McGraw-Hill Education | Wonders - The Power of Connection

Educator Newsletter
Issue 7, Winter 2022

Wonders News!

Hello, Wonders Community,

And welcome to a new calendar year. We hope you had a holiday season full of rest, reflection, and time with loved ones.

As we look forward to the remainder of the school year, we’d like to thank you for everything you’ve done and continue to do for your students. Through this time of immense change, we’ve learned that our relationships with each other—and the connections we form—are invaluable. We empower each other to learn and grow in new ways, and nowhere is this more evident than in your dedication to your students. Your hard work and resilience continue to bring them valuable learning experiences, and we are so grateful.

We understand you and your students are facing uncertainty, so in this issue, we’re sharing resources to help simplify instruction and foster wellbeing. We hope they offer support in this next phase of your school year.

Stay safe and stay healthy.

- The Wonders Team

Educator Resources

While learning environments continue to shift, you may be seeking new ways to enhance instruction and strengthen classroom connections. The supports below provide a variety of strategies to adapt your teaching and guide your students successfully.

Instructional Routines Handbook: This comprehensive guide goes step-by-step through key instructional practices embedded in Wonders. It outlines several instructional routines that reflect best classroom practices and help students learn new tasks across reading, writing, and more. The Instructional Routines Handbook also highlights the important ways in which Wonders aligns with the Science of Reading.

Find it under Resources > Resource Library > Teacher Resources > Instructional Routines.

Online Professional Development: The Professional Development section of your digital workspace offers 24/7 access to on-demand resources. Explore author and coaching videos, assessment and data resources, dual-language instruction support, model classroom videos, and self-paced modules to assist ongoing implementation.

Access these Professional Development resources under Resources > Professional Development.

Restore and Connect with Empathy: Our newest Virtual Care Package explores the importance of empathy—in the classroom and elsewhere. It includes activities for children and adults to inspire compassion for our peers, our community, and ourselves.

Moments for Myself: The development of social and emotional skills can help children process change, relate to others, and find success in the classroom. Our new podcast considers the five competencies of social-emotional learning by interviewing teachers, administrators, guidance counselors, and nonprofit leaders. Their tips and experiences are a must-listen for educators and parents alike.

Supporting Learning Progress with Assessments

As the school year progresses, assessments can be valuable tools to identify student strengths and needs and plan instruction accordingly. The following resources provide guidance on using assessments to help students navigate their learning with confidence.

Assessment Handbook: This handbook helps you manage different assessment options, interpret their results, and apply that information to guide instruction. It includes an assessment glossary to define key terms and offers clear direction on how test scores can be used to address student needs.

Find the Assessment Handbook under Resources > Resource Library > Assessment > Assessment Handbook.

Online Assessment Center: Assign tests through the Online Assessment Center to familiarize your students with the procedures and item types they will encounter during online end-of-year testing. You can use this digital option to create your own targeted test prep.

Visit the Online Assessment Center under Assessment & Data > Online Assessment Center.

Not sure where to get started? Professional development resources around creating new online assessments, finding existing assessments, and more can be found under Resources > Professional Development > Digital Help > Assessment & Data.

Create practice tests by choosing Benchmark Assessment items that focus on the skills that require the most review, based on your classroom observations and your analysis of Wonders program assessment results.

Why benchmark? Benchmark Assessments are designed to measure how well children acquire reading and language arts knowledge and skills assessed on high-stakes tests. The results serve as a summative assessment by providing a way to measure children’s progress through the curriculum.

Know Your Reports: This printable guide helps you use the reports in your Data Dashboard and interpret their results to inform instructional planning.

Find it under Resources > Professional Development > Digital Help > Assessment & Data.

Inspiring Student Engagement

At this point in the school year, it can be difficult to keep students motivated and engaged—particularly if your district has been going back and forth between in-school and remote environments. One of our Wonders curriculum specialists, Christina Quarelli, has created resources to maximize instructional time and maintain student engagement.

Make Every Virtual Moment Count: This guide outlines teaching practices that will help transform participation in your remote classroom, positively impact classroom culture, and inspire a whole lot of fun. Bonus! They work beautifully together and can be applied in any learning model (whether that’s in-class, hybrid, or 100% remote).

Boost Classroom Participation: Do you feel like the same group of students are the only ones participating in your classroom? Watch this short video for tips on how to get other students actively engaged—and learning more effectively.

Inspired Ideas

Looking for resources to share with parents, research to inform your work, or inspiration from experts and peers? Visit our blog, Inspired Ideas. You’ll discover stories from educators, strategies from experts in reading instruction, and news from learning scientists and edtech experts. Here are three highlights to explore:

A Playbook for Growth Mindset: Having a growth mindset helps you focus on developing your abilities and encourages you to embrace challenges. Much remains to be discovered about how teachers can help inspire a growth mindset in students, but these preliminary suggestions are great ways to get started.
What's Important for Future Interruptions to Learning?: Our experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic can help us navigate interruptions to learning moving forward. Here are a few significant themes to help us reflect upon what we’ve learned so far.
Lessons Learned from Veteran Educators: We recently asked former educators on the McGraw Hill staff to share insights from their days in the classroom. Discover the ten most important lessons they learned during their careers as teachers, coaches, administrators, and professors.

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