One of the central challenges facing early childhood teachers is how to meet academic standards while creating learning environments that honour young children’s mathematical ideas, curiosity, and playfulness. Early Childhood Math Routines, introduces a set of short whole-group and partner routines designed to engage young children in meaningful math thinking and build problem-solving communities.
Inside you’ll find the following resources:
Learn from real experience in classrooms supporting the complexities of early childhood mathematics while also building communities that foster social, emotional, and cognitive development in young children. Get the tools and routines that will help you connect children to mathematics in a way that is exciting and powerful.
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How can we lay the groundwork for classroom conversations that are less teacher-directed and more conducive to student-to-student dialogue?
This unique book offers an innovative discourse structure in which students’ ideas and voices take the lead while teachers focus on listening and facilitating. In addition to classroom stories and examples, Christy and Kassia provide 28 micro-lessons designed to help K–5 students develop and exercise their speaking and listening muscles. Inside Hands Down, Speak Out you’ll learn how to:
Christy and Kassia believe that the development of dialogue skills is worth the investment of time not only because it has the power to deepen our understanding of literacy and mathematics, but also to deepen our understanding of ourselves, our communities, and the world.
Coming in September 2020 — Pre-Order today!
Infuse math class with the spirit of revision! Students will feel comfortable thinking aloud as they talk to learn through problem-solving, rather than talking only to perform right answers. In the process, a class of students becomes a community of mathematical thinkers, and teachers gain access to their students' ideas and understandings. Rough Draft Math shows how to create a classroom culture in which your students will feel more comfortable expressing their partial understandings and in-process thinking, and then continually revising that thinking as they build deep, conceptual understanding of mathematics.
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When we layer together the two ideas that the books we share not only serve an academic purpose, but they also convey big, affective messages, our classroom conversations become richer and student learning becomes more meaningful. Layers of Learning explores read-aloud strategies designed to enhance your reading and writing standards by capitalizing on the way literature can impact caring communities. With over 200 picture-book suggestions, author JoEllen McCarthy introduces the Heartprint Framework, which demonstrates how you can layer literacy and life lessons throughout your day using multiple connections across learning. Inside, you’ll find the following:
Layers of Learning is structured around four key elements: Community, Agency, Respect, and Empowerment, or CARE. Inside you’ll discover the tools you need to emphasize reading and writing connections, character education, and culturally responsive teaching, while championing the power of read alouds to affect independent readers, writers, and thinkers.
Coming in September 2020 — Pre-order today!
This era of “fake” news demands a deeper curriculum that questions inconsistencies of facts and opinions in various texts and images. This timely revision of a ground-breaking book offers opportunities for students to connect with social justice issues through inventive language exploration and the active examination of all forms of media. It encourages teachers to evaluate their core teaching beliefs and recognize the realities of their students’ lives for a richer understanding of our complex world. A glossary of more than fifty strategies, along with reproducible pages for easy classroom use, complement this essential resource.
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Teachers succeed when they grow, develop, and strive to maintain excitement and wonder: the WOW of learning. This book examines a wide variety of daily tasks, from delivering engaging lessons to nurturing life skills. Throughout the book, simple steps for instruction are explained, along with suggestions for fun-filled activities and games. Practical and hands-on, the book offers tricks, techniques, and original ideas for excellent classroom instruction in all subject areas. It demonstrates how the WOW factor will help teachers remain motivated as they enrich the classroom learning experience for students.
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Increasingly, educators are recognizing that for children to thrive intellectually, they need classrooms that offer and grow positive relationships and behavior, emotional self-regulation, and a sense of well-being. Using the guiding principles from his best-selling resources, Choice Words and Opening Minds, author Peter Johnston and six colleagues began a journey to create such classrooms—environments in which children meaningfully engage with each other through reading, writing, making and discussing books. By embracing the ideas and teaching strategies in Engaging Literate Minds, you can help your students become socially, emotionally, and intellectually healthy.
