Preliminary Fall Results Show BookNook Students are Closing the COVID Reading Gap
BY BEN KOSHLAND // NOVEMBER 19, 2020
PGCPS Reads: Raelyn’s Rising Reading Confidence
Raelyn’s favorite thing to do during the pandemic has been reading to herself. “She can read, and she will,” said her mother Kaschka Peavy of her 7-year-old daughter, but reading out loud with others just wasn’t happening. Raelyn is...
Writing a New Chapter Together
BookNook has a new look and here's why... It’s been a big year at BookNook, as we’ve grown to serve over 400 partner schools, school districts, and nonprofits across 35 states. Our BookNook logo and brand have been one of the few...
Shelby County Schools & Methodist LeBonheur Healthcare Announce Greater Memphis K-5 Reading Initiative with BookNook
Shelby County Schools (SCS) is not taking any chances with supporting struggling readers, especially those who were identified as in need of reading intervention well before the pandemic suddenly upended classrooms and daily...
PGCPS Reads: The Story of Beginning Readers
The Story of Benji: Benji is a pretty good reader. He’s seven attending first-grade classes at Dora Kennedy French Language Immersion School in Greenbelt, Md. Like many children in the county – and the country – he is attending those...
Preliminary Fall Results Show BookNook Students are Closing the COVID Reading Gap
Since Labor Day, BookNook students have logged more than 45,000 sessions of guided reading, reading intervention, and tutoring on our platform, and we couldn’t be more proud of all the hard work they’ve put in--and the resourcefulness...
Creating a Literacy Rich Learning Environment Remotely
Creating a Literacy Rich Learning Environment Remotely Recognizing reading and writing in everyday life helps children develop critical literacy skills. In a literacy rich classroom environment, those examples are everywhere. Children...
Prince George’s County Public Schools & BookNook Announce Community Reading Initiative
Study after study has shown tutoring can make a huge difference for students having a hard time with reading, so BookNook is thrilled to be partnering with Prince George's County Public Schools to deliver high quality and impactful remote...
Announcing our Distance Learning Results: BookNook Students Kept Growing
Thanks to the extraordinary efforts of thousands of parents, caregivers, educators, tutors, AmeriCorps members, volunteers--and, of course, students--BookNook is proud to announce the results of our spring Distance Learning programs. Like...
BookNook Takes a Stand With Equity-Based Pricing
Equity has been one of BookNook’s core values since the very beginning of our journey. The phrase we use to define it is “We Are Our Community.” We talk about it that way both because we want our team to look like our users, but also as a...
An Educator’s insight on how to handle teaching from home
Check out BookNook - an reading application that Teachers and Paras are using to read with their students remotely - offered at no cost during the COVID-19 Shutdowns I grew up wanting to be a teacher. At an early age, I played ‘school’...
How a healthcare system in Memphis is working towards long-term health impacts through reading
It’s 8:30am in Memphis, TN, and BookNook employee Ben Koshland is about to join a Zoom video conference meeting with his team members. It’s a daily call, and since it’s early, he joins it from home – his team doesn’t mind the cat...
Lifetime Education & Nonprofit Leader Ellen Moir Joins BookNook Advisory Board
OAKLAND, Calif -- BookNook continued increasing the depth of experience on its advisory board today by adding longtime education leader and teacher advocate, Ellen Moir. Ellen is the Founder and former CEO of the New Teacher Center, a...
The NAEP reading data are a wakeup call: we need to change how we think about scale
It’s become an all-too-familiar tradition: every fall of an odd-numbered year the federal government releases the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP, also called ‘the Nation’s Report Card) showing little to no improvement in...
Lessons from adopting a new Curriculum
Curriculum adoption is one of the most important processes that a School District goes through. The process is lengthy, costly and does not happen often, yet it directly affects the teaching and learning of everyone in the...
Why Technology Doesn’t get Implemented (And What To Do About it)
Recently there was an article that was passed around at BookNook about the Six Unforgivable Sins of Teacher Professional Development. One stood out to me - Trying to Flash Credentials You Don’t Really Have - basically saying “I was a...
