Franki Sibberson's fourth and fifth grade students use binders to organize their weekly news magazines in a compilation for use throughout the year. In this classroom vignette, the students use these magazines collected and organized over many weeks as part of their social studies curriculum considering the legal system. After the classroom sequence, Franki and Karen Szymusiak, an elementary principal, discuss the many natural curriculum extensions...

The goal of teaching is to promote independent learning so reading and writing becomes a lifelong habit. As children become better readers, they also become better writers. A workshop format provides a literacy context for building connections between the reading and writing processes. About the author: Carla Soffos is a literacy specialist with the Arkansas Department of Education. She has twenty-one years of experience in education, including teaching...

Kids love to explore the real world, as young scientists they observe and relish nature, and through social studies they investigate other times, places, and cultures. In this series of three videos, authors and staff developers Anne Goudvis and Stephanie Harvey welcome you to the child-centered classrooms at Columbine Elementary in Boulder, Colorado, where the majority of the children are English language learners. In these culturally and linguistically...

You can read books or attend workshops about how to teach writing, but there's no substitute for seeing master teachers put ideas into practice with real kids. When students write takes us into the classrooms at Bailey's Elementary School in the outskirts of Washington, DC, where teachers wrestle with the questions of what it means to become an effective writer and what is a teacher's role in developing students' competence as writers. The four videos...

The ultimate test of a student's knowledge about words is the ability to transfer this information to reading and writing. A word study intervention must include opportunities for students to apply word-solving strategies to connected texts. Organized around 11 teaching episodes, including assessing word knowledge, modeling the word-solving process, providing guided practice, and prompting students to apply strategies during reading and writing, Small...

Have you ever wanted to sit down beside a master teacher and see how he or she confers? In this video, join Patrick Allen, author of Conferring: the keystone to reader's workshop, as he confers with nine different students over the course of two days. Sitting down one-on-one with a student in a conference is the best way to differentiate instruction so all students can learn the comprehension skills and strategies that wise readers use. Patrick demonstrates...

During Collaborative conferences, teachers observe a lesson or conference and provide explicit feedback on the teaching and learning interaction. Collaborative conferences use a team approach (with two or more teachers) to support student learning. During the pre-conference, the student's teacher identifies the instructional goal and asks the observing teachers to notice specific writing behaviors. After the lesson, the teachers engage in purposeful...

What are the features of a school change model? Can these characteristics be captured and shared with other schools? How can all members of the school community work together to effect change? In this four-part series, teachers and administrators explore specific ideas for implementing an apprenticeship literacy model that includes on-the-job experiences in five critical areas: assessing change over time in reading and writing progress colleague coaching...

Nothing matters more than kids' thinking. As teachers, we want to honor kids' thinking and teach them to become critical, thoughtful, independent readers. To help them turn thinking into meaning and to understand what they read, students need an arsenal of strategies to navigate and synthesize text. And they need to know when, where, and how, to use these strategies. Strategic thinking builds on the comprehension instruction in the book, Strategies...

The ability to select just-right books is a key element in developing confident, successful, independent readers. Gail starts this mini-lesson with Joan's K-2 multiage students by modeling how she picks a pair of shoes that are a good fit for her. Having engaged the class, Boushey and Moser show how to use a similar five-step process to select appropriate books: look at the book, consider the purpose and decide, am I interested in it? Do I comprehend...