There is power that resides in outstanding culturally diverse literature'sa power that has the potential to engage students in reading and teach them about the art and craft of writing.
In Dream Wakers: Mentor Texts That Celebrate Latino Culture, Ruth Culham focuses her love of children's literature'sand her decades of work developing the traits of writing'son books that celebrate Latino life and culture. She provides a wide variety of ideas to teach writing using some of the richest and most beautiful children's books available.
Dream Wakers gives you:
- An annotated list of more than 120 books with do-it-today lesson ideas for teaching the traits of writing'sIdeas, Organization, Voice, Word Choice, Sentence Fluency, and Conventions. More than half of the books listed are bilingual or offer English and/or Spanish editions.
- Eleven original, insightful essays by renowned children's authors of some of the featured books
- A handy reference chart that helps teachers locate books quickly by trait, genre, language, and author/publisher information.
Ruth encourages all of us to make sure students of all backgrounds have access to high-quality, culturally diverse texts and recognize the difference those texts will make in their reading lives, as well as in their perception of themselves as a thinkers, learners, and citizens.
Biography
Ruth Culham, EdD, has written more than forty professional resources illuminating both writing and the reading-writing connection. Her most recent book, The Writing Thief, has helped teachers find “right now” children's books and everyday texts to use as mentor texts. Dream Wakers expands and complements this work by delving into books that focus on Latino culture and life as mentor texts for writing.
'Dream Wakers: Mentor Texts That Celebrate Latino Culture takes the author's love for children's literature and writing and blends it with a special focus on Latino life and culture to provide teachers with new strategies for incorporating some of the best new children's books into writing inspiration.
Over 120 such books are paired with lesson ideas designed to emphasize different creative writing processes in a survey packed with insight. Over half of the recommended books are bilingual or offer choices between English and Spanish editions, while advice on charting, encouraging student dialogues from specific readings, and synopses of each book's approach provides plenty of detail educators will find useful for classroom applications.'
- California Bookwatch, James A. Cox, Editor-in-Chief, and Diane Donovan, Editor, Midwest Book Review
