Product Description
Increasing evidence shows that young children benefit from reading instruction that includes informational text. Educational organizations, U.S. state mandates, and standardized tests all call for children to effectively read information, yet emphasis on using story text with young readers persists in the early literacy community. Teachers who are unsure about how to integrate informational text into their instruction will find expert guidance in this book, which demonstrates the effectiveness of this text in early reading instruction. Authors Kletzien and Dreher provide suggestions for developing classroom libraries and choosing quality informational text that can be used with all children in a variety of settings, such as inclusive classrooms and self-contained special education classrooms. The authors guide teachers in choosing informational books at appropriate reading levels for their students, featuring them in class read-alouds, and using them to teach comprehension, writing, and search strategies. Informational Text in K–3 Classrooms: Helping Children Read and Write provides ways in which teachers can strive for and maintain a more equal balance of fiction and informational text in the classroom. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Informational Text Review
The book is very informative and useful!It is extremely teacher friendly and gives clarity for how to use in a balanced literacy classroom.We have been trying to do more with non-fiction in the classroom, in the content area, in our leveled library, etc., so this just seemed to come along at the right time for us!The authors provide examples scaffolding instruction for all students using informational text.

Informational Text in the Balanced Literacy Classroom!
The book is very informative and useful.It is extremely teacher friendly and gives clarity for how to use informational text in the classroom with appropriate scaffolding.Kletzien and Dreher provide clear and concise explainations of informational text structure, strategy instruction, and application in meaningful reading and writing.The authors writing stlye demonstrates an acknowledgement of teachers as informed decision makers; empowering them with an understanding of the types of informational text and the implications for instruction.This is a must have book for teachers of reading in the elemnetary schools!Enjoy! ... Read more

Product Description

This book emphasizes both constructivist and explicit strategies for teaching literacy to young children within an integrated language arts approach.

With a thought-provoking and rich presentation, renowned author Lesley Morrow explores literacy development as an active process between children and adults to create meaning and real purpose. The Sixth Edition presents a theoretical and research-based rationale for its contents, as well as extensive practical applications to help readers grasp the scope and the complexity of early literacy development.

This Sixth Edition embraces integrated language arts and an interdisciplinary approach to literacy development as it addresses developing writing, reading, and oral language in the home and in school curriculum. The use of expository and narrative selections of children's literature is emphasized, as well as motivating children to become lifelong readers. This edition spends more time with strategies for preschool literacy and skill development in grades Pre-K through three. Both constructivist problem-solving teaching techniques and more explicit systematic instruction are discussed.

Key to this Sixth edition is the expanded coverage in the assessment chapter of the importance of assessment-guided instruction. In addition, differentiation of instruction has been made a high priority, and much more attention has been paid to dealing with children from diverse backgrounds. There are also more practical examples of how teachers can put strategies into practice than in other editions, especially with the new supplementary perforated pages that can be torn out of the book for actual use with children.

Customer Reviews (4)

Great for class and as a resource
This book was used for one of my classes in my Master's reading program. I am an early childhood teacher and this book is an excellent resource. It's an easy read! Many examples and suggestions are given for any concept or issue involving the classroom. Chapters were long but engaging. Definitely a keeper!

Great
Recieved item on time, right when we were told it would arrive.Book in very good condition.

The item I never recieved
I NEVER RECIEVED THIS ITEM!!! HOW CAN I REVIEW SOMETHING I NEVER GOT? WILL AMAZON PLEASE GIVE ME MY MONEY BACK OR GIVE ME THE BOOK!!! I ORDERED IT AT THE BEGINNING OF THE SEMESTER AND NOW THE SEMESTER IS HALF WAY THROUGH AND I HAVE YET TO SEE ANY SIGNS OF THAT EXPENSIVE BOOK!!!

Developing Literacy
I used this book as a textbook for a course entitled "Early Literacy Learning".This is one of the few textbooks that I am keeping from my Elementary Education major.It was full of ideas of how to incorporate literacy experiences for your youngsters into all areas of the classroom.As well, there were many ideas of how to get parents involved at school and at home to support their children�s emerging literacy.

Ms. Morrow is up-to-date on her research and practices.This book is a good companion for any first-year or experienced teacher.However, I do wish her writing style were improved herself.The reader can get easily bogged down when reading some of these very long chapters.

