Writing

Using the guiding principles from Peter Johnston’s best-selling professional resources, Choice Words and Opening Minds, Peter and six colleagues began a journey to create just such classrooms—environments in which children meaningfully engage with each other through reading, writing, making, and discussing books.

Together, they bring you Engaging Literate Minds: Developing Children's Social, Emotional, and Intellectual Lives, K-3 where you’ll discover how these teachers struggled and succeeded in building such classrooms. Inside you’ll find the following:

• Practical ways to develop a caring learning community and children's socio-emotional competence
• Powerful teaching practices from real classrooms
• Engaging ways to encourage inquiry and student agency
• Suggestions on how to use formative assessment in everyday teaching practices
• Helpful research behind the classroom practices and children’s development
• Ways to help students inspire and support each other

Building a just, caring, literate society has never been more important than it is today. By embracing the ideas and teaching strategies in Engaging Literate Minds, you can help children to become socially, emotionally, and intellectually healthy. Not only do these classroom practices develop the skills to achieve district benchmarks and beyond, they help develop children’s humanity.

• Detailed explanations of each standard’s importance and real-world application examples
• Planning tools including academic vocabulary, modifiable lesson plans for whole group instruction, and suggestions for literacy workstations
• Mentor texts to use during whole group, small group, or stations
• Over 400 full-color photos demonstrating workstations in action
• Ways to connect lessons into other areas of daily instruction, including independent reading time, small-group instruction, and workstations
   

• Teaching Foundational Skills Across Subjects: Hands Down, Speak Out is a practical guide for teaching listening and talking skills that span both literacy and math instruction and can be applied to a multitude of curriculums.
• K-5 Classroom Management Focused on Dialogue: Too often, the practice of hand-raising favors the performance of answers by a few students over the construction of meaning involving the whole class. Help all students develop dialogue skills that will deepen their understanding of literacy and mathematics, as well as of themselves, their communities, and the world.
• 28 Student-Centered Micro Lessons: Each of these short, incremental lessons build specific skills during content instruction rather than taking time away from it. Students will be energized by a discourse structure in which their ideas and voices take the lead while teachers focus on listening and facilitating.
• Nurturing Disagreements: The authors provide guidance for managing difficult conversations by teaching students to engage in debate and discussion in a way that values listening equally with talking. Students are able to spend time developing active listening and speaking skills in a constructive environment.

When teaching reading, American classrooms often focus exclusively on skills instruction. But how can you teach the “how” without the “why?”  In his new book, Igniting a Passion for Reading: Successful Strategies for Building Lifetime Readers, Steve Layne shows teachers how to develop readers who are not only motivated to read great books, but also love reading in its own right. Packed with practical ways to engage and inspire readers from kindergarten through high school, this book is a “must-have” on every teacher’s professional book shelf.

Well-known for his children’s books, young adult novels, and keynote speeches across the nation and around the world,  "Dr. Read" offers teachers everywhere a plan for engaging even the most reluctant reader. From read-alouds to creating reading lounges to author visits and so much more, this book will help schools create a vibrant reading culture. Each chapter is introduced by well-known children's and young adult author, including Joan Bauer, Neal Shusterman, Steven Kellogg, Sharon Draper, and more. 
 

Written with humor, grace, and poignancy, Igniting a Passion for Reading will have a profound effect on the teaching of reading in our nation’s schools.

• Increasing the amount of reading and writing students are doing while giving students more choice around those activities
• Balancing rigorous, high-quality literature and non-fiction works with student-selected titles
• Encouraging readers to deepen their comprehension by moving beyond the “four corners of the text”
• Planning lessons that move beyond Common Core expectations to help young writers achieve more authenticity through the blending of genres
• Using modeling to enrich students’ writing skills in the prewriting, drafting, and revision stages
• Resisting the de-emphasis of narrative and imaginative reading and writing

• Detail specific demands books in that text level make on young readers and the best ways to coach students as they work through them
• Highlight instructional procedures for reading, writing, and word study that can be implemented immediately at your small group table
• Suggest optimal schedules, techniques, and formats for efficient instruction at that level
• Unpack the book characteristics specific to that level and demonstrate ways to capitalize on them to intentionally support emergent readers and writers.

