Professional Resources

Teachers:

For your summer perusal, consider the following:

• For the Love Of Books: A Guide to Help Teachers Connect Middle Grade Readers with Literature by Jane Vossler.

Young adolescent novels are organized by theme complete with taching ideas. Themes include novels about family relations, survival, other cultures, and speaking out.

• The World’s Best Thin Books: What to Read When you Book Report is Due Tomorrow by Joni Richards Bodart.

This publication includes descriptions or over 90 titles less than 200 pages. Also included are inclusion of curricular areas and readablility indexes.

• Reading Reasons: Motivational Mini-Lessons for Middle and High School by Kelly Gallagher.

You can hear the complaints now, “Why should I read?” Use this book that contains forty mini-lessons to answer the real life applications of why they should read.

• Adolescents in the Search for Meaning: Tapping the Powerful Resource of Story by Mary L. Warner.

The books presents the results of “a survey of more than 1,400 teens” as well as thoughts from YA authors. Over 120 meanigful novels recommended by teens and authors arranged by chapters on such topics as real-life experiences, facing life and death, discrimination, allegory, and parables.

• Reading Doesn’t Matter Anymore: Shattering the Myths of Literacy by David Booth.

Twelve steps to assist both parents and teachers with helping children read all genres and formats. These new formats include the internet, graphic novels, and manuals.

• Nonfiction Matters: Reading, Writing, and Research in Grades 3-8 by Stephanie Harvey.

This book shows “how students can read expository text, engage in research, and write authentic nonfiction that is captivating, visual, and full of voice.” Projects described lead students through the proper research process that helps students become independent thinkers and creative problem solvers.

• Getting it Right: Fresh Approaches to Teaching Grammar, Usage, and Correctness by Michael W. Smith and Jeffrey D. Wilhelm.

Teaching grammar the old-fashioned way just doesn’t work. This book offers a new perspective on teaching grammar and usage.

• Eyewitness to the Past: Strategies for Teaching American History in Grade 5-12by Joan Brodsky Schur.

History comes alive for students when using primary documents to imagine the past. Included are interactive strategies to help students complete written and oral projects such as staging congressional hearings, scrapbooks, newspapers, or debates.

• Managing the Diverse Classroom: How to Build on Students’ Cultural Strengths by Carrie Rothstein-Fisch and Elise Trumbull.

A simple framework is presented to help teachers understand cultural differences of the classrooms. Strategies include communication with families, homework attendance, and assessment.

• Radical Reads: 101 YA Novels on the Edge by Joni Richards Bodart.

The books included in the guide are “engaging, tough, and well-written” with high interest to teens looking for those stories with which they can identify. Titles are arranged by alphabetical order and include subject areas, characters, major themes and ideas, strengths, and reviews.

• Bringing the Outside in: Visual Ways to Engage Reluctant Readers by Sara B. Kajder.

Using those skills students already possess outside of school - texting, blogging, gaming - guidance is offered on how to help kids connect their skills with electronic medium and the curriculum. Help your students redefine literate for today’s world.