Why 4 stars?:
Morrow provides some wonderful advice and information on how to best create an environment that will support the literacy of young children.However, her own writing style could use a little bit of improvement to make the text a little more interesting. ... Read more

Product Description
The unique focus of this book integrates constructivist learning, diversity, and instruction-based assessment, and helps translate principles into practice for teachers of early literacy.

The book begins with a brief overview of the recent key national policies and initiatives that have had a significant impact on the teaching of reading and writing at the preschool level. Renowned and respected authors Vukelich, Christie, and Enz describe a continuum of approaches to reading instruction, ranging from emergent literacy to Scientifically-Based Reading Research. They also present their vision of a “blended” approach to teaching literacy that includes the best elements of these diverging views. The authors end this introduction with a set of principles to guide the effective teaching of literacy in preschool and kindergarten classrooms.

A Letter to Students from the Authors

Dear Student,

Helping Young Children Learn Language and Literacy, 2^nd edition, is about teaching the language arts –about facilitating reading, writing, speaking, and listening development for children, ages birth through kindergarten.  It is intended for preservice and inservice preschool and kindergarten teachers and administrators. The first edition of our book was written in late 1990s and was heavily influenced by the emergent literacy perspective that was dominant at the time.  This constructivist view maintains that the best way to teach early literacy is to provide settings and experiences that provide rich, meaningful experiences with language and print.  Key emergent literacy strategies include extended classroom discourse, print-rich environments, shared reading, shared writing, and literacy-enriched play. We still believe that these strategies form the core of an effective early literacy program.  However, over that past decade, a series of significant national educational events have impacted early literacy education, including the standards movement, No Child Left Behind legislation, and the use of scientifically-based reading research to make curricular and instructional decisions. The new second edition of our book reflects these important new trends and explains how this new skills-based approach to literacy instruction can be integrated with the earlier constructivist perspective. We advocate blending scientifically-based reading research with the emergent literacy perspective to create a ‘value added’ approach to language and literacy teaching and learning.  The second edition contains new content focusing on the “core” knowledge and skills that young children must have to become successful readers: oral vocabulary, phonological awareness, and alphabet knowledge. Vignettes demonstrate how these skills are directly and systematically taught to young children.  We also provide examples of how emergent literacy strategies such as shared reading and shared writing are being used in these same classrooms.   We believe that this type of balanced approach to early literacy instruction is the best way to prepare young children to become successful readers and writers.

We think that you will find our book to be very user friendly.  We provide definitions for key terms and study questions at the beginnings of each chapter and concise summaries at the end.  We provide many vignettes, case studies, and “trade secret” examples from master teachers to make learning and teaching come to life.  Each chapter ends with a “Linking Knowledge to Practice” feature that helps connect research and theory with the practices that you will observe in preschool and kindergarten classrooms.

We hope our text finds its way into your professional library and will become a helpful resource for you as you develop or continue your development as a professional educator.

Sincerely,

Carol, Jim, and Billie

Customer Reviews (3)

college book
the book came in perfect condition was well worth the money.Shipping was very quick and was packaged perfect.

happy customer
book came in the good shape. came in within the estimated time frame.thank you

Great book for all parents, and teachers
I am currently taking an emergent reading class from one of the authors of this book.It is very easy to read and understand.The book is full of valuable information that all parents and teachers of pre-k should read. ... Read more

Product Description
There is hope for your dyslexic child—
here are practical ways to achieve real progress!
Not just a reading problem, dyslexia can affect many areas of your child's life—including understanding words, descerning left from right, and counting money. These problems can have a devastating effect of your child's self-esteem and can make you feel powerless to help.
But you can help your dyslexic child. Eileen Cronin, Ph.D., founder of The Raskob Learning Institute, has studied dyslexia for many years and has developed a working program that parents can use to help dyslexic children significantly improve their reading, writing, and spelling. Beginning with a simple test that you conduct at home Cronin presents you with a comprehensive and holistic program that any parent or teacher can easily use.
Inside you'll find these helpful chapters:

• Is Dyslexic Real?
• The Growing Mind
• Parenting the Dyslexic Child
• Help at School
• Helping the Dyslexic Child with Reading
• A Monster Called Homework
• And Many More Chapters Filled with Invaluable Information

With Eileen Cronin's guidance, you can begin right away to help your child overcome dyslexia and achieve greater self esteem. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Excelent
Its a wonderful, economis book. Im a Special Education teacher and learned more in this book that in many of my classes. Very easy and interesting to read.

