Strive-For-Five Conversations

Oral language is the cornerstone of literacy, and this reader-friendly book provides a tool – the « Strive-For-Five » framework – to help educators extend conversations with students to help support speaking, vocabulary, reasoning and other skills. Chapters include « Creating Classroom Routines for Strive-for-Five Conversations », « Choosing Books That Spark Rich Conversations » and « Talking Is Teaching: Strive-For-Five Conversations…

Big Words For Young Readers

In this book, Heidi Mesmer shares research-backed strategies to support teachers as they move students beyond basic phonics and decoding short words. It’s easy to follow with lots of graphics, sidebars, resources accessible by QR code and appendices. Part I of the book breaks down the foundations of teaching big words with “What You Need…

Acadience Reading K-2 Data Sheets

This Google Sheets document is designed to support K-2 educators in analyzing their Acadience reading data. It features a dedicated sheet for each grade level at each time window, allowing educators to input raw scores. The document automatically compares raw scores to benchmark scores, colour codes data, and calculates composite scores efficiently. This allows for…

Teaching Summary Writing to Support Comprehension

Watching this webinar from PaTTAN, you will learn why summarizing has been identified through research as highly effective for developing comprehension and writing. It defines a quality summary and how it differs from retelling or paraphrasing.  Practical suggestions for explicitly teaching summary writing based on text and non-text sources will be shared, including scaffolds. The…

Literacy Learning for Infants, Toddlers, & Preschoolers

This book is an excellent, reader-friendly resource for kindergarten teachers and Early Childhood Educators. While infant and toddler development takes place before the Ontario curriculum kicks in, the authors are American. Their recommendations for preschoolers generally align with the age of our Year 1 kindergarten students. Much of the research and advice in the book…

Teaching Beginning Writers

In this book, the authors share background information on how writing develops, and a research base for three key elements: handwriting, spelling and composition. The following chapters provide practical classroom advice for teaching all three, including several chapters dedicated to genre-specific writing instruction: book reviews (opinion), narratives and description, and how those progress from K-2….