Many Pathways To Literacy

Based on extensive research that proves that children actively make sense of literacy outside the official schooling and parental tuition they receive, this book examines how young children take literacy learning into their own hands.

This unique and visionary text is a compilation of fascinating studies conducted in a variety of cross-cultural settings where children learn language and literacy with siblings, grandparents, peers and community members. Focusing on the knowledge and skills of children often invisible to educators, these illuminating studies highlight how children skilfully draw from their varied cultural and linguistic worlds to make sense of new experiences. The vastly experienced team of contributors provide powerful demonstrations of the generative activity of young children and their mediating partners - family members, peers, and community members - as they syncretise languages, literacies and cultural practices from varied contexts. Through studies grounded in home, school, community school, nursery and church settings, we see how children create for themselves radical forms of teaching and learning in ways that are not typically recognised, understood or valued in schools. This book will be invaluable reading for teachers, teacher educators, researchers and policy-makers who seek to understand the many pathways to literacy and use that knowledge to affect real change in schools.

With the advent of the Information Society, access to resources is vital to the ordinary citizen, the academic, and the career professional, as well as in public administration and private enterprise. Information Pathways: A Problem-Solving Approach to Information Literacy is designed to serve as a textbook for courses that address the need of college students to develop a basic knowledge of the complex matrix of core resources for the retrieval, management, and exploitation of information. This book shows students how to: • Build effective search strategies for solving information problems • Evaluate and use information and information sources • Apply information skills to the writing process • Be at ease with numeric information • Integrate information skills for smooth problem solving • Maintain their new fluency with information Organized into chapters that examine different ways in which information is structured, Information Pathways will help students develop and evaluate strategies for finding and adopting information.

In The Power of Pictures book and companion DVD, Beth Olshansky introduces teachers to her innovative art-based approach to literacy instruction. Widely practiced in classrooms across the country, the model has been proven by research to improve literacy achievement with a wide range of learners, especially those who struggle with verbal skills. At the heart of her approach is the Artists/Writers Workshop. Through study of quality picture books and hands-on art experiences, students learn to visualize, “paint pictures with words,” and ultimately create their own extraordinary artistic and literary work. The book and DVD explain how any teacher can successfully use this process to enable all students, particularly low performers, to make dramatic gains in both reading and writing.

Now in its fifth edition, Reading Pathways (with help from Dewey the Bookwormâ?¢) offers an easy-to-use, highly effective approach to teaching reading accuracy and fluency to students of all ages, using a unique pyramid format. Reading pyramids begins with one word, and slowly build into phrases and sentences of gradually increasing complexity. As the student moves from the pinnacle to the base of each pyramid, the phrase or sentence becomes a more interesting and expansive, and the student's confidence grows with each line completed. Progressively building up the amount of text per line increases eye span, strengthens eye tracking, and develops reading fluency. The book also features more challenging multi-syllable word pyramid exercises and games to further develop fluency and vocabulary. Learning to read long words by syllables removes the fear and mystique of multi-syllable words and helps students build the strong vocabulary so critical for success in reading and writing. Dewey® and Dewey Decimal Classification® are proprietary trademarks of OCLC Online Computer Library Center, and are used with permission. Dewey the Bookworm™, Dewey D. System, Bookwormus Giganticus™, and the design mark of the character Dewey are trademarks of Dolores G. Hiskes and are also used with permission.

This text recognizes that there is no simple way to develop literacy. It begins with the central premise that literacy is not simply a cognitive process, but a set of social practices used in socio-cultural contexts, and argues that literacy learners come to school with unique social histories that need to be recognised in the programmes devised to facilitate learning. Cairney claims that literacy is not a unitary social practice and suggests that there are many forms of literacy, each with specific purposes and contexts in which they are used. The author provides a look at the many practical classroom strategies and practices that are necessary to recognize multiple pathways to literacy.

This text recognizes that there is no simple way to develop literacy. It begins with the central premise that literacy is not simply a cognitive process, but a set of social practices used in socio-cultural contexts, and argues that literacy learners come to school with unique social histories that need to be recognised in the programmes devised to facilitate learning. Cairney claims that literacy is not a unitary social practice and suggests that there are many forms of literacy, each with specific purposes and contexts in which they are used. The author provides a look at the many practical classroom strategies and practices that are necessary to recognize multiple pathways to literacy.