Helping Your Dyslexic Child: A Step-By-Step Program for Help
Easy to read.The best part about this book is that it gives you actual exercises to do with your child to help them.For this reason alone I am going to purchase this book.

I felt that this book did not provide enough resources.
This book did not offer enough resouces for parents.It was also pessimistic in terms of the outcome for dyslexics.It was very helpful in terms of identifying characteristics that are not often associated withdyslexia,yet it still appeared to be very general in catergorizing thesecharacteristics.One of the methods for teaching reading skills, howeverwas very helpful but other methods should have been given as well. ... Read more

Product Description
This K-8 methods book shows how to implement a balanced classroom literacy program that is child-centered and print rich with reading at the core. Helping Children Learn to Read presents, in a clear, readable style, the current theories and techniques for creating a literacy program in elementary grades. There is strong coverage of the role of the basal reader and how to modify its use; the whole language perspective and an integrated language arts curriculum; a teaching-strategies orientation to decoding, vocabulary, comprehension, studying, and writing; plus extensive discussion of emergent literacy, multicultural literature, metacognition, and holistic assessment. For anyone interested in elementary reading methods. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A helpful guide for busy teachers
This book is loaded with practical examples and ideas that will give both novice and seasoned teachers the necessary tools and techniques to get their students to read across the curriculum successfully. I found the book especially helpful with ideas for teaching reading using content area materials. With more topics than ever before being crowded in today's curriculum, teachers must teach reading using content materials in order to cover everything that's required. ... Read more

Product Description
In What Do the Experts Say?, anyone who has been affected by the phonics versus whole language debates, which means all of us, will find a thorough and well-balanced presentation of the basic arguments that have fired the controversy. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Important, dynamic, invaluable, benchmark contribution.
What Do The Experts Say?: Helping Children Learn To Read is a thorough and well-balanced presentation of the basic arguments arising from the phonics versus whole language debates regarding how children can best learn toread. In exploring this fundamental educational issue, Rona Flippoinsightfully underscores the critical need for some agreement in theeducational community. She presents the "Expert Study", withessential information about the various participants and study methods. Theareas of agreement are then analyzed and interpreted. Flippo then movesbeyond the theoretical into the real world, with practicing teacherssharing their own views and classroom experiences. What Do The Experts Say?concludes with a synthesis of the findings and invites the reader toparticipate in a follow-up study designed to give classroom teachers andother educational professionals an equal voice. Ultimately, only whenpractitioners join the conversation about how best to support developingyoung readers will they be empowered to make the decisions that are shapingliteracy education today. What Do The Experts Say? is an important,dynamic, invaluable, benchmark contribution to the on-going nationaldiscussion regarding literacy and the teaching of reading skills in theclassroom setting.

An important, dynamic, invaluable, benchmark publication.
What Do The Experts Say? is a thorough and well-balanced presentation of the basic arguments arising from the phonics versus whole language debates regarding how children can best learn to read. In exploring thisfundamental educational issue, Rona Flippo insightfully underscores thecritical need for some agreement in the educational community. She presentsthe "Expert Study", with essential information about the variousparticipants and study methods. The areas of agreement are then analyzedand interpreted. Flippo then moves beyond the theoretical into the realworld, with practicing teachers sharing their own views and classroomexperiences. What Do The Experts Say? concludes with a synthesis of thefindings and invites the reader to participate in a follow-up studydesigned to give classroom teachers and other educational professionals anequal voice. Ultimately, only when practitioners join the conversationabout how best to support developing young readers will they be empoweredto make the decisions that are shaping literacy education today. What DoThe Experts Say? is an important, dynamic, invaluable, benchmarkcontribution to the on-going national discussion regarding literacy and theteaching of reading skills in the classroom setting. ... Read more

Product Description
Promotes the teaching of reading in a child-centred, language rich environment in order to produce children who are truly literate - who can and do read. This text presents current theories and techniques for creating a primary classroom reading programme. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from Intervention in School & Clinic, published by Pro-Ed on March 1, 2002. The length of the article is 2298 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Helping children link sound to print: phonics procedures for small-group or whole-class settings.
Author: Laurice M. Joseph
Publication: Intervention in School & Clinic (Refereed)
Date: March 1, 2002
Publisher: Pro-Ed
Volume: 37Issue: 4Page: 217(5)

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Glory days: what our educators were up to in 1950
I ordered this little booklet because I hoped it might be a time capsule from the early years of the reading wars. It is.

