Teaching Reading in Middle School


Book Description

Get the "big picture" of teaching reading in the middle school, including research, as well as the practical details you need to help every stydent become a better reader. Veteran teacher Laura Robb shares how to: teach reading strategies across the curriculum, present mini-lessons that deepen students' knowledge of how specific reading strategies work; help kids apply the strategies through guided practice; support struggling readers with a plan of action that improves their reading motivation; and much more.







Effective Instruction for Middle School Students with Reading Difficulties


Book Description

Reading problems don't disappear when students enter middle school, recent studies show that nearly a quarter of today's eighth graders aren't able to read at a basic level. This book arms language arts teachers with lessons, strategies, and foundational kowledge they need to resolve older students' reading difficulties and increase their chances for academic success. Ideal for use with struggling readers in Grades 6 - 8, this book clearly lays out the fundamentals of effective teaching for adolescents with reading difficulties. Teachers will discover how to: select and administor assessments for comprehension, fluency, and word recognition; use assessment results to plan individualized instruction; apply research-supported instructional practices; develop flexible grouping systems; set manageable short-term learning goals with students; give appropriate and corrective feedback; monitor student progress over time; provide effective interventions within a school-wide Response to Intervention framework; and more. To help teachers incorporate evidence-based practices into their classroom instruction they'll get more than 20 complete, step-by-step sample lessons for strengthening adolescents' reading skills. Easy to adapt for use across any curriculum, the sample lessons provide explicit models of successful instruction, with suggested teacher scripts, checklist for planning instruction, key terms and objectives, strategies for guided and independent practice, tips on promoting generalization, and more.




Designed to Learn


Book Description

Students become attentive, curious, and passionate about learning when they can see its relevance to their lives and when they're empowered to use that learning to solve problems that matter. Regardless of the subject or grade level you teach, you can infuse your instruction with the meaning students crave by implementing design thinking. Design thinking prompts students to consider: "I've learned it. Now what am I going to do with it?" In Designed to Learn, cognitive scientist and educator Lindsay Portnoy shares the amazing teaching and learning that take place in design thinking classrooms. To set the stage, she provides easy-to-implement strategies, classroom examples, and clear tools to scaffold the processes of inquiry, discovery, design, and reflection. Because formative assessment is crucial to the process, Portnoy includes sample assessments that measure student learning and ensure that learners take the lead in their own learning. As the author guides you through the five elements of design thinking (understand and empathize, identify and research, communicate to ideate, prototype and test, and iterate and reflect), you'll learn how to support students as they - Use the content you teach to solve a problem in their community or in the world around them. - Isolate a concern for their designed solution to address. - Communicate ideas and provide valid reasoning for potential solutions. - Prototype a solution and test it. - Revise their design for maximum impact and reflect on the process. Equipped with the strategies and supports in Designed to Learn, teachers will be able to ensure that learning in their classrooms is visible, student-centered, and measurable—by design.




From Texting to Teaching


Book Description

Don’t blame technology for poor student grammar; instead, use technology intentionally to reach students and actually improve their writing! In this practical book, bestselling authors Jeremy Hyler and Troy Hicks reveal how digital tools and social media – a natural part of students’ lives – can make grammar instruction more authentic, relevant, and effective in today’s world. Topics Covered: Teaching students to code switch and differentiate between formal and informal sentence styles Using flipped lessons to teach the parts of speech and help students build their own grammar guides Enlivening vocabulary instruction with student-produced video Helping students master capitalization and punctuation in different digital contexts Each chapter contains examples, screenshots, and instructions to help you implement the ideas. With the strategies in this book, you can empower students to become better writers with the tools they already love and use daily. Additional resources and links are available on the book’s companion wiki site: textingtoteaching.wikispaces.com




Create, Compose, Connect!


Book Description

Find out how to incorporate digital tools into your English language arts class to improve students’ reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills. Authors Jeremy Hyler and Troy Hicks show you that technology is not just about making a lesson engaging; it’s about helping students become effective creators and consumers of information in today’s fast-paced world. You’ll learn how to use mobile technologies to teach narrative, informational, and argument writing as well as visual literacy and multimodal research. Each chapter is filled with exciting lesson plans and tech tool suggestions that you can take back to your own classroom immediately. See Jeremy Hyler’s TEDx! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHtXIJvSSAA




