Rather, a combination of causes can create a perfect storm of failure.” —Wiley BlevinsPicture a class of kindergarteners singing the alphabet song, and teaching phonics  seems as easy as one-two, three, A, B, C, right? In a Fresh Look at Phonics, Wiley Blevins explains why it can get tricky, and then delivers a plan so geared for success, that teachers, coaches, and administrators will come to see owning this book as a before and after moment in their professional lives. In this amazing follow up to his renowned resource Phonics From A-Z, Wiley uses the data he has collected over two decades to share which approaches truly work, which have failed, and how teachers can fine-tune their daily instruction for success. You will learn to focus on the seven critical ingredients of phonics teaching that produce the greatest student learning gains— readiness skills, scope and sequence, blending, dictation, word awareness, high frequency words, and reading connected texts. Then, for each ingredient, Wiley shares:   Activities, routines, word lists, and lessons that develop solid foundations for reading Ideas for differentiation, ELL, and advanced learners to ensure adequate progress for all learners Help on decodable texts, what not to over-do, and what you can’t do enough of for your students’ achievement Interactive “Day Clinic” activities that facilitate teacher self-reflection and school wide professional learning In a final section, Wiley details the ten common reasons instruction fails and shows teachers how to correct these missteps regarding lesson pacing, transitions, decodable texts, writing activities, assessment and more. A Fresh Look at Phonics is the evidence-based solution you have been seeking. Wiley Blevins, Ph.D., is a world-renowned expert on early reading, and author of the seminal book Phonics From A-Z among many other works. He has taught in both the United States and South America, and regularly trains teachers throughout Asia. He holds a Doctorate in Education from Harvard University, and has worked with numerous educational scholars, including Jeanne Chall, Isabel Beck, Marilyn Adams, Louisa Moats, and Dianne August, and others.

    Hailed for its practical, systematic approach, the book showed hundreds of thousands of teachers how to address the needs of the whole classroom as well as individual readers. Now, with the publication of Word Matters, Pinnell and Fountas offer K-3 teachers the same unparalleled support, this time focusing on phonics and spelling instruction.Word Matters presents essential information on designing and implementing a high-quality, systematic literacy program to help children learn about letters, sounds, and words. The central goal is to teach children to become "word solvers": readers who can take words apart while reading for meaning, and writers who can construct words while writing to communicate. Where similar books are narrow in focus, Word Matters presents the theoretical underpinnings and practical wherewithal of word study in three contexts:word study that includes systematically planned and applied experiences focusing on the elements of letters and wordswriting, including how children use phoneme-grapheme relationships, word patterns, and principles to develop spelling abilityreading, including teaching children how to solve words with the use of phonics and visual-analysis skills as they read for meaning.Each topic is supported with a variety of practical tools: reproducible sheets for a word study system and for writing workshop; lists of spelling minilessons; and extensive word lists, including frequently used words, antonyms, synonyms, and more. Armed with these tools-and the tried-and-true wisdom of Gay Su Pinnell and Irene Fountas-teachers can help students develop not just the "essential skills," but also a joyful appreciation of their own literacy.

    In  Revision Decisions: Talking Through Sentences and Beyond,  authors Jeff Anderson and Deborah Dean create a book to help teachers simplify the revision process and start building students' writing and reading skills.In this book, Anderson and Dean use mentor texts to show the myriad possibilities that exist for revision. You will also find:How students find the "why" by talking through revisions during group and classroom discussions Easy-to-follow lessons and exercises to lead student discourse during rewrites and make challenging writing processes accessibleTeacher Tips to help apply new knowledge and develop both the writer and the writingReading and writing practices that keep the goals of Common Core and other standards in mindThe noted language arts teacher James Britton once said that good writing “floats on a sea of talk.” Revision Decisions supports those genuine conversations we naturally have as readers and writers, leading the way to the essential goal of making meaning.

    Beers and Probst offer insights into how to create text dependent questioning in assisting students to develop greater reading comprehension skills.

    This book focuses on the quantitative and qualitative factors of text complexity as well as the ways in which readers can be matched with texts and tasks. Examine how close readings of complex texts scaffold students understanding and allow them to develop the skills necessary to read like a detective.

    There are a variety of approaches or programs, but none of them matches the writing workshop when it comes to growing strong writers. That's why, despite the pressures of testing, the writing workshop has endured and even flourished in thousands of schools across the country. Today we face a time when as many as ten million new teachers are entering the profession. It is for these teachers, and others who are unfamiliar with writing workshop, that Ralph Fletcher and JoAnn Portalupi wrote this book - as a way to introduce and explain the writing workshop . . . to reveal what a potent tool the writing workshop can be for empowering young writers.Above all Writing Workshop is a practical book, providing everything a teacher needs to get the writing workshop up and running. In clear language, Fletcher and Portalupi explain the simple principles that underlie the writing workshop and explore the major components that make it work. Each chapter addresses an essential element, then suggests five or six specific things a teacher can do to implement the idea under discussion. There's also a separate chapter entitled "What About Skills," which shows how to effectively teach skills in the context of writing. The book closes with practical forms in the appendixes to ensure that the workshop runs smoothly.Fletcher and Portalupi's twenty-plus years working with teachers have convinced them that there is no better way to teach writing. This important book is the culmination of all their years of effort, a synthesis of their best thinking on the subject.

