Increasingly, research supports the importance of teaching children to read and write informational text, but few resources show us how to do it well. This book fills that gap. The authors explain why it's important to weave informational text into the primary curriculum. From there, they provide a framework for organizing your time and space, and classroom-tested strategies for incorporating informational text into reading, writing, and the content areas. For use with Grades K-3.

This book has been replaced by Close Reading of Informational Sources, Second Edition, ISBN 978-1-4625-3945-1.

Describes some of the different and unusual school settings around the world, from an environmentally sustainable school in India to schools within caves in China and schools for the nomadic tribes of Siberia.

Specifically designed for K-3 teachers, this accessible guide describes ways to use informational text creatively and effectively in both reading and writing instruction. The book presents lessons, read-alouds, and activities that motivate students to engage with a wide variety of exemplary texts. Links to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are explained throughout. Key topics include how to build academic vocabulary, balance fiction and nonfiction, and address the needs of English language learners. Examples from diverse classrooms and end-of-chapter discussion questions and engagement activities enhance the book's utility as a professional development resource. Reproducible handouts and other tools can be downloaded and printed in a convenient 8 1/2" x 11" size.

A leading authority in using informational text shows teachers how to develop project-based units on reading, writing, and researching major text types--informative/explanatory, persuasive, procedural/how-to, nonfiction narrative, and biographical.

One of two parents' guides based on the revised National Curriculum, this book is intended as an introduction to Key Stages 1 and 2. The need for parents to be involved in their children's education has taken root in recent years. To be able to make choices, however, parents need to be informed. This book is intended to enable them to get to grips with the elements of the National Curriculum and topical issues.

In this highly readable and provocative book, Thomas Newkirk explodes the long standing habit of opposing abstract argument with telling stories. Newkirk convincingly shows that effective argument is already a kind of narrative and is deeply "entwined with narrative." --Gerald Graff, former MLA President and author of Clueless in Academe Narrative is regularly considered a type of writing-often an "easy" one, appropriate for early grades but giving way to argument and analysis in later grades. This groundbreaking book challenges all that. It invites readers to imagine narrative as something more-as the primary way we understand our world and ourselves. "To deny the centrality of narrative is to deny our own nature," Newkirk explains. "We seek companionship of a narrator who maintains our attention, and perhaps affection. We are not made for objectivity and pure abstraction-for timelessness. We have 'literary minds" that respond to plot, character, and details in all kind of writing. As humans, we must tell stories." When we are engaged readers, we are following a story constructed by the author, regardless of the type of writing. To sustain a reading-in a novel, an opinion essay, or a research article- we need a "plot" that helps us comprehend specific information, or experience the significance of an argument. As Robert Frost reminds us, all good memorable writing is "dramatic." Minds Made for Stories is a needed corrective to the narrow and compartmentalized approaches often imposed on schools-approaches which are at odds with the way writing really works outside school walls.

Interactive Writing is specifically focused on the early phases of writing, and has special relevance to prekindergarten, kindergarten, grade 1 and 2 teachers.

"Do monarch butterflies have a nose?" a kindergartener inquires. "Does it rain on the moon?" a first-grader wonders. "Does a white shark really produce 30 million teeth?"asks a second grader. These incisive, critical quests for additional knowledge about the world are precisely what children do when the Common Core State Standards for informational texts go right in K-2. And with The Everything Guide to Informational Texts, the Common Core will go right in K-2. Authors Kathy Barclay and Laura Stewart have written the book that teachers like you have been pleading for—a resource that delivers the "what I need to know Monday through Friday" to engage kids in a significant amount of informational text reading experiences. No filler, no lofty ideals about college and career readiness, but instead, the information on how to find lesson-worthy texts and create developmentally appropriate instructional plans that truly help young readers comprehend grade-level texts. What you’ll love most: The how-to’s on selecting stellar informational texts High-impact comprehension strategies for nonfiction Suggestions on providing sufficient challenge in guided reading, read alouds, and other practices Model text lessons and lesson plan templates across each grade An annotated list of 449 informational texts for read alouds, guided reading, and independent reading It’s time to bring in to our classrooms all the high-quality informational texts that are available. It’s time to demonstrate to students how to read them, and to allow the authors of these children’s texts to take readers into rich, complex ideas they can handle with our support. If ever there were a book to quell our concern about how Common Core expectations will play out in grades K-2, this is it.

High-interest reproducible informational passages provide text-marking practice that help students read closely, build comprehension skills, and meet higher standards.