Using evidence from elementary-aged learners in a summer program for struggling readers, our team of teachers and researchers investigated the use of field journaling as an engaging pedagogical strategy for building foundational literacy skills.
Stress-Less Holidays: How to Plan with Your Kids and Build Executive Function Skills
Looking ahead on the calendar with your child is an easy way to help your child develop their planning skills while also priming your child so they aren’t surprised by all the changes in routine.
Mindful Moments in Nature: Finding Calm and Connection with Your Kids this Holiday Season
Research shows that spending even a few minutes outdoors can reduce stress, improve focus, and boost mood for both kids and their grown-ups.
Word Bag Game
Introduce morphological word families and word study with a fun game that is easy to differentiate. AKA the “Word Family Game”.
Family Fun Finder
Our “Family Fun Finder" is a fun way to talk about what individual children like to do, and what the whole family enjoys, together. We use this tool to jump start conversations about ‘everyday literacy’.
Phoneme Walls
Phoneme walls are more effective than word walls in developing students' decoding (reading) and encoding (writing) abilities. They are also really engaging!
Fishy, Fishy
At Words in the Wild, we make reading a full-body experience, but…HOW? Here’s a free download of a game teachers can use to embed essential literacy skill practice in a large-body movement game to engage every learner, even (and especially) your wiggliest!
Supporting Handwriting with Real Script: Take-Aways from Action Research
Check out what our teaching fellow learned about a unique handwriting intervention, Real Script, through an action research project.
Mindful Minutes
Can 1 minute really make a difference? We think so! Check out this list of mindful minutes specially curated by our teaching team.
“Tell Me A Story” Story Starters
Engage your child’s imagination with our Story Starters!
5 Strategies to Build Students’ Vocabulary
We share 5 strategies to build vocabulary, along with a free download for a simple daily gratitude practice to give your students the opportunity to practice using the word “grateful” in a meaningful context.
Land Acknowledgement
Words in the Wild would like to acknowledge the Chochenyo-speaking Muwekma Ohlone people who were enslaved, forcibly removed from their land, confined to three Bay Area missions, and targets of a "war of extermination" waged by the first Governer of California.
Going on a Picnic
This simple, yet effective game helps students notice meaningful patterns in words. Every teacher needs this in their toolkit!
Photo by Jennie Clavel on Unsplash
Summer Reading List
Looking for high-quality titles to help reach your elementary kiddo’s summer reading goals? Check out our list of Words in the Wild-themed children’s books!
Base Race
Our new resource is perfect for educators and word-curious families to help kids practice putting morphemes together to make new words!
Student Goals
Use our free goal-setting templates to help students set their own learning goals. Two forms show examples for daily short-term goals and bigger, long-term goals!
Roll-A-Base
Roll the dice to generate words using morpheme bases in this exciting game! Teachers will love this easy to use, print-ready resource while kids strengthen spelling, writing, and decoding skills, while building morphological awareness.