Filled with more than 80 stimulating and creative ways to teach the individual letters of the alphabet, Extraordinary Alphabet Activities is an ideal resource for both experienced preschool and kindergarten teachers as well as those beginning a career teaching your learners. With multiple literature-based lessons for each letter, the well-organized format makes it easy to plan and fun to teach. Each lesson is divided into five sections—Before the Lesson, Have on Hand, Read Aloud, Talk About and Kids Create.
Creating Literacy Instruction for All Children is a comprehensive, practical text that provides its readers with step-by-step guidance for teaching all major aspects of reading and writing. Gunning's text helps students discover approaches and techniques that fit teachers' personal styles and situations. It aims to present as fairly, completely, and clearly as possible the major methods and strategies shown to be successful in research and practice. The text features sample lessons for virtually every major literacy skill/strategy and offers numerous reinforcement suggestions and generous listings of materials. With two updated chapters on word analysis skills/strategies, the text continues to give teachers the information and techniques they need to implement a systematic and functional program of word analysis that is integrated with students' reading and writing. The text also presents the theory behind the methods, so students will be free to choose, adapt, and/or construct their own approaches as they create literacy instruction. This edition endorses the viewpoint that a well-prepared classroom teacher is capable of effectively instructing most struggling readers and writers.
This book will not tell you how to teach reading. Teaching reading is in large measure a matter of making choices: Should you use basal readers or children's books, or both? Should you teach children to read whole words or to sound out words letter by letter, or both? Should you have three reading groups or four, or no groups? There are no right answers to these questions. The answers depend on your personal philosophy, your interpretation of the research, the level at which you are teaching, the kinds of students you are teaching, community preferences, and the nature of your school or school district's reading program.