Recommended Books
Life is good for Jenna Bianchi. She's just started her second year of teaching English at Morrison High School, a job she loves. She has a pet parrot with attitude. And there's a handsome math teacher who wants to be more than just friends. But everything changes when a defiant, disruptive tenth grader walks into her classroom.
With a smart mouth and a swagger to match, Michael Tayler is a problem for Jenna from the very first day. His school record screams troublemaker, and Jenna wonders if the new year is already doomed. But when she reads Michael's first poetry assignment, she recognizes it for what it truly is: a cry for help.
Michael's presence sets into motion a chain of events that turns Jenna’s perfect life upside-down and threatens to destroy her career. Faced with a challenge unlike anything she’s ever known, Jenna commits to doing what no one has done for Michael Tayler before.
Click here to read an excerpt from the book.
"Questioning the Author" (QtA) is an interactive teaching strategy that helps students comprehend what they are reading. When elementary students read in a QtA lesson, they learn to question the ideas presented in the text while they are reading, making them thinkers, not just readers.
In Raising Cain, Dan Kindlon, Ph.D., and Michael Thompson, Ph.D., two of the country's leading child psychologists, share what they have learned in more than thirty-five years of combined experience working with boys and their families. They reveal a nation of boys who are hurting—sad, afraid, angry, and silent. Kindlon and Thompson set out to answer this basic, crucial question: What do boys need that they're not getting? They illuminate the forces that threaten our boys, teaching them to believe that "cool" equals macho strength and stoicism. Cutting through outdated theories of "mother blame," "boy biology," and "testosterone," the authors shed light on the destructive emotional training our boys receive—the emotional miseducation of boys.
Raising Lifelong Learners: A Parent's Guide is a vital book for parents. Beginning with talk as the foundation of literacy, and emphasizing the importance of listening to and speaking with children, Lucy Calkins, longtime education specialist, then moves into the stages of reading and writing: how to recognize an emergent reader, how to foster a young author, and how to encourage a love of books and reading through your own interest and modeling.
In this practical handbook for parents, clinical psychologists Brooks and Goldstein draw on their considerable experience working with children and families to demonstrate that parents' core goal should be to instill in their children a sense of inner recourse. "A resilient child is an emotionally healthy child, equipped to successfully confront challenges and bounce back from setbacks," they contend, and to this end they provide 10 parenting "guideposts" for nurturing the kind of resilience that helps children thrive.
This accessible and informative guidebook to reading aloud includes sensible advice and important tips on: when to start reading to your children, how to use television and computers wisely, how to make a reader out of your child, how to make a writer out of your child and much more.
This practical but comprehensive guide to reading comprehension instruction begins with the question, "What do good comprehenders look like?" What follows are detailed descriptions of seven students, representing different ages and backgrounds, all of whom are skilled, successful readers. The authors use these descriptions as a basis for their definition of comprehension. Chapters include strategies and cover classrooms that support comprehension instruction, comprehension assessment, comprehending fiction, reading to learn information, vocabulary instruction, research skills, and studying and test taking. Recommended for teaching ELLs as well as native speakers.
This new edition continues to focus on informal, teacher-led assessment and correction of reading difficulties using regular classroom reading materials. This focus on informal rather than formal (clinical) assessment and its detailed descriptions of instructional procedures set it apart from the competition.
Since the initial publication of this important text, the research support for balanced literacy instruction has continued to grow. This revised and updated second edition incorporates findings from reports by the National Reading Panel and the National Research Council, as well as ongoing research by the author and others. Michael Pressley demonstrates how effective reading instruction combines aspects of both skills-emphasis and whole language approaches.
This revised and updated second edition incorporates findings from reports by the National Reading Panel and the National Research Council, as well as ongoing research by the author and others. Topics covered include the various components of both whole language and skills instruction, how the balanced approach is applied in real classrooms, and motivational issues. The second edition has been augmented with new material on phonemic awareness, comprehension problems, decoding and comprehension, vocabulary instruction, development of word knowledge, and "flooding" the classroom with motivation. It also features a new discussion of the place of Reading Recovery within balanced instruction, including an in-depth case study.
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