Teaching with WiggleWorks®

d

WiggleWorks: The Scholastic Beginning Literacy System is an inclusive early literacy curriculum codeveloped by CAST and Scholastic Inc. Universal design features make WiggleWorks a flexible tool for teaching literacy skills to diverse learners and working with mixed ability groups in classrooms.

Suggestions for using WiggleWorks compiled from teachers who use the program and from CAST's classroom research are presented here as a series of tips classified into literacy instruction areas. Customization ideas for learners with diverse needs are included with some of the tips. Click on a category name to view tips in that group. For help using some of the WiggleWorks features used in these tips, choose WiggleWorks Basics.

WiggleWorks Tip Categories

Help students learn how stories work. Support concepts such as left-to-right and top-to-bottom tracking, using illustrations, and the structure of stories.

Help students learn to recognize sight words, use picture cues and repetitive text patterns to recognize words, and build automaticity.

Help students learn to seek and use phonic regularities, decode words, and build word analysis skills.

Help students learn to create their own narratives, respond to literature, improve writing mechanics, and create stories using sounds and images.

Help students build a variety of comprehension strategies including activating prior knowledge, drawing inferences, summarizing, predicting, and retelling.

Help students become fluent, expressive, oral readers.

Review steps for using WiggleWorks features found in the tips.

CAST welcomes new ideas, tips, and suggestions from teachers using WiggleWorks in their classrooms. Send your tip ideas to worm@cast.org. (Be sure to include contact information in case we need to reach you for more details.)

More Information

• Visit the Educational Software section of the CAST Web site.
• Review some of the universally designed features of WiggleWorks in the Teaching Strategies section of the CAST Web site.
• Visit Scholastic's Web site (http://teacher.scholastic.com/wiggleworks).

Credits

The WiggleWorks tips were provided by teachers from Aggasiz Elementary School (Jamaica Plain, MA), Farmington Memorial Drive School (Farmington, NH), Harvard-Kent School (Charlestown, MA), Jackson-Mann Elementary School (Allston, MA), Maplewood Elementary School (Somersworth, NH), Oliver Wendell Holmes Elementary School (Dorchester, MA), and CAST staff.

Screen shots from WIGGLEWORKS® Scholastic Beginning Literacy System copyright Scholastic Inc. Reproduced by permission. SCHOLASTIC, WIGGLEWORKS, and associated logos and designs are registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc. All rights reserved.