Literacy For Real

Written for the busy practitioner by an experienced professional development consultant, writer, and speaker, Literacy for Real is a hands-on guide to meaningful reading across the content areas of English, math, science, and social studies in grades 6–12. It presents key information that addresses all types of 21st-century literacy—visual, digital, and print—in an easy-to-use format. The book centers on classroom practices and strategies for helping students tackle the reading required for subject-area study. Chapters focus on engagement, vocabulary, comprehension, and critical reading, and each includes sample activities as well as a list of resources. Avoiding the one-size-fits-all model, this guide instead offers foundational practices based on what we know about learning. Research-based strategies for content-area reading instruction, with a focus on student engagement. Online, multimedia texts for today’s 21st century classrooms. Interactive lessons that teachers can adapt to their own needs.

'Joanne Larson and Jackie Marsh's Literacy Learning is easily the most theoretically sophisticated and practically useful discussion of sociocultural and critical approaches to literacy learning that has appeared to date' - James Paul Gee, Tashia Morgidge Professor of Reading, University of Wisconsin-Madison Making Literacy Real is the essential reference text for primary education students at undergraduate and graduate level who want to understand literacy theory and successfully apply it in the classroom. Doctoral students will find this a useful resource in understanding the relationship of theory to practice. The authors explore the breadth of this complex and important field, orientating literacy as a social practice, grounded in social, cultural, historical and political contexts of use. They also present a detailed and accessible discussion of the theory and its application in the primary classroom.

Two seasoned veterans recount their 23-year collaboration to find ways to get students to improve their learning in their content area subjects. The two teachers, one an elementary-trained reading specialist and the other a secondary-trained science teacher, begin by telling of their mission to find what will work for them, rejecting and tiring of bandwagon movements and quick-fix promises, and finding the power of collaboration. In their subsequent chapters, they discuss practices and strategies for helping students read and become actively involved with books, lectures, and videos. Then they flesh out activities to help students write more effectively in the content areas. Every teaching strategy is one that they have used successfully with real students. And they have tracked improved grades and secured students' feedback about which strategies helped them the most.

One of the most important ways to scaffold a successful transition from high school to college is to teach real-world, gate-opening writing genres, such as college admission essays. This book describes a writing workshop for ethnically and linguistically diverse high school students, where students receive instruction on specific genre features of the college admission essay. The authors present both the theoretical grounding and the concrete strategies teachers crave, including an outline of specific workshop lessons, teaching calendars, and curricular suggestions. This text encourages secondary teachers to think of writing as a vital tool for all students to succeed academically and professionally. Appropriate for courses and teacher professional development, this accessible book: Reconceptualizes the ways in which writing can best serve marginalized students.Examines research-based curricular and teaching approaches for the secondary school classroom.Provides a writing workshop framework for creating a college admissions essay complete with lesson-planning materials, activities, handouts, bibliographic resources, and more.Includes student perspectives and work samples, offering insight into the lives and struggles of diverse adolescents. “In this important book, Jessica Early and Meredith DeCosta describe a readily replicable set of activities that provides motivated, meaningful opportunities for writing development and helps potential first-generation higher education students gain university admission.” —From the Foreword by Charles Bazerman, Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, University of California Santa Barbara “This is a book about opening doors, about demystifying writing tasks that can keep many students on the outside. The authors take on a major writing challenge—the college application essay—and through careful instruction help students use their real life stories to master it. It is teaching at its best, and democracy at its best.” —Thomas Newkirk, University of New Hampshire “This groundbreaking book has the best qualities of an exemplary research study while also providing us with a handbook of practical wisdom and engaging lessons for teaching writing to a diverse population of secondary students. It is certain to inspire and instruct all English teachers and composition researchers who care about helping traditionally marginalized and underprepared students discover and demonstrate that they are qualified to enter college.” —Sheridan Blau, Teachers College, Columbia University

Help children learn coping skills through literature! This book answers the often repeated question: Is there a children's book I can read in my classroom to give children insight into significant life events? Literature ideas and activities help students cope with real-life situations, such as bullying, that interfere with school. This book will assist educators in guiding and nurturing children's special issues and concerns with outstanding, ready-to-go reading and writing lessons. This professional resource for K-6 educators and parents uses literature with identifiable characters to help children who are facing challenges in their lives. Like bullying, peer acceptance, peer pressure, and being different, as well as family situations such as death, divorce, adoption, and sibling rivalry.

Presents statistical evidence to support the author's contention that children in the United States are reading at the same or a better level than they did a generation ago; and argues that the literacy crisis has been brought on not by poor achievement, but by a simple lack of books.