Close, critical, and generative reading can be broken down into five key questions that a strategic reader must answer: What does the text say? How does the author say it? What does the text mean? What does it mean to me? What insights can I now gain? In this resource, the authors show that insight into these questions is the key to comprehending text. The authors provide tools such as mining charts, assessments, progress monitoring charts, and rubrics to strengthen the teaching and use of...

In the second book in the Uncomplicating Mathematics Series, professional developer Marian Small shows teachers how to uncomplicate the teaching of algebra by focusing on the most important ideas that students need to grasp. Organized by grade level around the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics, Small shares approaches that will lead to a deeper and richer understanding of algebra for both teachers and students. The book opens with a clear discussion of algebraic thinking...

Literacy continues to be a hot topic for educators and parents. I Don't Get It! Helping Students Understand What They Read is a practical, easy-to-use resource for classroom teachers and literacy coaches. Parents will also find the information helpful as they assist their children with homework and support for reading comprehension.This book will help to improve student literacy by offering a variety of strategies designed to help students think as they read printed text. ...

Teachers know how important it is to develop children’s fine motor skills as a stepping stone to future learning. Christy Isbell’s book, Mighty Fine Motor Fun, provides teachers with the tools and information to teach fine motor skills to children ages three to five. Isbell covers a wide range of current research on fine motor development, from developmental differences between boys and girls to guideposts for what is developmentally appropriate for children at each age. The activ...

What do children need to learn first? Their ABCs? Their numbers? As it turns out, the “what” children need to develop is their social intelligence and emotional intelligence, the essential building blocks for all future learning. Best-selling author Pam Schiller provides information, activities, and experiences that develop the seven skills children need in order to become successful learners. These include social intelligence skills, such as relating to and playing with others, as well as...

Compelling and highly engaging, this text shows teachers at all levels how to do critical literacy in the classroom and provides models for practice that can be adapted to any context. Integrating social theory and classroom practice, it brings critical literacy to life as a socio-cultural orientation to the teaching of literacy that takes seriously the relationship between language and power and orients readers to the social effects of texts. Students and teachers are drawn into the key q...

Create a new approach to balanced literacy grounded in research-based best practices. This book infuses best practices of the new balanced literacy model through the lens of Common Core, with support on read-alouds, guided reading, language and literacy centers, word walls to language walls, independent reading and writing, and classroom libraries. It also provides the "how" for novice and veteran K-8 teachers, administrators, school literacy teams. With the daily routine "110 Minutes of L...

Writing With, Through, and Beyond the Text: An Ecology of Language elaborates an understanding of writing, its influences on our interpretations of experience and identity, and its potential for enabling individuals to learn about and connect to the world beyond themselves. Rather than considering writing a process, the author describes it as a system, an ecology that engages the individual in a variety of socially constituted and interacting systems. The book examines the pedagog...

Middle-school students must be able to write explanatory/informational, argument, and narrative genre pieces and respond to literature, both for standardized tests and, more importantly, real-world writing. With a balanced literacy approach, Wolfe provides core instruction, teaching strategies, and mini-lessons on these text types, each of which can be delivered in a four- to six-week time period. Each mini-lesson includes applicable Common Core Standards, materials lists, overviews, plann...

Discovering Voice is a collection of classroom exercises that helps students deeply understand the reading and writing of complex text. The lessons, which cover diction, detail, figurative language, imagery, syntax, and tone, help students understand voice in what they read and encourage them to develop a strong, personal voice in their own writing. Every voice lesson includes a quotation selected from a wide range of fiction and nonfiction text, two discussion questions, and an exercise t...

Although the Common Core and C3 Framework highlight literacy and inquiry as central goals for social studies, they do not offer guidelines, assessments, or curriculum resources. This practical guide presents six research-tested historical investigations along with all corresponding teaching materials and tools that have improved the historical thinking and argumentative writing of academically diverse students. Each investigation integrates reading, analysis, planning, composing, and refle...

With the aim of discussing “old” and “new” teaching technologies, based on research and on the strategies and praxis of the use of technologies and methodologies in the different teaching levels, and also embracing the contribution and active participation of researchers, teachers, creators, managers and other specialists, the work will provide inputs on the following topics: Students’ perspectives on media in the classroom, Students and media (as content and as tools for learning), Educat...