Paul A. Witty was one of the architects of Whole Word and, later, a founder of the International Reading Association (IRA), whose purpose was banishing phonics. The publication date, 1950, is significant. The country has been distracted by 10 years of economic depression and 10 years of war and recovery. The people pushing Whole Word have been in control of the nation's reading programs for a generation. "Why Johnny Can't Read" was still 5 years in the future. (In that book Rudolph Flesch would refer to Witty as "one of the top word-method people.")

"Helping Children Read Better" contains about 45 pages, of which 8 are cartoons. Remarkably, only 3 or 4 pages deal with the theory and practice of reading, and this slender material has a single theme: pushing Whole Word.

Witty writes: "The young child...must learn that marks like chair, mother, bravery, sweet and OK are really symbols for things and ideas...He reads groups of words. He doesn't read words individually--and then put them together to make sense. He grasps phrases, then sentences, that express a complete thought...Teaching the preschool child the ABC's so that he can spell out words isn't generally a good idea. Good readers don't spell out words, for one thing. They learn to recognize them as whole words....Learning to pay attention to individual letters will only slow up the child's progress later....After noting the total word form, details can be observed, such as capital letters or endings. For example, 'suddenly' and 'suitcase' have the same length and the same beginning letter, but their shapes are different...."

However, MOST of the book is an almanac of alibis for why a child might have trouble reading (basically, a blame-the-victim smokescreen for the poor results obtained by Whole Word). Witty asserts: "These are some of the most frequent factors in reading failure: emotional problems, unfavorable home conditions and family relationships, poor teaching, inadequate teaching materials, differences in children's rate of growth, low intelligence."

And failure there was, massively so. Witty begins with this question: "Why are there so many poor readers in our schools?" Later he muses: "Is it true that one-third of our high school students can't read at the fifth grade level? That's what one magazine writer estimated in 1946. Other articles have painted almost as black a picture." Witty suavely sidesteps this claim, but his own questions confirm everything Flesch would assert a few years later.

This booklet also makes clear that Whole Word had already spawned not just reading failure but a whole infrastructure to deal with it: endless non-books with tiny vocabularies (e.g., Dick and Jane), an avalanche of testing materials, advice books, remedial services, even clinics. Witty himself is the Director of the Psycho-Educational Clinic. The booklet unselfconsciously lists many of these resources.

Almost humorously, there's a section called "Reading for better citizenship," which includes these thoughts: "How can the United Nations be made more effective as an agent for world peace and human rights?...What can we do to conserve our natural resources." Plus ca change.

Witty even mentions that during the Second World War, Special Training Units were set up to deal with illiterates and non-English speaking men. "The Army developed so efficient a program that the average illiterate learned the basic reading skills in the amazingly short time of eight weeks." What?! So why doesn't Witty recommend using those methods instead of his, where a third of high school students can't read? You can bet the Army didn't use Whole Word.

QED: I write a lot about what I call "the war against reading." People are nervous about the thought of a conspiracy. Well, this booklet confirms for me that there are only two options: Witty and his pals were a confederacy of dunces, or a conspiracy. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Reading Textbook
I found this book in the library.I used it so much I got tired of checking it out.I couldn't do without it so I bought a copy on Amazon at a very reasonable price.This is an excellent book for reading education.It is well organized and thorough.Excellent reference book for educators and student educators. ... Read more

Product Description
This textbook educates teachers and parents about the potential they have, when they work together, to improve children's literacy development. The book provides teachers with sound information that they can communicate to parents about literacy education that can be developed at home and in the schools. ... Read more

Product Description
This is a practical guide to implementing and sustaining a developmental approach to writing in the early years. It is intended for all those interested in the education of young children, including teachers, students and governors.

Beginning with a sound theoretical justification for developmental writing, the book gives practical guidance on a range of issues such as planning a writing curriculum, spelling, handwriting, assessment, bilingual writers, gender, parents and creating a writing policy. Each chapter is illustrated with examples of children’s writing and reference is made to The National Curriculum documents for English.

Product Description