The author cuts through the pressurized, strategy-overloaded, fluency-crazed atmosphere surrounding reading instruction to lay out the reading and writing workshop practices that are most effective in developing readers in the primary grades. She shares the daily how-tos needed to sustain a literacy block that engages children in authentic reading and writing practices including dozens of effective practices that illustrate amazing ways to organize instructional and independent reading for kids including: (1) letter and sound searches that improve students' word accuracy and fluency; (2) companion books bags that develop their confidence and comprehension; (3) strategy sheets that make children's thinking about text concrete; (4) a Putting Our Strategies to Work Board that enables students to reflect on and discuss the meta-cognitive strategies they're using; and (5) Idea Books and Ta-da Publishing Books that help children get inside the reading and writing process and see how each feeds the other. This book contains: Part One: Defining Our Teaching: (1) What Really Lies at the Heart of Comprehension?; (2) The Text, Our Teaching--They've Got to Make Sense; (3) Time to Read; (4) Time to Write; (5) Time to Talk; and Part Two: Refining Our Teaching: (6) Accurate Fluent Reading; (7) Background Knowledge; (8) Oral Language and Vocabulary; (9) Reading-Writing Connection; (10) Repertoire of Strategies. The accompanying CD contains appendices and a study guide.