In "Notebook Know-How", Aimee Buckner demonstrated the power of notebooks to spark and capture students' ideas in the writing workshop. In "Notebook Connections", she turns her focus to the reading workshop, showing how to transform those "couch-potato" readers into deep thinkers. Buckner's fourth-grade students use reader's notebooks as a place…

Just as comprehension strategies have helped millions of students learn to read like proficient readers, they can also help students think like effective test-takers. The authors show how students can use background knowledge, mental images, synthesizing, monitoring, inferring, questioning, and determining of importance to understand the genre of…

In her previous books, "Literacy Work Stations and Practice with Purpose," Debbie Diller showed teachers how to productively occupy the "rest of the class" while meeting with small groups. Now Debbie turns her attention to the groups themselves and the teacher's role in small-group instruction. "Making the Most of Small Groups" grapples with…

In today's results-based classrooms, student engagement and fulfillment are too often left behind as teachers strive to meet external standards. This innovative book explores best practices and projects designed to meet the literacy learning needs of a diverse range of students. It is committed to connecting student knowledge, experience, and…

Most educators want to provide appropriate instruction for the diverse learning needs of their students, however moving from theory to practice can stymie both novice and experienced teachers. The author shows middle- and secondary-level teachers how to plan a differentiated lesson from start to finish, detailing the steps to take before, during,…

Since its publication in 1998 Craft Lessons has become a mainstay of writing teachers, both new and experienced. Practical lessons--each printed on one page--and the instructional language geared to three grade-level groupings: K-2, 3-4, and 5-8 are contained in this book. In the decade since Craft Lessons' publication the world has changed in…

This book shows how the school grounds, whether urban, suburban, or rural, can become an enriching extension of the classroom. The author blends theory and practice, providing readers with teacher-tested suggestions and activities for using the outdoors. The book offers step-by-step guidance to help ensure success when teachers take a class…

Since its publication in 2000, Strategies That Work has become an indispensable resource for teachers who want to explicitly teach thinking strategies so that students become engaged, thoughtful, independent readers. In this revised and expanded edition, the authors have added twenty completely new comprehension lessons, extending the scope of the…

Written for the general classroom teacher whose class includes English language learners (ELLs), as well as for ELL teachers working in general classrooms, this book portrays ELL students in grades 3-6 who learn essential reading and writing skills and are full members of the classroom community. Throughout the book, the authors emphasize the…

In productive classrooms, teachers do not just teach children skills: they build emotionally and relationally healthy learning communities. Teachers create intellectual environments that produce not only technically competent students, but also caring, secure, actively literate human beings. Choice Words shows how teachers accomplish this using…

Do students often struggle with difficult novels and other challenging texts? Do they think one reading of a work is more than enough? Do they primarily comprehend at a surface-level, and are they frequently unwilling or unable to discover the deeper meaning found in multi-layered works? Do teachers feel that they are doing more work teaching the…

Primary-grade teachers face an important challenge: teaching children how to read while enabling them to build good habits so they fall in love with reading. Many teachers find the independent reading workshop to be the component of reading instruction that meets this challenge because it makes it possible to teach the reading skills and…

Everyone talks about "best practice" teaching--what does it actually look like in the classroom? How do working teachers translate complex curriculum standards into simple, workable classroom structures that embody exemplary instruction--and still let kids find joy in learning? In this book, the authors present seven basic teaching structures that…

Reading and writing across content areas is emphasized in the standards and on high-stakes tests at the state and national level. As educators seek to incorporate content-area literacy into their teaching, they confront a maze of theories, instructional strategies, and acronyms like REAP and RAFT. Teachers who do work their way through the myriad…

Tired of assigning weekly spelling lists that students memorize for the test only to have them misspell the words in their daily writing? Then join Max Brand in his fifth-grade classroom where word learning is integrated fully into literacy workshops. Using spelling investigations, word study notebooks, reading logs, and writers' notebooks,…