Our youngest learners thrive when their learning environment is one that celebrates curiosity, exploration, and imagination. This comprehensive resource sets the stage for play-based learning that will help children build a strong literacy foundation as well as negotiate the choices they make in real life. Get your students off on the right foot with literacy learning that appeals and engages.

• Over 200 picture book suggestions introducing the Heartprint Framework, which demonstrates how you can layer literacy with life lessons
• 60 read aloud based connections that support caring classroom conversations, lesson planning, and extensions
• Instructional opportunities for nurturing readers and writers during workshop time, small-group gatherings, or individual conferring sessions
• Literacy Snapshot photo essays with ideas on how to adopt or adapt
• Continuing connections with additional resources and invitations for further learning

In her practical and inspirational book, Literacy Essentials: Engagement, Excellence, and Equity for All Learners, author Regie Routman guides K-12 teachers to create a trusting, intellectual, and equitable classroom culture that allows all learners to thrive as self-directed readers, writers, thinkers, and responsible citizens. Over the course of three sections, Routman provides numerous "Take Action" ideas for implementing authentic and responsive teaching, assessing, and learning. This book poses a key question: How do we rise to the challenge of providing an engaging, excellent, equitable education for all learners, including those from high poverty and underserved schools? 

Teaching for Engagement: Many high performing schools are characterized by a a thriving school culture built on a network of authentic communication. Teachers can strengthen classroom engagement by building a trusting and welcoming environment where all students can have a safe and collaborative space to grow and develop.

Pursuing Excellence: Routman identifies 10 key factors that describe an excellent teacher, ranging from intellectual curiosity to creativity, and explains how carrying yourself as a role model contributes to an inclusive, caring, empathic, and fair classroom. She also stresses the importance for school leaders to make job-embedded professional development a top priority.

Dismantling Unequal Education: The huge gap in the quality of education in high vs low income communities is the civil rights issue of the 21st century, according to Routman. She spells out specific actions educators can take to create more equitable schools and classrooms, such as diversifying texts used in curriculums and ensuring all students have access to opportunities to discuss, reflect, and engage with important ideas. 

From the author, "I wrote Literacy Essentials, because I saw a need to simplify teaching, raise expectations, and make expert teaching possible for all of us. I saw a need to emphasize how a school culture of kindness, trust, respect, and curiosity is essential to any lasting achievement. I saw a need to demonstrate and discuss how and why the beliefs, actions, knowledge we hold determine the potential for many of our students. Equal opportunity to learn depends on a culture of engagement and equity, which under lies a relentless pursuit of excellence." 
 

Ever wonder what the rest of your class should be doing while you are working with a small reading group? Debbie Diller offers practical suggestions in Literacy Work Stations: Making Centers Work for over a dozen literacy work stations that link to classroom instruction and make preparation and management easy for teachers. Learn how to set up work stations, how to manage them, and how to keep them going throughout the year.

Each chapter includes:

• How to introduce each station
• Which materials to include at which station
• What to model the station as
• How to solve problems and differentiate
• How to assess while keeping students accountable
• Reflection questions for professional development

Materials in both English and Spanish are provided in the extensive resource section. Throughout the book the author has included photos of literacy workstations from a variety of classrooms in which she has worked to illustrate the methods discussed in the text. Literacy Work Stations is a go-to classroom resource that will help you keep all students engaged while you focus in on small groups.

• What close reading is (and is not)
• How to encourage students to “read like detectives”
• Ways to weave close reading practices into your lessons
• How to cultivate real reading, organic thinking, and deep conversation
• Which books invite amazing learning and thinking experiences

• Honor students’ passions, interests, and questions by teaching how to embrace inquiry, curiosity, and exploration
• Teach students how to frame relevant questions throughout the research process and make the information personal
• Develop authentic projects that include surveys, experiments, and interviews
• Assess skills, not just memorization by recognizing and legitimizing what students are doing with research on their own