    She shows us how to teach students to manage all the thinking and questioning that precedes their putting pen to paper. More than that, she offers us smarter ways to have students write about their reading that can last them a lifetime. She demonstrates how students' responses to reading canstart in a notebook, in conversation, or in a read aloud lead to thinking guided by literary criticism reflect deeper text analysis and honest writing processes result in a variety of popular genres--book reviews, author profiles, commentaries, editorials, and the literary essay. She even includes tools for teaching-day-by-day units of study, teaching points, a sample minilesson, and lots of student examples-plus chapters on yearlong planning and assessment. Ensure that your students will be readers and writers long after they leave you. Get them enthused and empowered to use whatever they read-facts, statistics, the latest book--as fuel for writing in school and in their working lives. Read Angelillo.

     This companion volume focuses on spelling and vocabulary knowledge that grow primarily through processes of derivation. Designed for elementary educators' use as part of a reading curriculum where derivational relations is covered.

    From a kindergartner's loops and pictures to a second grader's reading log, her Literacy Teacher's Playbook details exactly how she comes to understand them deeply and meet everyone's literacy needs-and the standards.My I-wish-I-knew-then-what-I-know-now experiences are the main inspiration for this book, writes Jen. So her workshop-in-a-book shares a powerful approach to assessment, planning, and teaching. Go beyond curriculum to develop differentiated reading and writing goals then plan targeted instruction with her four-step assessment protocol:collect data-student work and everyday assessments-that will be the most useful to you analyze the data to understand deeply what kids know and can do synthesize data from multiple assessments to create learning goals develop instructional plans and follow-ups to monitor progress. What you can pull out of a child's messy seat pocket is data. So Jen provides downloadable assessment packets from real children representing two puzzling types of young learners. Spread Marelle's packet out and let Jen model how she analyzes little kids' work. Next try a guided practice with Emre's work. Then you'll be ready to try it with your own students.My goal, writes Jen, is to help you understand your students with the depth that allows you to tweak your units and ensure you're giving every student opportunities for success. Follow the play tens of thousands of teachers have succeeded with: trust Jen Serravallo and feel the confidence that comes from making winning instructional decisions based on powerful assessments. Preview a sample chapter from the Literacy Teacher's Playbook, K-2.NEW Printable Materialsword pdf Blank Reading Log Levels D-Iword pdf Blank Reading Log Levels J-Mword pdf Blank Reading Log Levels L+word pdf Blank Re-reading Log Levels D-Iword pdf Blank Reading Interest Survey K-2word pdf Blank Reading Interest Survey 3-6word pdf Blank High-Frequency Word Listword pdf Blank Engagement Inventory

    For Katie Wood Ray, this foundational idea is also the beginning of an important way of approaching rigorous writing instruction.In Study Driven Ray shows you that encouraging students to read closely can improve the effectiveness of your writing instruction. Detailing her own method for utilizing the popular mentor-texts approach, Ray helps you immerse children in a close study of published texts that supports their learning, leads them to a better understanding of the traits of good writing, and motivates them to become more accomplished writers.Ray shows you how to set up your writing workshop to facilitate close study. From grounded understandings to informed practice to supportive resources, she demonstrates:how to find a rich variety of texts that give students a clear vision of the writing you want them to do how to strategically select texts to support whole-class learning as well as individual choice how your teaching language gives structure to curriculum development and student learning how good planning turns curricular standards and objectives into sensible units of study why depth can be a more practical and effective curricular goal than breadth in writing instruction Study Driven also gives you the ideas and resources for thirty units of study, ranging from genres to punctuation and appropriate across grade levels.Get students into the habit of studying what they read to help them plan their writing. Give them examples of real-world texts as well as the structure, the space, the time, and the guidance to change and grow as writers. Give yourself Study Driven and find out how.