RELEASE: BookNook and Young Authors Publishing announce new partnership to get diverse content in the hands of thousands of students
OAKLAND, Calif. and ATLANTA, Ga. -- and BookNook, organizations focused on furthering the potential of students across the United States today announced a new partnership that will allow stories written by diverse young authors to be...
Diversifying the Literary Canon of Children’s Books
There’s a constant need to address diversity in literature, specifically in children’s books. During their most impressionable years, it’s important that children are able to see reflections of themselves throughout their environments,...
BookNook Wins MIT Competition for Digital Research in Education
We are thrilled to share that the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has selected BookNook for its second round of groundbreaking social science research projects. The full...
Fighting The Opportunity Gap: What Schools Can Do To Close It
Fighting the Opportunity Gap Scroll to read post What is the Opportunity Gap? The term “opportunity gap” refers to any significant and persistent differences in academic performance between different groups of students. Groups are...
Creating a Literacy-Rich Environment
Creating a Literacy-Rich Environment By Samantha Burke Facebook Twitter Instagram Linkedin About the author: Samantha Burke is a credentialed reading specialist that has worked with children in the San Francisco Bay Area for ten years....
Engage your K-5 Students with These 5 Reading Tips
Engaging students in meaningful conversations about what they are reading is so important in helping students get the most out of instructional time. Getting students engaged in reading and talking about what they are reading will...
5 Ways to Improve your Students’ Reading Comprehension
Reading comprehension is how students process, connect and learn from what they read. To attain strong reading comprehension, students must be a active readers. This means students are not just just decoding words, they are actively...
16 Great Back to School Books to Read With Your Students
What books will you read your first week back? The first books you read with your students give you the opportunity to discuss all those “Back to School” feelings and set the tone for the learning environment you want to create with them...
A Day in the Life of a BookNook Reading Guide
I want to live a day in the life of a Reading Guide... That’s what I found myself countlessly saying when I started my PeopleOps journey at BookNook. I heard great things about our application that was created to support children’s...
BookNook Spurs Parent Volunteer Program, Produces Great Results
About 10 miles south of the Wisconsin/Illinois border, Carrie Modra is hard at work with her students. As a Woodland School District 50 educator for 8 years in her role as a Speech-Language Pathologist, Carrie is an integral part of...
Technology in Education: Overcoming Barriers to Success
This post is the second part in a series we are doing on Barriers and lessons learned on implementing Technology in Education. Check out part one here. Overcoming Barriers: Emerging New Best Practices As daunting as the barriers may seem,...
Announcing A New Funding Round—And More Importantly What We’ve Learned
About a year ago, we announced BookNook’s first fundraising round. A group of dual-bottom line investors, led by Reach Capital, bet on a company with a very rough alpha product, a handful of pilot schools, and a vision that technology...
3 Things the Nation’s Report Card Is Telling Us About Reading, and 1 It’s Not
This week, the US Department of Education today released the 2017 results of its National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) better known as the Nation’s Report Card. In what has become a grim ritual for the past 10 years, the...
Technology in Education: Barriers to Success
Back in 1986, Ohio educator and school administrator Howard Merriman bemoaned "the challenges brought by the incursion of technology into the schools." He was talking about electric typewriters and programmable televisions, but 40 years...
Guiding Your Student to Success: Effectively Using Talking Points and Discussion Questions
This is the 1st post in our new series: “Guide your Students to Success” that will explain how to best use the instructional components within BookNook. Asking questions that will lead your students to higher levels of comprehension and...
The BookNook Olympics
These past few weeks at BookNook HQ in Oakland, we’ve been in the midst of our own Olympics. And no, we’re not talking about the March Reading Madness we’re working on with all of the schools using BookNook. We’ve been working hard with...
Gold Medalist Kristi Yamaguchi to be Featured Author for BookNook
OAKLAND, Calif., February 28, 2018 -- Today Olympic Gold Medalist, Children's author, and philanthropist Kristi Yamaguchi announced that she will serve as a featured author on BookNook, a new technology platform that helps children...
5 Creative Uses of Technology in the Classroom
Considering the pervasiveness of smartphones, the concept of "technology in the classroom" isn't without controversy. The jury is still out on whether or not kids should be allowed to or even encouraged to bring their phones to class....