The Maine Department of Education’s (DOE) Interdisciplinary Instruction Team has created new resources for supporting PK-12 literacy instruction. The Integration of Literacy and Neuroscience suite of resources reflects current research-based practices through a combination of asynchronous professional learning modules, strategies, and additional resources to support student engagement and reading comprehension through the lens of neuroscience. These modules focus on multiple aspects of literacy, including:

• Active self-regulation includes engagement and motivation, executive functioning skills, and strategy use in literacy, with the goal of developing engaged, motivated, independent readers.
• Word Recognition includes literacy foundational skills such as phonological awareness, alphabetic principles, phonics, decoding, and sight words.
• Language Comprehension focuses on Cultural and Other Content Knowledge, including work on the role of students’ prior and background knowledge in improving reading and Theory of Mind, which refers to a reader’s ability to empathize with characters or people in books.
• Bridging processes are the tools that readers use to move between word recognition and language comprehension with increasing fluency. Bridging processes are how readers begin to weave together word recognition and language comprehension skills to become more fluent readers.

Access the PK-12 Literacy and Neuroscience Integration Resources here.

To learn more about this exciting resource, please contact Kathy Bertini at Kathy.Bertini@maine.gov.