    Here's the cool thing: poetry can get you there. It is inherently turbo-charged. Poets distill a novel's worth of content and emotion in twenty lines. The literary elements and devices you need to teach are all there, powerful and miniature as a Bonsai tree. Paul B. JaneczkoYou'd like to teach poetry with confidence and passion, but let's face it: poetry can be intimidating to both you and your students. Here is the book that takes the fear factor out of poetry and shows you how to use this powerful genre to spark student engagement and meet language arts requirements. Award-winning poet Paul B. Janeczko is the master for creating anthologies for pre-teen and adolescent readers, and here he's chosen 20 contemporary and classic selections with step-by-step, detailed lessons for investigating each poem from the inside out. Kids learn to become active readers of poetry, using graphic organizer worksheets to help them jump over their fear and dive into personal, smart, analytical responses. There's no better genre than poetry for helping students gain perspective on their own identities and their own worlds, and Paul provides a space on each reproducible poem for private thoughts, questions, feelings, and ideas. Your students will discover what each poem means to them.The 20 poems in this collection were chosen for their thought-provoking topics; compelling real-world themes that lead to conversation and collaboration in middle school classrooms. And by showing you how the poems and activities address the common core standards for English Language Arts (complete with a sample chart linking the poems to the standards), Paul provides a clear understanding of how you can get there using poetry.You can cultivate a passion for poetry in your classroom. Take the journey with Paul B. Janeczko and grow in confidence with your students, meeting some standards along the way.

    Inundated with seemingly insurmountable piles of papers to read, respond to, and grade, many teachers often find themselves struggling to balance differentiated, individualized feedback with the one resource they are already overextended on--time.Flash Feedback seeks to alleviate these struggles by taking teachers to the next level of strategic feedback by sharing:How to craft effective, efficient, and more memorable feedback Strategies for scaffolding students through the meta-cognitive work necessary for real revision A plan for how to create a culture of feedback, including lessons for how to train students in meaningful peer response Downloadable online tools for teacher and student use

     -Lucy Calkins, Author of Units of Study for Teaching WritingHidden Gems will transform the way we read student work. -Thomas Newkirk, Author of Holding On to Good Ideas in a Time of Bad OnesYou don't get true, fire-in-the-belly energy for writing because you fear getting a bad grade, but because you have something to say and your own way of saying it. -Katherine BomerIf you're like Katherine Bomer, you've grown weary of searching for what's wrong in student writing, and you want better ways to the respond to pieces whose beauty and intelligence doesn't shine on the first read. Now she shares how she learned instead to search-sometimes near the surface, sometimes deep beneath-to find, celebrate, and teach from writers' Hidden Gems.My hope is that as teachers we can respond to all students' writing with astonished, appreciative, awe-struck eyes, writes Katherine. Through protocols, sample assessments, and demonstrations with actual student work, she shows how to bring the brilliant facets of your writers to the surface as you:spot hidden stylistic gems in writing that is unconventional or vernacular uncover content and organizational gems even when you don't find the subject matter engaging or significant respond by naming and celebrating writers' gems instead of hunting for mistakes give lasting compliments using the inspiring language of published writers that motivate students to keep writing, revising, and polishing their gems. Accept Katherine Bomer's invitation to read work by young, unseasoned writers the way we would inquire our way into a poem by Nikki Giovanni, Jimmy Santiago Baca, or Naomi Shihab Nye and to notice the quirky brilliance and humor, the heartbreaking honesty, and surreal beauty in even the slightest bits of writing. You'll soon discover that student writers often perform remarkable feats in the craft of writing, and that you can achieve remarkable results with them when you uncover theirHidden Gems.

    Suggests ways to overcome the problems teachers face when teaching the classics--length, challenging vocabulary, complex syntax, and alien times and settings--and lists suggested titles.

    Instead of fueling the debate, Dr. Jan Burkins and Kari Yates have immersed themselves in the research and produced Shifting the Balance: 6 Ways to Bring the Science of Reading into the Balanced Literacy Classroom . This concise and practical guide integrates effective reading strategies from each perspective. Every chapter of Shifting the Balance focuses on one of the six simple and scientifically sound shifts reading teachers can make to strengthen their approach to early reading instruction in these areas:Reading ComprehensionPhonemic AwarenessPhonicsHigh-Frequency WordsCueing SystemsText SelectionPractical Instruction for Primary Grades: Whether your students are just learning to read or building more advanced reading comprehensive skills,  Shifting the Balance  is designed to help teachers meet the instructional needs of K-2 students.Six Manageable Shifts: Each chapter focuses on a key shift that helps educators understand common misconceptions and adjust their thinking around some common instructional practices that teachers have been using for decades.Evidence-Based Instruction: Burkins and Yates offer busy educators a blueprint for integrating finding from brain research, cognitive science, and child development into their daily instruction, while keeping meaningful experiences with books a priority.Classroom Applications: Shifting the Balance is full of sample activities and classroom vignettes that paint a picture of what these shifts look like in action with roomful of learners.The book has already helped countless educators by taking the guesswork out of how to blend best practices with the latest research while keeping students at the forefront of reading instruction. "We've written this book to support you in making sound decisions anchored in the best of science, the truth of responsiveness, and a relentless focus on providing all children learning experiences saturated with meaning," the authors write.