After 10 years of accolades for Serious Players in the Primary Classroom: Empowering Children Through Active Learning Experiences, Selma Wassermann provides readers with a second edition to her classic. Building on the original work, this new edition offers further insight into Wassermann's notion of organizing for instruction known as "Play-Debrief-Replay, a way of structuring curriculum experiences to promote children's active learning in cooperative groups and to foster independent thinking. The book also provides a theoretical framework for implementing teaching for thinking in primary classrooms. By updating references and adding a new chapter on moral dilemmas, including information that is consonant with constructivist ideologies, Wassermann continues to promote ways of teaching that stimulate children's appreciation for social and ethical issues. Her approach is holistic; it not only honors the play of children, but also the work of teachers. Accessible and enlightening, this new edition is a must-read for all early childhood professionals. Parents, too, will find this volume useful.

Report of the National Reading Panel : hearing before a subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, United States Senate; One Hundred Sixth Congress, second session; special heÅ April 13, 2000; Washington, DC.

"In 1997, Congress asked the Director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), in consultation with the Secretary of Education, to convene a national panel to assess the status of research-based knowledge, including the effectiveness of various approaches to teaching children to read. The panel was charged with providing a report that should present the panel's conclusions, an indication of the readiness for application in the classroom of the results of this research, and, if appropriate, a strategy for rapidly disseminating this information to facilitate effective reading instruction in the schools" -- p. 1-1.

The Science of Reading: A Handbook brings together state-of-the-art reviews of reading research from leading names in the field, to create a highly authoritative, multidisciplinary overview of contemporary knowledge about reading and related skills. Provides comprehensive coverage of the subject, including theoretical approaches, reading processes, stage models of reading, cross-linguistic studies of reading, reading difficulties, the biology of reading, and reading instruction Divided into seven sections:Word Recognition Processes in Reading; Learning to Read and Spell; Reading Comprehension; Reading in Different Languages; Disorders of Reading and Spelling; Biological Bases of Reading; Teaching Reading Edited by well-respected senior figures in the field

Proven ideas from research for parents.

Reading fluency has been identified as a key component of proficient reading. Research has consistently demonstrated significant and substantial correlations between reading fluency and overall reading achievement. Despite the great potential for fluency to have a significant outcome on students’ reading achievement, it continues to be not well understood by teachers, school administrators and policy makers. The chapters in this volume examine reading fluency from a variety of perspectives. The initial chapter sketches the history of fluency as a literacy instruction component. Following chapters examine recent studies and approaches to reading fluency, followed by chapters that explore actual fluency instruction models and the impact of fluency instruction. Assessment of reading fluency is critical for monitoring progress and identifying students in need of intervention. Two articles on assessment, one focused on word recognition and the other on prosody, expand our understanding of fluency measurement. Finally, a study from Turkey explores the relationship of various reading competencies, including fluency, in an integrated model of reading. Our hope for this volume is that it may spark a renewed interest in research into reading fluency and fluency instruction and move toward making fluency instruction an even more integral part of all literacy instruction.