Expanding the reach of Oakland Reads

BUILD and Manzanita Community EBAYC teams become Oakland Reads super users

"I will continue to use the website. It has useful information that helps and guides us on how to coach and teach our students to read and make it fun”

- East Bay Asian Youth Center expanded learning staff at Manzanita Community School

Oakland Reads was designed as a family-facing literacy resource, but its impact extends far beyond the home. This past school year, the OLC partnered with multiple expanded learning and out-of-school-time teams to explore how Oakland Reads can support the adults who work with children every day outside the classroom.

In the fall, we worked with Berkeley United in Literacy Development (BUILD), a UC Berkeley mentoring program who does literacy based sessions with elementary students in Berkeley and Oakland schools. This spring, we did three learning sessions with the East Bay Asian Youth Center (EBAYC) Expanded Learning Staff at Manzanita Community School, who provide both after school and summer programming for TK-5th graders.

A commitment to adult learning

With both teams, the program directors have ensured that their staff gets trained in supporting students’ reading, and both were eager for more training and practice for their staff in foundational skills and hands on activities. They know that their students spend a significant amount of time in out of school time programs and that the need for reading support doesn’t end when the bell rings at the end of the school day.

The OLC team multiple designed sessions about the foundational skills required for students to become successful readers, in depth explorations of resources to support those skills on the Oakland Reads website, and hands on activities to practice those skills. The sessions were based on the self assessments of the knowledge, skills, and instructional practices that staff and mentors identified as growth areas.

In between sessions, team members spent time exploring the Oakland Reads site in depth, using it in their work with students, and brought reflections, successes, and challenges to subsequent learning sessions. The meaning making and hands on practice in learning sessions, as well as applied practice in their work with students helped staff and mentors become more familiar and comfortable using the resources and tools on Oakland Reads.

Visualizing how reading works

We started our sessions with an overview of different models that break down the essential components of reading, and how the ultimate goal of reading instruction is comprehension. We talked about the 5 pillars of literacy, and how each of these pillars is a reading skill page on Oakland Reads :

Phonological awareness – the ability to hear and manipulate sounds in spoken language

Phonics – knowing the sounds of written letters and words

Fluency – the ability to read quickly, accurately, and with expression

Vocabulary – understanding the meaning of words, including their morphology, grammar, structure, and semantics

Comprehension – understanding the meaning of what has been read

Then we explored how the Simple View of Reading shows that students need to be able to decode words and understand language to achieve reading comprehension, and how if either one of those is weak, it will negatively impact understanding what they read.

Last, we explored Hollis Scarborough’s Reading Rope, a more detailed way to show how complex the skill of reading is. In subsequent sessions, we returned to the reading rope, examining which parts of the rope each activity addressed, and learning about the components necessary for word recognition and language comprehension.

Morphology

With the EBAYC team, we dedicated time to exploring the concept of morphology, which was new to most of their team. We talked about how studying morphemes, the smallest meaningful units of language, can unlock thousands of word meanings for students and what a gift that can be, especially for older students as they have to decode and understand longer, multisyllabic words. We practiced brainstorming words from a matrix of prefixes, suffixes, and one base word, and split into groups to do differentiated word family activities for younger and older students.

Curious to learn more about morphology? The vocabulary page on Oakland Reads has video explainers and activities to help you learn and practice.

Interested in having the OLC do a series of Oakland Reads trainings with your tutoring or expanded learning organization? We are now scheduling for Fall 2026. Email julia@oaklandliteracycoalition.org with questions.

Oakland is a Reading Town campaign now on Oakland Reads

Last month, Mayor Barbara Lee joined the Oakland Literacy Coalition and Oakland Unified School District to launch our new campaign, Oakland Is a Reading Town. The campaign asks: “What if reading weren't just something that happened in classrooms and homes, but something Oakland wore proudly?”

At the heart of the campaign are three simple conditions that research shows are important for developing lifelong readers:

• Access — to books and welcoming reading environments

• Blocks of time — dedicated, protected moments to read and talk about reading

• Culture — the visible, joyful presence of reading everywhere young people look

Learn more about the ABC’s of a Reading Town here, and more campaign info and the pledge are now on their own page on Oakland Reads.  

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