Basics with Mrs. Brown

Reading Fundamentals and How We Teach Them

Hi! I’m Mrs. Brown.

This blog is a work in progress being created for a course in my masters program. I originally was going to name it Brown’s Basics to keep it simple. Yet, it’s not always a short and simple road to teaching the bare basic fundamentals. It’s my goal with this blog to give a framework to help simplify a way to reach students that aren’t reading on grade level.

Another reason I couldn’t name this blog Brown’s Basics is because that infers the info found here are all my ideas, processes and instructional ideas for developing strong readers. That’s not the case! What it will become is a compilation earned from a quarter of a century of classroom experience, so many workshops that I’ve lost count, stacks of books I’ve dog eared until they resemble a yard sale discard pile, and late nights searching the web looking for ways to help those kiddos that just need a little something more than your average basal textbooks (which is all students in my opinion).

Future Button
Another Future Button

A little trip down memory lane in the form of yearbook pics.

Mira De Wilde

Installation Artist

Jonas Richter

Don’t laugh. These were taken around the time most of you were entering kindergarten. Probably.

Zubair Khan

They will be replaced with actual students and instructional ideas as this blog progresses. One of our articles said to use Photoshop so I did.

Maiko Tanaka

It was just the first tote I pulled from the top shelf so that’s what I had to work with to complete my first assignment and it’s due in two days.

My biography:

This was a heading that I didn’t want to delete in case I couldn’t figure out how to get it back on here.

Yep, another requirement of the assignment so here we go…

As blasted across the cover page, I’m Mrs. Brown.

I’m a retired teacher turned property manager on the best river in Oklahoma, Mountain Fork. I’m heading back to college to finish my masters in reading education just in case I ever decide to head back to the classroom and this is my very first course. Plus, I started my masters in 1999 and I figure it’s high time I finished it.

I taught for almost 25 years. I did everything from self contained severe/profound classrooms to high school geometry. If you’ve ever taught in a small school, you get it. You have to go where they need you the most, but my heart always belonged in first grade which is where I spent the majority of my teaching career.

I’m so excited to share the things I saw with my very own eyes that worked in reading instruction. I was really good at it. Honestly.

Hopefully, this blog will help you in some way. I hope it will become a resource for teachers that the lady in those photos above would have loved to have had at her fingertips. I did not even have access to the internet my first go ’round in college and look at me now creating my very own blog!

Can’t wait to fill these buttons with actual important things!

Latest NEWS

Digital Story Telling

I’ll have to eventually change this format because I can promise you that this will not be a daily blog. I do not have time for that! This is WordPress’ original page set up with this theme I chose so I have to learn how to navigate this whole thing before I can get it changed. What I will do is create a digital story since that’s the name of this course. I’m not exactly sure how, but I’ll figure it out.

On a more serious note, I do have things I hope to accomplish with this blog. I hope to give some insights into small groups, the sequential steps of reading readiness skills, understanding and using data from the testing the districts require of us, and creating reading units centered around our favorite children’s books.

Another button I’m scared to delete because I like the placement.
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