The One Book You Need This Year

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I am reading The Reading Strategies book right now and you guys . . .

This may be the best book of all time.

There is a reason the tagline on this book is "Your Everything Guide to Developing Skilled Readers".  It's one of the most practical, I can use this in my classroom and make a difference in students' reading lives right now books I've ever come across.

The first eighteen pages is on goal setting.  Thinking about where your kids are as readers, where the breakdown may be happening, and then moving with them from there.  After that, there are 300 pages of one pages strategy instruction ideas that could be used with students individually, in small groups, or in whole class lessons.

Take a peek at The Reading Strategies Book
There are 13 goals addressed in this book:

•Pre-Emergent and Emergent Readers
•Teaching Engagement
•Print Work
•Fluency
•Plot and Setting
•Thinking About Characters
•Themes and Ideas
•Main Topic and Idea
•Determining Key Details
•Understanding Text Features
•Understanding Vocabulary and Figurative Language

•Supporting Conversations
•Improving Writing About Reading



Here's a breakdown of each section:

Brief 2-3 overview of the goal

One page overview of the strategies

Then lots of strategies!

I love the Teaching Engagement section.  Let's be honest.  How many of us complain about our students not actually reading during reading time, hopping from book to book, or spending the whole time book shopping.  Now, how many of us would maybe gloss over this section to get to the "heavier" reading stuff that kids need to be successful?

I would have.  We feel a lot of pressure to add "rigor" to our classrooms and push our curriculum from day one.  The weight of those standardized tests rests heavily on our shoulders.  Here's a quote from the book that significantly changed my outlook on this:

I'm not going to lie-this book is expensive.
It's in color which really drives up printing costs.  Have the sections color coded makes it so much easier to flip through them though.  Teachers are visual creatures.  We color code EVERYTHING.  It makes sense for a book that is so full of lesson ideas is color coded.

So, do you have it already? Are you thinking about buying it? I can definitely say The Reading Strategies Book was the best instructional resource I purchased this summer.

Happy reading!