Yellow Brick Roads : Shared and Guided Paths to Independent Reading 4-12

Do you spend your days working with students who struggle to comprehend reading in literacy and content classes? Are you looking for a way to establish comprehensive literacy instruction in your school or classroom so all students receive support in becoming competent and confident readers?

In Yellow Brick Roads, Janet Allen offers research-based methods for helping teachers move toward these goals. This book provides research, practical methods, detailed strategies, and resources for read-aloud, shared, guided, and independent reading. In addition, Janet outlines solutions for many of the literacy dilemmas that teachers face every day:

• understanding what gets in the way of reading;
• rethinking and reorganizing time and resources;
• providing support for content literacy;
• developing assessment practices that inform instruction;
• supporting reading as a path to writing instruction;
• establishing professional communities to support individual and school-wide needs-based research.

The appendixes include graphic organizers to support strategy lessons, suggestions of titles for building classroom libraries, as well as web sites and professional resources that support the teaching of reading.

Yellow Brick Roadswill give you rich ideas, detailed strategies, and literature support for implementing those strategies. At a time when many are looking for that elusive wizard to solve students' reading problems, this book helps you create your own paths to effective literacy environments.

Do you spend your days working with students who struggle to comprehend reading in literacy and content classes? Are you looking for a way to establish comprehensive literacy instruction in your school or classroom so all students receive support in becoming competent and confident readers?

In Yellow Brick Roads, Janet Allen offers research-based methods for helping teachers move toward these goals. This book provides research, practical methods, detailed strategies, and resources for read-aloud, shared, guided, and independent reading. In addition, Janet outlines solutions for many of the literacy dilemmas that teachers face every day:

• understanding what gets in the way of reading;
• rethinking and reorganizing time and resources;
• providing support for content literacy;
• developing assessment practices that inform instruction;
• supporting reading as a path to writing instruction;
• establishing professional communities to support individual and school-wide needs-based research.

The appendixes include graphic organizers to support strategy lessons, suggestions of titles for building classroom libraries, as well as web sites and professional resources that support the teaching of reading.

Yellow Brick Roadswill give you rich ideas, detailed strategies, and literature support for implementing those strategies. At a time when many are looking for that elusive wizard to solve students' reading problems, this book helps you create your own paths to effective literacy environments.

VOYA

Teachers looking for new methods to inspire readers will find a wealth of smart and practical ideas in Allen's book. Although the topics she introduces, such as read-alouds, shared reading, and guided reading, are not new concepts, she refuses to take the familiar for granted. The author analyzes these practices and highlights the obstacles that can cause frustration and disappointment for both students and teachers. Her discussion of reluctant readers looks at the important differences between students who protest they "can't," "don't know how," "would rather not," and simply "don't care." Her suggestions for success are realistic and grounded in personal experience. Unlike authors of many reading texts, Allen not only emphasizes the importance of diversity in a reading curriculum, but she also usefully provides models of how to incorporate small pieces of text from an assortment of high and low cultural resources in a classroom. Along with reading novels and poems, Allen's students frequently are invited to engage with short articles, quotations, excerpts pulled from the professional journals Allen reads, newspapers, magazines, letters, and any other thought-provoking text she happens to stumble over. Repeatedly, Allen emphasizes the essential point that to be a successful reading teacher, one must be a curious and active reader as well. Eight appendixes that list Web sources, books on tape, cross-curricular suggestions, professional references, and copies of the author's own surveys, diagrams, and prompts provide a rich set of resources to help teachers put Allen's suggestions into practice. Charts. Further Reading. Appendix. 2000, Stenhouse, 304p, pb. Ages Adult. Reviewer:Megan Isaac SOURCE: VOYA, June 2001 (Vol. 24, No. 2)