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Teachers are learners too, and for the past ten years, Gail Boushey and Allison Behne have been working with hundreds of teachers and students nationwide, gaining insight into best practices for reading instruction. Using those insights, they developed The CAFE Book, Expanded Second Edition to help teachers apply what their research has shown—that reading instruction is not about the setting, the basal, or the book level. Rather, effective reading instruction is based on what that student needs in that moment.
The CAFE Book, Expanded Second Edition builds on the same research-based, student-centered foundations as the original, but now includes
The CAFE Book, Expanded Second Edition gives you a variety of tools to structure your literacy block and create an environment where your students are engaged readers and writers with resources that set them up for success. This CAFE system is all you need to support, guide, and coach your students toward the strategies that will move them forward.
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Discover the route to a classroom culture where students do the talking, explain their thinking, and critique each other’s mathematical reasoning, all in the context of the math you're expected to teach. You’ll start with short speaking and listening routines that take just a few minutes to introduce. As you and your students progress, you can layer on additional debate routines, until your class is engaging in full-class debates using mathematical reasoning. With this easy-to-read guide, you don't need to wait any longer. You will be able to start debating in your classroom, tomorrow!
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The 6 essential steps for nurturing writers who have the will to write are at the core of this practical book. Based on extensive classroom experience, the book explores how teachers can help students tap into their own life experiences, model the habits of a writer, and make use of the tools of the trade. Strategies throughout the book show teachers how to create an environment that helps students see writing as a rewarding experience in and outside the classroom. Powerful real-life anecdotes and ready-to-use activities support this guide to developing classrooms full of thoughtful, passionate writers.
Coming in May 2020 — Pre-order today!
Imagine that you assign a math problem and your students, instead of getting discouraged after not solving it on the first attempt, start working harder—as if on a quest to figure out the answer. They talk to each other and enthusiastically share their discoveries. What could possibly make this fantastic scenario come true? The answer is: the Open Middle math problems and strategies in this book.
Open Middle Math by Robert Kaplinsky gives middle and high school teachers the problems and planning guidance that will encourage students to see mathematics in an entirely different light. These challenging and rewarding Open Middle math problems will help you see your students build genuine conceptual understanding, perseverance, and creativity. With these practical and intuitive strategies, extensive resources, and Robert’s own stories about his journey learning to use Open Middle math problems successfully, you will be able to support, challenge, and motivate all your students.
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Teaching Tough Topics shows teachers how to lead students to become caring citizens as they read and respond to quality children’s literature. It focuses on topics that can be challenging or sensitive, yet are significant in order to build understanding of social justice, diversity, and equity. Racism, Homophobia, Bullying, Religious Intolerance, Poverty, and Physical and Mental Challenges are just some of the themes explored. The book is rooted in the belief that by using picture books, novels, poetry, and nonfiction, teachers can enrich learning with compassion and empathy as students make connections to texts, to others, and to the world.
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This practical book explores ways teachers can collaborate and learn from each other in formal and informal situations. It demonstrates that a mentoring relationship can benefit both new and experienced teachers. Full of strategies that are practical and easy to implement, the book offers solutions to common questions, opportunities, and challenges that face teachers every day. Based on extensive experience, this highly readable book includes personal histories and experiences around important values and advocates for honest reflection and meaningful feedback. An essential resource for all educators, the book champions reciprocal and ongoing processes of learning, listening, and sharing.
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This timely book uses thinking structures to deepen student writing. It revolves around “brain pockets” to help students appreciate the qualities of different writing forms. Some powerful examples include memory pockets for personal narrative writing, fact pockets for nonfiction, and imagination pockets for story writing. Detailed lesson plans are featured along with sample anchor books and book lists. Based on extensive classroom testing, student samples throughout the book illustrate this unique approach to teaching writing. Suggestions for setting up an effective writing program and assessment tips for guiding instruction complete this comprehensive approach to developing a year-long writing program.
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