The Daily 5


Book Description

The Daily 5, Second Edition retains the core literacy components that made the first edition one of the most widely read books in education and enhances these practices based on years of further experience in classrooms and compelling new brain research. The Daily 5 provides a way for any teacher to structure literacy (and now math) time to increase student independence and allow for individualized attention in small groups and one-on-one. Teachers and schools implementing the Daily 5 will do the following: Spend less time on classroom management and more time teaching Help students develop independence, stamina, and accountability Provide students with abundant time for practicing reading, writing, and math Increase the time teachers spend with students one-on-one and in small groups Improve schoolwide achievement and success in literacy and math. The Daily 5, Second Edition gives teachers everything they need to launch and sustain the Daily 5, including materials and setup, model behaviors, detailed lesson plans, specific tips for implementing each component, and solutions to common challenges. By following this simple and proven structure, teachers can move from a harried classroom toward one that hums with productive and engaged learners. What's new in the second edition: Detailed launch plans for the first three weeks Full color photos, figures, and charts Increased flexibility regarding when and how to introduce each Daily 5 choice New chapter on differentiating instruction by age and stamina Ideas about how to integrate the Daily 5 with the CAFE assessment system New chapter on the Math Daily 3 structure




Flight


Book Description

From the National Book Award–winning author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, the tale of a troubled boy’s trip through history. Half Native American and half Irish, fifteen-year-old “Zits” has spent much of his short life alternately abused and ignored as an orphan and ward of the foster care system. Ever since his mother died, he’s felt alienated from everyone, but, thanks to the alcoholic father whom he’s never met, especially disconnected from other Indians. After he runs away from his latest foster home, he makes a new friend. Handsome, charismatic, and eloquent, Justice soon persuades Zits to unleash his pain and anger on the uncaring world. But picking up a gun leads Zits on an unexpected time-traveling journey through several violent moments in American history, experiencing life as an FBI agent during the civil rights movement, a mute Indian boy during the Battle of Little Bighorn, a nineteenth-century Indian tracker, and a modern-day airplane pilot. When Zits finally returns to his own body, “he begins to understand what it means to be the hero, the villain and the victim. . . . Mr. Alexie succeeds yet again with his ability to pierce to the heart of matters, leaving this reader with tears in her eyes” (The New York Times Book Review). Sherman Alexie’s acclaimed novels have turned a spotlight on the unique experiences of modern-day Native Americans, and here, the New York Times–bestselling author of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian takes a bold new turn, combining magical realism with his singular humor and insight. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Sherman Alexie including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.




A Place to Belong


Book Description

A guide for families of all backgrounds to celebrate cultural heritage and embrace inclusivity in the home and beyond. Gone are the days when socially conscious parents felt comfortable teaching their children to merely tolerate others. Instead, they are looking for a way to authentically embrace the fullness of their diverse communities. A Place to Belong offers a path forward for families to honor their cultural heritage and champion diversity in the context of daily family life by: • Fostering open dialogue around discrimination, race, gender, disability, and class • Teaching “hard history” in an age-appropriate way • Curating a diverse selection of books and media choices in which children see themselves and people who are different • Celebrating cultural heritage through art, music, and poetry • Modeling activism and engaging in community service projects as a family Amber O’Neal Johnston, a homeschooling mother of four, shows parents of all backgrounds how to create a home environment where children feel secure in their own personhood and culture, enabling them to better understand and appreciate people who are racially and culturally different. A Place to Belong gives parents the tools to empower children to embrace their unique identities while feeling beautifully tethered to their global community.




What Every Middle School Teacher Needs to Know About Reading Tests


Book Description

Tests require a special kind of savvy, a kind of critical thinking and knowledge application that is not always a part of classroom reading experiences. Who better to teach you how to prepare your students for reading tests than someone who has written them? Charles Fuhrken has spent years working with several major testing companies and contributing to the reading assessments of various testing programs. What he' s learned about testing can help teachers who are interested in teaching effective reading strategies as well as preparing students for reading tests. What Every Middle School Teacher Needs to Know About Reading Tests (From Someone Who Has Written Them)' offers extensive, practical strategies to help students perform well on test day. This ready-to-use, easy-to-understand resource provides a wealth of information about reading tests, including high-quality preparation materials, samples of the most frequently assessed reading standards, and engaging core-reading activities. Charles takes the mystery out of reading tests; he explains how students can learn the language of tests and apply their knowledge of reading to standardized tests. In addition to providing information about reading tests that will help students feel prepared and confident on test day,' What Every Middle School Teacher Needs to Know About Reading Tests' provides a wealth of resources that can be incorporated into a teacher' s everyday reading work, including vocabulary development, literary techniques, interpretation, comprehension, and more.