An award-winning journalist and literacy advocate provides a clear, step-by-step guide to helping your child thrive as a reader and a learner. When her child went off to school, Maya Smart was shocked to discover that a good education in America is a long shot, in ways that few parents fully appreciate. Our current approach to literacy offers too little, too late, and attempting to play catch-up when our kids get to kindergarten can no longer be our default strategy. We have to start at the top. The brain architecture for reading develops rapidly during infancy, and early language experiences are critical to building it. That means parents’ work as children’s first teachers begins from day one too—and we need deeper knowledge to play our positions. Reading for Our Lives challenges the bath-book-bed mantra and the idea that reading aloud to our kids is enough to ensure school readiness. Instead, it gives parents easy, immediate, and accessible ways to nurture language and literacy development from the start. Through personal stories, historical accounts, scholarly research, and practical tips, this book presents the life-and-death urgency of literacy, investigates inequity in reading achievement, and illuminates a path to a true, transformative education for all.

'Literacy Smarts' explores the opportunities that interactive whiteboards offer for more effective and expansive ways of teaching. It introduces simple activities and tasks that use whiteboard technology to bring new vitality to classroom lessons.

In Book Smart: How to Support Successful, Motivated Readers, the experience of reading together is used as a vehicle for discussing the varied yet interconnected language and literacy skills that jumpstart the career of a successful reader.

To meet the complexities of today's world, we need more than intelligence - we need emotional literacy. Emotional literacy means having the skills to understand and manage emotions, to communicate effectively, and to become an autonomous person. Unfortunately, many of us are not emotionally literate enough to help others, let alone ourselves. This book combines strategies and skills with theory and research to identify some of the key skills, maps, and tools needed to learn emotional literacy.

Encourages readers to look at their own combination of brain power, skills, abilities, and capabilities to determine how they might learn best, excel, and be themselves. Age range: 4-8.

Apply the "science" of reading to students with moderate-to-severe developmental disabilities, including autismThe Early Literacy Skills Builder program incorporates systematic instruction to teach both print and phonemic awareness. ELSB is a multi-year program with seven distinct levels and ongoing assessments so students progress at their own pace.Five years of solid research have been completed through the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, proving ELSB to be a highly effective literacy program and more effective than a sight-word only program. ELSB is based upon the principles of systematic and direct instruction. It incorporates scripted lessons, least-prompt strategies, teachable objectives, built-in lesson repetition, and ongoing assessments. The seven ELSB levels contain five structured lessons each. All students begin at Level 1. If a student struggles here, go back and administer Level A. Instruction is one-on-one or in small groups. Teach scripted lessons daily in two 30-minute sessions. On the completion of each level, formal assessments are given. ELSB includes everything you need to implement a multi-year literacy curriculum.

"Describes strategies for greening the campus and the curriculum, conducting environmental audits, rethinking school food, and transforming schools into models of sustainable community"-- P. [4] of cover.