A story about many different sheep, and one that seems to be missing. On board pages.

Is there too much emphasis on guided reading in primary classrooms? It's a question that many educators, like kindergarten teacher and literacy coach Cathy Mere, are starting to ask. Guided reading provides opportunities to teach students the strategies they need to learn how to read increasingly challenging texts, but Cathy found that she needed to find other ways to help students gain independence. While maintaining guided reading as an important piece of their reading program, teachers need to offer students opportunities during the day to develop as readers, to learn to choose books, to find favorite genres and authors, and to talk about their reading. In More Than Guided Reading, Cathy shares her journey as she moved from focusing on guided reading as the center of her reading program to placing children at the heart of literacy learning—not only providing more time for students to discover their reading lives, but also shaping instruction to meet the needs of the diverse learners in her classroom. By changing the structure of the day, Cathy found she was better able to adjust the support she was providing students, allowing time for whole-class focus lessons, conferences, and opportunities to share ideas, as well as reading from self-selected texts using the strategies, skills, and understandings acquired in reader's workshop. The focus lesson is the centerpiece of the workshop. It is often tied to a read-aloud and connected to learning from the previous day, helping to build skills, extend thinking, and develop independence over time. This thoroughly practical text offers numerous sample lessons, questions for conferences, and ideas for revamping guided reading groups. It will help teachers tweak the mix of instructional components in their reading workshops, and provoke school-wide conversations about the place of guided reading in a complete literacy curriculum.

Here is the blue sheep, and here is the red sheep. Here is the bath sheep, and here is the bed sheep. But where is the green sheep? Mem Fox and Judy Horacek take you on a wildly wonderful adventure in their rollicking search for the green sheep. Mem has never owned a sheep, let alone a green one, but she does admit to having woolly thoughts from time to time. Judy loves drawing things, especially sheep. This is her first flock.

Little ones are sure to be lulled off to a peaceful, sheep-filled sleep by this cozy new book from acclaimed author Mem Fox. There are red sheep and blue sheep, wind sheep and wave sheep, scared sheep and brave sheep, but where is the green sheep? The search is on in this cozy, sheep-filled story from acclaimed author Mem Fox and popular Australian cartoonist Judy Horacek. Complete with sleepy rhymes and bright illustrations, this book is sure to delight children of all ages, from the very young to those just beginning to read.

Use favorite read-alouds to kick off hands-on activities that teach basic colors and shapes. Each developmentally appropriate lesson includes clear, easy-to-follow instructions for reading about, talking about and creating artwork that is all about these fundamentals of early childhood learning. Bonus section features simple scissor skills activities. Award certificates included too!

Provides teachers and parents with 75 engaging and creative lessons that make teaching phonemic awareness fun and meaningful.

In Beyond Leveled Books, Second Edition the authors provide even more resources to help teachers understand and meet the needs of transitional readers. The key topic of series books has been revised and enlarged, with charts outlining new series along with the challenges they pose and the supports readers need. New lessons have been added, and most chapters now include a related article from a literacy expert. Some of the contributors include Kathy Collins, Larry Swartz, and Mary Lee Hahn.

Based on extensive research on the features that make children's books appealing and appropriate, this valuable teacher resource offers guidance on selecting books, strategies for specific grade levels, suggestions for extension, and tips for assessment. This teacher-friendly book is organized around the major genres — traditional literature, picture books, nonfiction, poetry, and multicultural texts — that will inspire young readers. Throughout the book, teachers will find suggestions for using literature to implement shared reading, reading aloud, and response strategies with emergent, developing, and independent readers. This comprehensive book is rooted in the belief that educators must consider and offer a wide range of choice to ensure that students read "good" books. It argues that the choices children make about what they read should be governed by their interests and desire to learn; not by a grade or reading level.

This accessible text will show students and class teachers how they can enable their pupils to become critical thinkers through the medium of picturebooks. By introducing children to the notion of making-meaning together through thinking and discussion, Roche focuses on carefully chosen picturebooks as a stimulus for discussion, and shows how they can constitute an accessible, multimodal resource for adding to literacy skills, while at the same time developing in pupils a far wider range of literary understanding. By allowing time for thinking about and digesting the pictures as well as the text, and then engaging pupils in classroom discussion, this book highlights a powerful means of developing children’s oral language ability, critical thinking, and visual literacy, while also acting as a rich resource for developing children’s literary understanding. Throughout, Roche provides rich data and examples from real classroom practice. This book also provides an overview of recent international research on doing ‘interactive read alouds’, on what critical literacy means, on what critical thinking means and on picturebooks themselves. Lecturers on teacher education courses for early years or primary levels, classroom teachers, pre-service education students, and all those interested in promoting critical engagement and dialogue about literature will find this an engaging and very insightful text.