FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - August 29, 1998
For more information contact:
Kathleen Carpenter (kat@teachers.net)
Teachers.Net http://teachers.net/
WEEKLY COLUMN ON TEACHERS.NET
SAN DIEGO, CA -- Teachers.Net, the popular online resource for educators has announced its newest feature for professional support, this one on the topic of literacy development. Cheryl Mahaffey Sigmon, author of Implementing the 4-Blocks Literacy Model (Carson Dellosa, 1997) will provide a weekly column addressing educators' questions about teaching reading and writing to young children in school. The column debuts early in September and will be available through the Books and Literature section of the expansive Teachers.Net site. (http://teachers.net/mentors/literature)
Ms. Sigmon, who is an Education Associate for K-12 Language Arts with South Carolina's Department of Education, plans and conducts workshops for teachers and administrators, providing an in-class model along with support and technical assistance to schools with low performing students. She has referred to her discovery of the Four Blocks Model as her "salvation" for trying to model how to meet the needs of a heterogeneous group of children. "Not one day since being introduced to the 4-Blocks Model have I lacked the confidence that individual needs of students-even in a classroom with tremendous diversity-can be met....with all students engaged in meaningful, productive learning activities."
The co-author with 4-Blocks creators Pat Cunningham and Dottie Hall of The Four Blocks Literacy Framework: Teaching All Our Children In Primary Classrooms (Carson Dellosa, Fall 1998), Cheryl Sigmon has the endorsement of Cunningham and Hall in the Forward to her Implementing the 4-Blocks Literacy Model:
"In the 8 years that we have worked with the 4-Blocks framework, hundreds of teachers, consultants, and administrators have come to visit in the classrooms and talk with us about implementation issues. Of all the people we have talked to and observed as they helped teachers implement this framework in their classrooms, Cheryl Sigmon is far and away the best!"Sigmon's column at Teachers.Net will address specific questions and general topics taken from the discussions flowing through the Teachers.Net 4-Blocks Mailring, a free, subscriber e-mail discussion group.
Mailrings supplement dozens of other resources that attract educators to Teachers.Net from the U.S. and many other locations including Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, the Middle East, and Africa. The mega-site is currently averaging more than 4,200 user sessions each day. Bob Reap and Tony Bott, site creators, have made it their business to respond to the expressed needs of teachers and school administrators who flock to their resource in numbers that have increased monthly since Teachers.Net went online just over 2 years ago. "If there is a way that we can assist educators with mentoring support and information, it is our mission to hear it, find it, nurture it, and offer it," says Bott, an Ed.D. candidate at UCLA. "If teachers have the support they need, they can do the job."