A comprehensive system of literacy instruction is outlined in this monograph. The system involves two stages--learning to read and reading to learn (reading to get information from printed materials)--which are integrated through two overlapping teaching spirals organized around a chosen subject matter theme. The nine chapters of the monograph…

This monograph presents classroom activities that were designed to encourage children to read and write in a self-reliant and responsible manner. The activities were chosen for their relevance to the children involved and because the vocabulary involved was interesting, familiar, and worth remembering and using again. The topics are arranged in…

A longitudinal study of reading difficulties in schools in the county of Dunbarton, Scotland, was conducted in 1966. More than 1,500 children were tested after they had completed two years at school and were just over seven years of age. Important results included: about 15% of the children were without any independent reading skill, boys were…

Discover an innovative teaching model that brings children of similar abilities together in small groups for paced instruction that maximizes learning. Based on best practices, the model's step-by-step lesson plans reflect the developmental stages of the reading process and provide students with opportunities to engage in guided reading, word…

"Do I really have to teach reading?" This is the question many teachers of adolescents are asking, wondering how they can possibly add a new element to an already overloaded curriculum. And most are finding that the answer is "yes." If they want their students to learn complex new concepts in different disciplines, they often have to help their…

This book argues that it is the incorporation of a multicultural agenda into basal readers, the primary tool for teaching reading in elementary schools, that has stunted American children's ability to read. The book shows how basal readers have been systematically "dumbed down" in an effort to raise minority students'"self…

In order to help kindergartners and first graders who need extra work on their literacy skills, this book offers a plan for teaching phonemic awareness and letter sound correspondence. The plan in the book is a developmentally sequenced, 11-week program to give students repeated opportunities to practice and enhance their beginning reading and…

This book offers 60 stimulating, classroom-tested activities to instill a love of literature and help young learners develop as readers, writers, and speakers. By using picture books, novels, or even nonfiction readings as starting points, the reproducible worksheets in the book can be implemented to strengthen students' entire spectrum of…

This book explains that mainstream elementary classroom teachers with little or no English-as-a-Second-Language training can meet the needs of linguistically diverse students by integrating the teaching of English with the content areas of the regular curriculum. It begins with a strong theoretical underpinning for this practice, drawing on a…

When your school wants to do more to improve the literacy skills of secondary school students, here's a leadership plan that takes your program in a bold, new direction. Instead of focusing on isolated teaching strategies and textbooks, the authors introduce you to a whole-school program that emphasizes: (1) Exposing students in all subjects to…

In order to meet the goals of No Child Left Behind, standardized testing is preeminent as the sole indicator determining whether states all across America demonstrate adequate yearly progress regarding the improvement of student achievement in literacy education. This book will help teachers and parents raise children's scores on standardized…

Using Jeanne Chall's widely applied model of reading development, this book examines the strengths and weaknesses in the reading, writing, and language development of children from low-income families to help identify the onset of their difficulties. The book shows how, in the transition from learning the medium to understanding the message, the…

This book offers 80 original chants for teaching children to play with language, discover their ownership of language, and experiment with language. The book states that chants can provide a strategy that develops reading skills, ease in dramatic situations, sidebars in art work, communication abilities, awareness of self and environment, and…

Including revisions and updates in all areas, this book functions as a pre-service and in-service teacher self-instructional manual in word recognition skills. The first part of the book discusses the controversy concerning early phonics instruction versus use of the whole language approach, and then discusses consonants, vowels, reading…

The study described in this book was designed to create an overall picture of the type of student found at a school for educationally substandard army recruits in England, to establish the causes of the student's educational backwardness and relate these to linguistic performance, and to compare the effectiveness of the approaches and methods used…