Reading experts, Tim Rasinski and Nancy Padak, developed powerful assessments that help you accurately identify students' potential reading problems in just three minutes. This exciting new DVD lets you observe teachers as they assess students in word recognition, comprehension, fluency, and vocabulary. These quick assessments make it easy to pinpoint students' strengths and target areas in which they need more support. As the DVD shows, the assessments are easy to administer and manage, saving you valuable classroom time so that you can focus on what's important--teaching.

 

Use the teaching ideas in this rich resource to improve your students reading comprehension. By nurturing meaningful talk about reading and learning, you can monitor and support students metacognitive use of strategies such as predicting, making connections, questioning, visualizing, and summarizing. A comprehensive breakdown of the components of each strategy helps you support learners from the introduction of a strategy to students independent use of it.  Throughout each chapter you ll read classroom transcripts as well as student samples and quotes that show the deep learning that occurs. Strategy chapters present numerous activities, and the appendixes contain a matrix that shows what activities can be used to teach each strategy, as well as numerous reproducible forms and graphic organizers.

 

Teaching comprehension and insuring that students think about what they read can be a challenging task for educators. In reader-friendly terms, Comprehension Strategies for Your K6 Literacy Classroom illustrates how teachers can effectively use six critical comprehension strategies to enhance student understanding: activating schema, questioning, visualizing, inferring, determining important ideas, and synthesizing.

 

In the decade since Craft Lessons' publication the world has changed in many ways, yet one thing has remained constant: teachers continue to feel starved for time. With new curriculum mandates, daily specials, “pull-outs,” and precious time devoted to test preparation, the situation has never been worse, and the need for a succinct resource like Craft Lessons has never been greater.

In this book, two seasoned teachers show how to set reading goals, assess students to ensure goals are being met, and carry out instruction. Stressing that there are many ways to determine where students are and just as many ways to determine where to take them, they give teachers the tools to make that journey. They open with overview chapters on reading workshop and ""the first six weeks"" and move to detailed chapters on independent reading, read-aloud, whole-class instruction, small-group instruction, and conferences. In short, they provide a model for assessment-informed instruction.

 

 

Change is hard work, even when we are convinced it’s worth the effort. Teachers are expected to change without clear explanations or evidence of how the changes will benefit them or their students. Meaningful change is most likely to occur when teachers’ beliefs, feelings, and personality are taken into consideration.

Differentiated Coaching applies the latest research and theory of personality type, multiple intelligences, experiential learning models, and mind styles models to create a differentiated approach for staff development.

 

Developing leveled materials and creating an organizational system to manage it all is an immense undertaking. In this comprehensive resource, veteran teacher and staff developer Margo Southall shares management tools along with hundreds of leveled activities that she has fine-tuned over the years. The result is an invaluable collection of research-based activities that enable teachers to match independent practice with students' needs in reading comprehension, fluency, word study, and writing. Moreover, Southall provides a workable framework that makes setting up the centers and tracking student progress simple.

 

Differentiated instruction-matching just-right instruction to the needs of each learner-is a powerful and effective way to help all students be successful. In this resource, reading expert, Laura Robb, invites you into her classroom so you can see differentiated reading instruction in action. She shows you how to teach and manage whole-class reading where each student reads a different book, provide targeted support while working with small-groups, build comprehension through student-centered journal writing, and tier assignments to maximize the learning potential of each student. Includes lessons, strategies, assessment ideas, management tips, and samples of student work.

 

Grades K - 5
The author dispels the misinformation that has arisen about fluency since the National Reading Panel named it as a key element of reading and helps teachers explore and understand their role in supporting students who read with appropriate speed, accuracy, expression and comprehension. The book equips teachers to make reliable professional judgments about students' fluency and provides a step-by-step plan with an array of instructional options.