When is the best time to invite students to become actively involved in think-alouds? Join classroom teacher, Patrick Allen, in this 35 minute video, and watch as he engages the students in his fourth-grade classroom, demonstrating that you don’t need to wait very long to make the most of your think-alouds. The importance of nonfiction literature in literacy instruction is. Using Seymour Simon’s Animals Nobody Loves, Patrick demonstrates how comprehension...

While reading Debbie Miller's book, Reading with meaning, or viewing her Happy reading! video series, one wonders at Debbie's ability to orchestrate a buzzing classroom full of first-graders into a cooperative literacy community. The Joy of Conferring lets us focus in with Debbie and see what happens at the individual level as she conducts reading conferences with her students. About the author: Debbie Miller taught and learned from children in the...

Guided reading has long been recognized as a dynamic process that supports children's skills as readers in all genres, yet fiction accounts for over ninety percent of the texts we select for these small-group encounters. If children are to be empowered, life-long readers, who read for many different purposes, they need concentrated, small-group encounters with informational texts. In this series, Tony Stead works with third-grade teacher Lisa Elias...

This lively video invites you to join Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis, authors of Strategies that work, in an middle years reading workshop where students engage in real-world literacy. In this classroom, kids use comprehension strategies to better understand what they read. They grapple with issues, information and ideas that provoke thinking and spur thoughtful conversation. Read, write and talk provides a framework for literacy, supporting readers...

Since its publication, teachers throughout the world have made The Daily 5 one of the most widely read books in education. Through this proven structure, teachers experience for themselves the power of students gaining independence and monitoring their own behaviors. Join Gail and Joan as they work with third- and fifth-grade teachers in two diverse Midwest classrooms where the Daily 5 has been in place for several years. As the popularity of the...

Book clubs are forming in classrooms everywhere, with small groups of students from kindergarten through high school leading their own lively literature discussions. This promising movement has drawn many of its key ideas and management procedures from Harvey Daniel's book, Literature circles: voice and choice in book clubs and reading groups. But teachers who are new to literature circles sometimes have questions that no book can quite answer: What...

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...

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...

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...

Organizing for Literacy is a professional development series for implementing a balanced early literacy program based on apprenticeship theory. The series presents a complete early literacy resource, with the option of using individual videos to focus on a specific area of need. The programs illustrate the reciprocal nature of teaching and learning across a range of reading and writing events. Each program is designed to allow you to view it in its...