Lucy Calkins

Here the nationally acclaimed educator who transformed the way our children learn to read and write in school shows us how to nurture our children's imagination at home, from the earliest days of babytalk to the time when we see them off to school. Drawing upon her influential philosophy of active learning, as well as her personal experience as a parent, Calkins shows parents how to stimulate curiosity and spark creative thinking in children. Having an open and creative approach to conversations, chores, and games can matter just as much as reading, writing, and math. And even in traditional skills like reading and writing, we need to encourage our children to read for meaning and write for expression, rather than focus only on mechanics like phonics and spelling.By giving parents new and imaginative techniques for educating children, and by providing them with an insider's view of what goes on in the early grades, Raising Lifelong Learners creates the ultimate partnership in learning between home and school, parents and teachers.

A Parent's Guide

Raising Lifelong Learners

Celena Dangler Larkey

Lauren Kolbeck

Shanna Schwartz

Lindsay Wilkes

Amanda Hartman

Brianna Parlitsis

Elizabeth Moore (Writing teacher)

"In second grade, children move from a "little-kid" focus on print to a "big-kid" focus on meaning. The first unit, Second-Grade Reading Growth Spurt, teaches children to take charge of their reading, drawing on everything they know to figure out hard words, understand author's craft, and build big ideas about the books they read. Children learn that books can be their teachers in the second unit, Becoming Experts: Reading Nonfiction, in which they learn more about familiar topics and grow understanding of new topics while working on word solving, vocabulary development, and comparing and contrasting information across texts. In the third unit, Bigger Books Mean Amping Up Reading Power, children learn strategies to build three foundational reading skills--fluency, understanding figurative language, and comprehension. In the final unit for second grade, Series Book Clubs, children work within book clubs to study author's craft to understand ways authors use word choice, figurative language, punctuation, and even patterns to construct a series and evoke feelings in readers"--Pearson.com.

Grade 2

Units of Study for Teaching Reading

Up the Ladder: Accessing Grades 3-6 Narrative Units of Study

Kate Roberts

Audra Kirshbaum Robb

Maggie Beattie Roberts

Kathleen Tolan

Alexandra Marron

Stacey Fell

Emily Strang-Campbell

Gerrit Jones-Rooy

Grade 6

Units of Study in Argument, Information, and Narrative Writing

Mary Chiarella

This series of books is designed to help upper elementary teachers teach a rigourous yearlong writing curriculum.

From Essay and Narrative to Memoir

Shaping Texts

Writing about Fiction

The Literary Essay

Kristin Smith

Julie Mooney

"The third-grade units were written to support the crucial transition children make from learning to read to reading to learn. The opening unit, Building a Reading Life, launches your students' lives as upper elementary school readers. Children ramp up their reading skills by immersing themselves in within-reach fiction books while working on word solving, vocabulary development, envisionment, and prediction. The second unit, Reading to Learn: Grasping Main Ideas and Text Structures, addresses essential skills for reading expository nonfiction, such as ascertaining main ideas, recognizing text infrastructure, comparing texts, and thinking critically, as well as the skills for reading narrative nonfiction, such as determining importance by using knowledge of story structure. The third unit, Character Studies, lures children into fiction books, teaching them to closely observe characters, make predictions, and sharpen their skills in interpretation. The final unit, Research Clubs: Elephants, Penguins, and Frogs, Oh My!, shows youngsters how to turn to texts as their teachers. Children work in clubs to gather, synthesise, and organize information about animals, and then use this information to seek solutions to real-world problems"--pearson.com.

Grade 3

Amy Ludwig VanDerwater

Stephanie Parsons

Big Thoughts in Small Packages

Poetry

Assessment-based Instruction, Grade 5

If--then--curriculum

Mary Ehrenworth

Annie Taranto

The Research-Based Argument Essay

Narrative Craft

Emily Butler Smith

Research Reports

The Lens of History

A Guide to the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project Classroom Libraries

Historical Fiction Clubs

Zoë White

Zoe Ryder White

Lucy Calkins knows one of the most powerful ways to support good writers: clear, purposeful writing conferences.

The Art of Conferring with Young Writers

One to One

"Writing allows each of us to live with that special wide-awakeness that comes from knowing that our lives and our ideas are worth writing about." -Lucy Calkins Teaching Writing is Lucy Calkins at her best-a distillation of the work that's placed Lucy and her colleagues at the forefront of the teaching of writing for over thirty years. This book promises to inspire teachers to teach with renewed passion and power and to invigorate the entire school day. This is a book for readers who want an introduction to the writing workshop, and for those who've lived and breathed this work for decades. Although Lucy addresses the familiar topics-the writing process, conferring, kinds of writing, and writing assessment- she helps us see those topics with new eyes. She clears away the debris to show us the teeny details, and she shows us the majesty and meaning, too, in these simple yet powerful teaching acts. Download a sample chapter for more information.

Teaching Writing

Shelley Harwayne

Contains ideas for teaching reading and writing in the K-12 curriculum that include qualities of good writing, introducing literature, and rethinking of the writing workshop.

Living Between the Lines

Christopher Lehman

Lucy Calkins and her colleagues at the Reading and Writing Project have helped thousands of educators design their own pathways to the Common Core. Now, with Pathways to the Common Core, they are ready to help you find your way. Designed for teachers, school leaders, and professional learning communities looking to navigate the gap between their current literacy practices and the ideals of the Common Core, Pathways to the Common Core will help you: understand what the standards say, suggest, and what they don't say; recognize the guiding principles that underpin the reading and writing standards; identify how the Common COre's infrastructure supports a spiraling K-12 literacy curriculum; and scrutinize the context in which the CCSS were written and are being unrolled. In addition to offering an analytical study of the standards, this guide will also help you and your colleagues implement the standards in ways that lift the level of teaching and learning throughout your school.

Accelerating Achievement

Pathways to the Common Core

Lucy Calkins

Books

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