Reading Connections: Strategies for Teaching Students with Visual Impairments offers an in-depth and user-friendly guide for understanding reading instruction for teachers and professionals seeking to improve the reading skills of their students who are visually impaired. The book addresses in detail the essential components of reading--phonemic awareness, phonics, reading fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension--as well as other key reading components and subskills. While this book addresses the needs of students who read print, braille, or both, much of the book is also consistent with strategies for teaching reading to students who have, or are at risk for, developing reading disabilities. Teachers of students with visual impairments, as well as family members and other professionals who work with children who are blind or visually impaired, will find within this book a repertoire of strategies and activities for creating a balanced, comprehensive plan of reading instruction for each student and for teaching the essential reading skills necessary for students' success.

Here are more great topics and sample book club sessions to help you start a book club and keep it going! Chapters in this volume cover humor, families, social issues, folklore and mythology, sports, magazines, picture books as art, censorship, the Internet, middle school readers, gender bias, booktalks, and the arts. For each genre, the authors offer a general overview, discussion questions, a bibliography, resources for further reading, and appropriate Web sites. If you want to promote literacy and involve parents in the reading program, you'll love this book and its companion, The Reading Connection.

Beginning with braille provides a wealth of effective activities for promoting literacy at the early stages of braille instruction. The text includes creative and practical strategies for designing and delivering quality braille instruction and teacher-friendly suggestions for many areas such as reading aloud to young children, selecting and making early tactile books, and teaching tactile and hand movement skills. This book also includes tips on designing worksheets, introducing braille contractions, teaching the use of the braillewriter, and facilitating the writing process in braille. Chapters also address guidelines for individualizing instruction, the literacy needs of students with additional disabilities, and assessment of student progress in developing literacy skills.

A topic-based series to develop effective academic and professional reading skills.

Whether you read it quietly or loudly, learning about opposites has never been more fun - or funny - than with this winning book. Sniffles are quiet, but sneezes are loud. Amiably illustrated in a bright, graphic style, Leslie Patricelli’s spirited book, QUIET LOUD, stars an obliging, bald, and very expressive toddler who acts out each pair of opposites with comically dramatic effect.

I-M-ABLE, or the Individualized Meaning-Centered Approach to Braille Literacy Education, is an innovative, individualized, student-centered method for teaching braille and making it exciting for children who have difficulties learning braille. In this teaching approach, instruction is centered on continuously analyzing the strengths and needs of students, placing particular emphasis on engaging them using key vocabulary words and phrases based on their experiences and interests. This comprehensive practice guide provides detailed direction on how to implement the components of the approach. Teachers will find this resource invaluable for helping students with mild to moderate cognitive impairments or other difficulties make progress in braille reading and writing, and all the skills that it encompasses.

The second in a now three-book series, Connections is a basic writing text geared to the paragraph-to-essay level. The aim of Connections is to help students make the connection between reading, writing, and critical thinking all important skills for success in college. Not a traditional workbook, Connections take a top-down approach to writing instruction. The text moves beyond traditional sentence and paragraph exercises, offering a wide variety of activities and opportunities for journaling, supplemental readings, quick reference guides, and unique step-by-step writing assignments. Connections guides developmental writers gently through every stage of the writing process.

This thematically arranged reader offers 76 selections from various genres, complemented by substantial reading, writing, and research instruction. The structure, the apparatus, and the readings in Connections all lead students to seek relationships: among the processes of reading, writing, and thinking; among the cultures that are represented by the diverse selections; and, most of all, between the students' reading, writing, and thinking and the processes of their own lives. The collection offers numerous models of student writing at each stage of the writing process, including complete MLA and APA research papers.

Reading/Writing Connections in the K-2 Classroom demonstrates how through careful, explicit assessing, planning and teaching every student can understand the relationship between reading and writing. The text is filled with practical classroom strategies based on both theory and research. Focused on the goal of understanding the relationship between reading and writing, the text demonstrates how to move students between the two to become more skillful readers and writers. In three parts, the text explores the essential understandings needed to use the reading/writing connection; demonstrates how planning helps to use the reading/writing connection; and outlines teaching strategies to use the connection to strengthen your everyday encounters with students. Assessment is integrated into each chapter, providing a clear image of what it looks like to assess in the service of student learning. Practical ways to integrate phonemic awareness, phonics, word study and spelling into planning and teaching reading and writing are incorporated throughout. Word study is integrated into every chapter to ensure a systematic approach to the topic.

Intended for use by college and university educators, this book contains theoretical ideas and practical activities designed to enhance and promote writing across the curriculum programs. Topics discussed in the 12 major chapters are (1) conceptual frameworks of the cross writing program; (2) journal writing across the curriculum; (3) writing and problem solving; (4) assigning and evaluating transactional writing; (5) audience and purpose in writing; (6) the poetic function of language; (7) using narration to shape experience; (8) readers and expressive language; (9) what every educator should know about reading research; (10) reconciling readers and texts; (11) peer critiques, teacher student conferences, and essay evaluation as a means of responding to student writing; and (12) the role of the writing laboratory. A concluding chapter provides a select bibliography on language and learning across the curriculum. (FL)