Frequently Asked Questions About Response to Intervention

Part of the “Psychology in the Classroom” series, Teaching for Thinking addresses higher order thinking processes. The book helps teachers understand teaching strategies to enhance thinking, understand the role of questioning, helps teacher focus on teaching and evaluating creative insight skills, and understand the basic principles and pitfalls in the teaching of thinking skills.

The updated second edition of Unlocking Literacy is here — and now pre- and inservice educators will have the very latest research and practical guidance on teaching good reading and spelling skills. Developed for general and special educators of students from prekindergarten to middle school and beyond, the new edition of this bestselling textbook arms teachers with the most recent developments in reading research and shows them how to apply their knowledge in the classroom to help all students learn.

Focusing on two interlocking skills — decoding and spelling—this textbook gets teachers ready to:

• promote students’ print awareness and phonological awareness through letter naming, letter forming, and listening and speaking activities such as poetry and play
• improve students’ spelling skills by teaching the origins of English words, Anglo-Saxon base words, Latin affixes and roots, Greek combining forms, and multisyllabic words
• help students understand and correctly use the components of the English language, including common consonant and vowel patterns, syllable patterns, common spelling rules, prefixes and suffixes, roots, nonphonetic words, and contractions
• deepen older students’ proficiency with language by introducing less common Latin roots and Greek combining forms, new words entering the English language, and lessons built around themes such as calendars and mythology

To help educators teach with confidence once they’re in the classroom, this text is packed with practical, immediately applicable material. Educators will get engaging classroom activities (including 21 NEW activities suitable for use all students, including English language learners); lesson plans incorporating multisensory, language-based instruction; samples of student work; explanations of current research; and even more websites and reference material to strengthen their instruction.

An essential text for college and university courses on reading instruction — and an ideal professional development resource for inservice educators—this new edition of a classic bestseller will help teachers unlock literacy for all their students.

This text presents IDEA, other pertinent federal laws, and federal cases in a clear, well-organized manner in order to help educators understand and apply their knowledge in concrete situations. This practical book emphasizes students’ understanding at a conceptual level rather than mere memorization of the detailed provisions of these laws. Educators are thereby prepared to adjust to future amendments to IDEA and other laws and to apply statutory provisions to specific situations. The four sections of the text address the Constitutional Frameworks of education laws, IDEA, RA and ADA, and other legal issues such as No Child Left Behind, tort liability, and high stakes testing.

Since the first edition was published, author Susan Winebrenner has spent eight years using it with school districts, teachers, parents, and kids across the U.S. and the U.K. this revised, expanded, updated edition reflects her personal experiences and the changes that have taken place in education over the years. Her basic philosophy hasn’t changed, and all of the proven, practical, classroom-tested strategies teachers love are still here. But there’s now an entire chapter on identifying gifted students. The step-by-step how-tos for using the strategies are more detailed and user-friendly. There’s a new chapter especially for parents. And all of the forms in the book are also on CD-ROM (sold separately) so you can print them out and customize them for your classroom.

In America today, 43 percent of our children fall below grade level in reading. In her meticulously researched and groundbreaking work, Diane McGuinness faults outmoded reading systems for this crisis — and provides the answers we need to give our children the reading skills they need. Drawing on twenty-five years of cutting-edge research, Dr. McGuinness presents bold new “phoneme awareness” programs that overcome the tremendous shortcomings of other systems by focusing on the crucial need to understand and hear reliably the sounds of a language before learning to read. Maintaining that any child can be taught to read fluently if given proper instruction, she dramatically reveals how dyslexia and behavior problems such as ADD stem not from neurological disorders but from flawed methods of reading instruction. With invaluable information on remedial reading programs that can correct various ineffective reading strategies, this book is a must for concerned parents, teachers, and others who want to make a difference.

This book uses the Building Blocks model. The Building Blocks model is practical, supported by research, and easy to implement. It identifies ten areas important to school success (the building blocks), divided into three levels:

1. the foundational level includes attention and impulse control, emotion and behavior, self-esteem, and learning environment blocks
2. the symbolic processing and memory level contains the visual, auditory, and motor skills blocks
3. the conceptual level comprises using strategies and thinking with language and images