Children entering kindergarten and grade 1 vary greatly in their emergent literacy skills. Because preschool teachers can help set the foundation of literacy skills related to school readiness, one way to address those gaps is to build teachers' capacity to apply evidence-based strategies in their language and literacy instruction.…

Describes a weekly vocabulary assignment for college students with poor reading skills and shows how it provides incidental reading and writing benefits. (RL)

This book provides a research-based framework and practical strategies for vocabulary development with children from the earliest grades through high school. It emphasizes instruction that offers rich information about words and their uses and enhances students' language comprehension and production. The book guides teachers in selecting words for…

Based on characters in the Arthurian legend, this lesson plan presents activities designed to help students understand that many writers have told the tale of King Arthur and the people around him, including Guinevere, Lancelot, Merlin, and Mordred. The main activity of the lesson involves students writing a dramatic monologue supposedly composed…

Based on Arthur Miller' play "The Crucible," this lesson plan presents activities designed to help students understand that in 17th-century New England, people were persecuted for allegedly practicing witchcraft; students of this period have looked into the allegations and offer alternatives to witchcraft to explain the people's behavior; and…

Describes how an elementary teacher can plan and manage directed reading, including selecting appropriate children's books, preparing a reading guidesheet for each, and conducting conferences with each student to reinforce reading comprehension and vocabulary development. (SJL)

Describes an activity/assignment involving composition and cooperative learning which is designed to help students learn to attend to context clues. (SR)

Designed for elementary and secondary English and language arts teachers, this book provides 74 lists for developing instructional materials and planning lessons. The book also includes 89 practical activities and reproducible line master worksheets that motivate students to simultaneously improve writing skills, word usage, and vocabulary. For…

Describes activities that use jigsaw puzzles for vocabulary building and positive reinforcement and in-class book publishing to motivate high school remedial readers. (AEA)

This lesson plan presents activities designed to help students understand that Keiko, the killer whale, lived for a long time in an aquarium and had to be taught to live independently; and that computer users can get updates on how Keiko is doing. The main activity of the lesson involves middle school students working in small groups to produce a…

Based on John Steinbeck's novel "The Grapes of Wrath," this lesson plan presents activities designed to help students understand the universal nature of Steinbeck's characters' struggles and some of the complex forces affecting their lives; and the value of primary source material in presenting an authentic picture of a given period in history.…

Based on Herman Melville's novel "Moby-Dick," this lesson plan presents activities designed to help students understand that the novel is grounded in facts that Melville acquired in his own experiences at sea; New England was the center of a prospering whaling industry in the 19th century; and journal keeping was not uncommon among 19th-century…

Based on Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel "The Scarlet Letter," this lesson plan presents activities designed to help students understand that the ending of a novel does not resolve all of the questions that may occur to readers; and that readers may imagine characters living out their lives beyond the ending the author gave to a novel. The main…

Offers 10 basic guidelines that might help reading teachers who use basal readers to make more effective instructional decisions about what to teach. (MG)

Noting that students often have difficulty reading texts for information, this book offers practical, classroom-tested techniques that focus on content while encouraging students to take control of their own learning by expanding their repertoire of reading strategies. The book defines "infotexts" as the books, textbooks, journals,…