The Reading Turn Around With Emergent Bilinguals

This practical resource will help K-6 practitioners grow their literacy practices while also meeting the needs of emergent bilingual learners. Building on the success of The Reading Turn-Around, this book adapts the five-part framework for reading instruction to the specific needs of emergent bilinguals. Designed for teachers who have not specialized in bilingual instruction, the authors provide an accessible introduction to differentiating instruction that focuses on utilizing students' strengths, identities, and cultural backgrounds to foster effective literacy instruction. Chapters include classroom vignettes, teacher exercises, illustrations of powerful reading plans for the student and teacher, resources for culturally and linguistically diverse children's literature, and tools to engage with students' families and communities. Book Features: Grounded in current theories and research in the teaching and learning of literacy as it relates to emerging bilingual learners. Accessible to K-6 educators, ESL and bilingual teachers, principals, literacy coaches, and curriculum developers. Borrows from the framework of Comber and Kamler's (2005) "turn-around pedagogies", which draws on student's strengths and assets to support teachers in improving their classroom practices. Emphasizes student-centered practices that are rooted in a child's identity as a reader and language learner. Based on Freebody and Luke's Four Resources Model (1990, 1999) but also includes a "fifth" dimension that foregrounds issues of identity.

This practical resource will help K–6 practitioners grow their literacy practices while also meeting the needs of emergent bilingual learners. Building on the success of The Reading Turn-Around, this book adapts the five-part framework for reading instruction to the specific needs of emergent bilinguals. Designed for teachers who have not specialized in bilingual instruction, the authors provide an accessible introduction to differentiating instruction that focuses on utilizing students’ strengths, identities, and cultural backgrounds to foster effective literacy instruction. Chapters include classroom vignettes, teacher exercises, illustrations of powerful reading plans for the student and teacher, resources for culturally and linguistically diverse children’s literature, and tools to engage with students’ families and communities. “Emergent bilinguals are the fastest growing population in our schools, and this important resource equips literacy educators with tools for providing equitable literacy experiences for emergent bilingual students. The authors have done an exceptional job of presenting their turn-around framework in a way that not only puts forth a vision for effective language and literacy development, but also presents a practical approach for applying the framework in today’s multilingual, multicultural classrooms.” —Jana Echevarria, professor emerita, California Statute University, Long Beach

This book demonstrates a five-part framework for teachers, reading specialists, and literacy coaches who want to help their least engaged students become powerful readers. Merging theory and practice, the guide offers successful strategies to reach your “struggling” learners. The authors show how teachers can “turn-around” their instructional practice, beginning with reading materials, lessons, and activities matching their students’ interests. Chapters include self-check exercises that will help teachers analyze their reading instruction, as well as specific advice for working with English Language Learners. Book Features: Effective methods for differentiating reading instruction in Grades 2–5.Real-life classroom vignettes and examples of student work.Helpful teacher self-evaluation exercises.Strategies to use with English Language Learners.And much more! “This is a masterwork that is simultaneously practical and groundbreaking. . . . The model these authors use to familiarize teachers with the essential elements of reading practice is clear and beautifully illustrated with stories of children you’ll swear you know.” —From the Foreword by Ellin Oliver Keene, national staff developer “This deeply intelligent and compassionate book provides teachers with detailed classroom scenarios and dozens of teaching tools for engaging all readers. The authors demonstrate how to help all students become motivated and powerful meaning-makers of a wide variety of texts.” —Katherine Bomer, Literacy Consultant, K–12

From the authors of the popular blog and resource for teachers, The Classroom Bookshelf, this book offers a framework and teaching ideas for using recently released children’s and young adult literature to build a culture of inquiry and engagement from a text-first approach. Reading With Purpose is designed to help K–8 teachers tap into their inner reader, to make intentional text selections for their students, and to create joyful and purpose-driven literacy learning experiences. The heart of the book is organized according to four purposes for selecting and using literature: care for ourselves and one another, connect with the past to understand the present, closely observe the world around us, and cultivate critical consciousness. Each chapter includes classroom stories, accessible research, reasons for why this matters now, and criteria for selecting for this purpose. A final section provides teaching invitations that pair with suggested books but can also be used with any high-quality book teachers may already have in their classrooms. Book Features: Builds on important work from thought leaders urging teachers to create their own reading identities to help them do so for their students.Describes a simple, sustainable framework teachers and teacher educators can use immediately to make more purposeful text selections.Provides myriad teaching ideas, narrative anecdotes from diverse classrooms, student work samples, and reflective questions.Offers a list of recommended, recently published children’s and young adult literature.

"The cognitive skill set known as metalinguistic awareness is an important component of reading ability. This guide for educators (K-6) scales activities and teaching strategies to students' age, linguistic background, and individual strengths and challenges. It offers suggestions for introducing metalinguistic concepts like phonological, semantic, and syntactic awareness with fun activities like games, songs, rhymes, and riddles"--

Anne Dyson confronts race and racism head-on with this ethnographic study of a child’s efforts to belong—to be a child among children. Follow the journey of a small Black child, Ta’Von, as he moves from a culturally inclusive preschool through the early grades in a school located in a majority white neighborhood. Readers will see Ta’Von encountering obstacles but finding agency and joy through writing and music-making, especially his love of the blues. Most attempts at desegregating schools are studied by reducing individual children to demographic statistics and test scores. This book, instead, provides a child’s perspective on challenges to classroom inclusion. Ta’Von’s journey demonstrates that it is within children’s peer worlds—formed in response to institutional policies and practices like desegregation initiatives, standardized testing, and a curricular focus on so-called “basic literacy skills”—that inequity becomes part of the experience of childhood. This book examines policies about literacy testing and teaching, including the potential power of the written word and of the arts. “Few researchers have had a career so embedded inside the lives of children in a classroom context as Anne Haas Dyson. This book should be on every literacy researcher’s shelf. It is a culmination of years of Dyson’s relentless fight against deficit framings of children and the deep inequalities that continue to persist in the world.” —Jennifer Rowsell, professor of literacies and social innovation, University of Bristol

"A number of academic texts address culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP), but very few focus on literacy practices that are culturally sustaining, unlike this one. Despite widespread interest among educators in culturally sustaining pedagogy, implementation of its practice is limited. This text provides authentic examples of culturally sustaining literacy pedagogy in real classrooms so that readers can see how CSP is enacted in practice, across multiple grade levels"--

Curating a Literacy Life spotlights the idea of curation as a process for inspiring student-centered learning with digital media. Young people need to learn to become purposeful collectors and, thus, curators of their own learning. In this book, Kist shows educators how to empower students as they make sense of all the books, videos, websites, and social media they access. Packed with ideas and activities developed over time in a high school setting, the author presents a model for learning to learn—a way of processing, making meaning, and repurposing all the texts around us. Kist demonstrates how curating can happen no matter where the teaching and learning are taking place, whether virtually or face-to-face, in school or out of school. Using Smart phones; a Netflix account, and access to a variety of YA, canonical, and media texts, this resource provides a foundation for becoming lifelong scholars and artists. Curating a Literacy Life is for both teachers and parents who are interested in helping young people harness, manage, and learn from the multiple messages and texts they encounter every day. Book Features: A powerful model to help teens make sense of and even repurpose the texts they encounter daily.Ideas for making use of digital media in ways that are meaningful to today’s students.Strategies for bridging the divide between in-school and out-of-school literacies. Activities developed during the author’s years as an instructional coach at Cleveland’s Glenville High School.