Straightforward and jargon-free, Mosaic of Thought is relevant to all literature-based classrooms, regardless of level. It offers practical tools for inservice teachers, as well as essential methods instruction for preservice teachers at both the undergraduate and graduate level.
Explains how teachers can enhance their students comprehension skills; providing classroom strategies, examples, vignettes, tools for creating reader workshops, advice on think-alouds and conferring, and tips on long-term planning.
Examines the characteristics of effective comprehension instruction, explores the range of applications it has for students, and discusses areas for improvement.
To Understand proposes a model that incorporates all aspects of literacy instruction and describes how teachers can focus on what matters most. Keene shows that when teachers target the most essential content, they can help every student engage more deeply with texts and discover a passion for reading and learning. You'll learn to draw out students' intellectual interests and spark improvements in their literacy learning and comprehension-even among students who struggle. You'll see that teaching the Outcomes and Dimensions of Understanding can help readers exceed expectations and also help broaden your vision of their capacity and energy for learning.
Developed by renowned author Ellin Keene, Assessing Comprehension Thinking Strategies is an ideal tool for assessing students' reading comprehension. This book offers a unique way of assessing how students use thinking strategies to comprehend text. The book contains four reading passages for each grade level (1-8) that offer high-interest fiction and nonfiction text. Each assessment is accompanied by a rubric that allows you to document students' thinking and then score and monitor their growth. Strategies assessed include thinking aloud, using schema, inferring, asking questions, determining.
It's 1885, and all Nora Shipley wants, now that she's graduating from Cornell University as valedictorian of the entomology program, is to follow in her late father's footsteps by getting her master's degree and taking over the scientific journal he started. The only way to uphold her father's legacy is to win a scholarship, so she joins a research expedition in Kodaikanal, India, to prove herself in the field. India isn't what she expects, though, and neither is the rival classmate who accompanies her, Owen Epps. As her preconceptions of India--and of Owen--fall away, she finds both far more captivating than she expected. Forced by the expedition leader to stay at camp and illustrate exotic butterflies the men of the team find without her, Nora befriends Sita, a young Indian girl who has been dedicated to a goddess against her will. In this spellbinding new land, Nora is soon faced with impossible choices--between saving Sita and saving her career, and between what she's always thought she wanted and the man she's come to love.
Reading education pioneer Ellin Oliver Keene demystifies comprehension instruction by describing what it can look like when readers comprehend deeply and what it can look like when teachers aim for this deep comprehension. This ground-breaking book is illustrated with video footage of Ellin modeling the reading instruction she describes. Here, you can watch Ellin use language and teaching moves that help students go beyond superficial reading comprehension to lasting understanding. Talk About Understanding offers: "Outcomes of Understanding" Markers-descriptions of the behaviors present when children understand a text deeply including ways to assess with and teach toward these outcomes. "Talk About Understanding" Principles-suggestions to modify teaching language and teaching interactions to deepen children's ability to comprehend. "From the Inside" Video Segments-classroom footage of Ellin teaching lessons that illustrate use of the "Outcomes of Understanding" markers and "Talk About Understanding" principles from the book. Do your students understand their reading as deeply as they need to? Talk About Understanding has the guiding principles, the teaching suggestions, the carefully described outcomes, and the video support to help you teach your students how to comprehend, thoroughly and eagerly, the varied and complicated texts in the world around us.
Do you spend your days working with students who struggle to comprehend reading in literacy and content classes? Are you looking for a way to establish comprehensive literacy instruction in your school or classroom so all students receive support in becoming competent and confident readers? In Yellow Brick Roads: Shared and Guided Paths to Independent Reading, 4-12, Janet Allen offers research-based methods for helping teachers move toward these goals. This book provides research, practical methods, detailed strategies, and resources for read-aloud, shared, guided, and independent reading. In addition, Janet outlines solutions for many of the literacy dilemmas that teachers face every day: Understanding what gets in the way of reading Rethinking and reorganizing time and resources Providing support for content literacy Developing assessment practices that inform instruction Supporting reading as a path to writing instruction Establishing professional communities to support individual and school-wide needs-based research The appendixes include graphic organizers to support strategy lessons, suggestions of titles for building classroom libraries, as well as web sites and professional resources that support the teaching of reading. Yellow Brick Roads will give you rich ideas, detailed strategies, and literature support for implementing those strategies. At a time when many are looking for that elusive wizard to solve students' reading problems, this book helps you create your own paths to effective literacy environments.
Mosaic of Love is a playful, wise and poignant book of poems about love and the mystery of life. With a unique perspective and distinct voice, Laura Thompson explores the meaning of love beginning with family, progressing to the garden of flowering lovers and culminating on the mystical note of universal love. Be a traveler on this pilgrimage of poems and seek for yourself the way of love.
Guy Gavriel Kay, the international bestselling and multiple award-winning author of The Fionavar Tapestry, brings his unique storytelling imagination to an alternate Byzantine world… Sarantium is the golden city: holy to the faithful, exalted by the poets, jewel of the world and heart of an empire. Caius Crispus, known as Crispin, is a master mosaicist, creating beautiful art with colored stones and glass. Still grieving the loss of his family, he lives only for his craft—until an imperial summons draws him east to the fabled city. Bearing with him a Queen’s secret mission and seductive promise, and a talisman from an alchemist, Crispin crosses a land of pagan ritual and mortal danger, confronting legends and dark magic. Once in Sarantium, with its taverns and gilded sanctuaries, chariot races and palaces, intrigues and violence, Crispin must find his own source of power in order to survive. He finds it, unexpectedly, high on the scaffolding of his own greatest creation.