Here are more great topics and sample book club sessions to help you start a book club and keep it going! Chapters in this volume cover humor, families, social issues, folklore and mythology, sports, magazines, picture books as art, censorship, the Internet, middle school readers, gender bias, booktalks, and the arts. For each genre, the authors offer a general overview, discussion questions, a bibliography, resources for further reading, and appropriate Web sites. If you want to promote literacy and involve parents in the reading program, you'll love this book and its companion, The Reading Connection.

Is there too much emphasis on guided reading in primary classrooms? It's a question that many educators, like kindergarten teacher and literacy coach Cathy Mere, are starting to ask. Guided reading provides opportunities to teach students the strategies they need to learn how to read increasingly challenging texts, but Cathy found that she needed to find other ways to help students gain independence. While maintaining guided reading as an important piece of their reading program, teachers need to offer students opportunities during the day to develop as readers, to learn to choose books, to find favorite genres and authors, and to talk about their reading. In More Than Guided Reading, Cathy shares her journey as she moved from focusing on guided reading as the center of her reading program to placing children at the heart of literacy learning--not only providing more time for students to discover their reading lives, but also shaping instruction to meet the needs of the diverse learners in her classroom. By changing the structure of the day, Cathy found she was better able to adjust the support she was providing students, allowing time for whole-class focus lessons, conferences, and opportunities to share ideas, as well as reading from self-selected texts using the strategies, skills, and understandings acquired in reader's workshop. The focus lesson is the centerpiece of the workshop. It is often tied to a read-aloud and connected to learning from the previous day, helping to build skills, extend thinking, and develop independence over time. This thoroughly practical text offers numerous sample lessons, questions for conferences, and ideas for revamping guided reading groups. It will help teachers tweak the mix of instructional components in their reading workshops, and provoke school-wide conversations about the place of guided reading in a complete literacy curriculum.

The skills and strategies students practice to become proficient writers also nudge them closer to becoming proficient readers, so how can K-2 teachers connect reading and writing instruction in meaningful ways that allow students to go deeper in their thinking? This revised second edition provides tips, tools, and mini-lessons for integrating reading, writing, and speaking and listening. Each operational, print awareness, craft, and foundational writing mini-lesson identifies the connecting point to reading and speaking and listening with Target Skills¨ that can and should be revisited and reinforced during your reading block and any content area. By design, these books are not printable from a reading device. To request a PDF of the reproducible pages, please contact customer service at 1-888-262-6135.

Teaching students specific literacy skills is important--but equally critical, and often overlooked, is giving them the time and opportunity to read actual texts. Bringing together leading scholars, this book focuses on how teachers can improve both the quality and quantity of reading experiences in K-12 classrooms. Essential topics include factors that make reading tasks more or less productive for different types of learners, ways to balance independent reading with whole-class and small-group instruction, how to choose appropriate texts, and the connections between reading engagement and proficiency. The relevant research literature is reviewed, and exemplary practices and programs are described.

Foreword by Colby Sharp In the decade since the first edition of Still Learning to Read was published, the prevalence of testing and the Common Core State Standards have changed what is expected of both teachers and students. The new edition of Still Learning to Read focuses on the needs of students in grades 3-6 in all aspects of reading workshop, including reading workshop, read-aloud, classroom design, digital tools, fiction, nonfiction, and close reading. The book stays true to its original beliefs of slowing down and knowing our readers, but it also takes into account the sense of urgency that changing times and standards impose on classrooms. This edition examines current trends in literacy, includes a new section on intentional instructional planning, and provides expanded examples of mini-lessons and routines that promote deeper thinking about learning. It also includes a brand new chapter on scaffolding for reading nonfiction and showcases the authors' latest thinking on close reading and text complexity. Online videos provide glimpses into classrooms as students make book choices, work in small groups, and discuss their reading notebooks. Expanded and updated book lists, recommendations for digital tools, lesson cycles, and sections specifically written for school leaders round out this foundational resource.

The Oxford Handbook of Deaf Studies in Literacy brings together state-of-the-art research on literacy learning among deaf and hard of hearing learners (DHH). With contributions from experts in the field, this volume covers topics such as the importance of language and cognition, phonological or orthographic awareness, morphosyntactic and vocabulary understanding, reading comprehension and classroom engagement, written language, and learning among challenged populations. Avoiding sweeping generalizations about DHH readers that overlook varied experiences, this volume takes a nuanced approach, providing readers with the research to help DHH students gain competence in reading comprehension.

Begun in 2010 as part of the “Histories of Literatures in European Languages” series sponsored by the International Comparative Literature Association, the current project on New Literary Hybrids in the Age of Multimedia Expression recognizes the global shift toward the visual and the virtual in all areas of textuality: the printed, verbal text is increasingly joined with the visual, often electronic, text. This shift has opened up new domains of human achievement in art and culture. The international roster of 24 contributors to this volume pursue a broad range of issues under four sets of questions that allow a larger conversation to emerge, both inside the volume’s sections and between them. The four sections cover, 1) Multimedia Productions in Theoretical and Historical Perspective; 2) Regional and Intercultural Projects; 3) Forms and Genres; and, 4) Readers and Rewriters in Multimedia Environments. The essays included in this volume are examples of the kinds of projects and inquiries that have become possible at the interface between literature and other media, new and old. They emphasize the extent to which hypertextual, multimedia, and virtual reality technologies have enhanced the sociality of reading and writing, enabling more people to interact than ever before. At the same time, however, they warn that, as long as these technologies are used to reinforce old habits of reading/ writing, they will deliver modest results. One of the major tasks pursued by the contributors to this volume is to integrate literature in the global informational environment where it can function as an imaginative partner, teaching its interpretive competencies to other components of the cultural landscape.

Recontextualized: A Framework for Teaching English with Music is a book that can benefit any English teacher looking for creative approaches to teaching reading, writing, and critical thinking. Providing theoretically-sound, classroom-tested practices, this edited collection not only offers accessible methods for including music into your lesson plans, but also provides a framework for thinking about all classroom practice involving popular culture. The framework described in Recontextualized can be easily adapted to a variety of educational standards and consists of four separate approaches, each with a different emphasis or application. Written by experienced teachers from a variety of settings across the United States, this book illustrates the myriad ways popular music can be used, analyzed, and created by students in the English classroom. “Together, this editor/author team has produced a book that virtuallyvibrates with possibilities for engaging youth in ways that speak to their interests while simultaneously maintaining the rigor expected of English classes.” – Donna E. Alvermann, University of Georgia