Your power tools for making the complex comprehensible Now more than ever, our students are being asked to do highly advanced thinking, talking, and writing around their reading. If only there were ingenious new tools that could give our students the space to tease apart complex ideas in order to comprehend and weld their understandings into a new whole. Good news: these tools exist—Mining Complex Text. You’ll learn how graphic organizers can: Help students read, reread, and take notes on a text Promote students’ oral sharing of information and their ideas Elevate organized note-making from complex text(s) Scaffold students’ narrative and informational writing

Your power tools for making the complex comprehensible Now more than ever, our students are being asked to do highly advanced thinking, talking, and writing around their reading. If only there were ingenious new tools that could give our students the space to tease apart complex ideas in order to comprehend and weld their understandings into a new whole. Good news: these tools exist—Mining Complex Text. You’ll learn how graphic organizers can: Help students read, reread, and take notes on a text Promote students’ oral sharing of information and their ideas Elevate organized note-making from complex text(s) Scaffold students’ narrative and informational writing

Fisher & Frey’s answer to close and critical reading Learn the best ways to use text-dependent questions as scaffolds during close reading and the big understandings they yield. But that’s just for starters. Fisher and Frey also include illustrative video, texts and questions, cross-curricular examples, and an online facilitator’s guide—making the two volumes of TDQ a potent professional development tool across all of K–12. The genius of TDQ is the way Fisher and Frey break down the process into four cognitive pathways: What does the text say? How does the text work? What does the text mean? What does the text inspire you to do?

The Common Core State Standards have put close reading in the spotlight as never before. While middle and high school teachers want and need students to connect with, analyze, and learn from both literary and informational texts, many are unsure how to foster the skills students must have in order to develop deep and nuanced understanding of complicated content. Is there a process to follow? How is close reading different from shared reading and other common literacy practices? How do you prepare students to have their ability to analyze complex texts measured by high-stakes assessments? And how do you fit close reading instruction and experiences into an already crowded curriculum? Literacy experts Barbara Moss, Diane Lapp, Maria Grant, and Kelly Johnson answer these questions and more as they explain how to teach middle and high school students to be close readers, how to make close reading a habit of practice across the content areas, and why doing so will build content knowledge. Informed by the authors’ extensive field experience and enriched by dozens of real-life scenarios and downloadable tools and templates, this book explores • Text complexity and how to determine if a particular text is right for your learning purposes and your students. • The process and purpose of close reading, with an emphasis on its role in developing the 21st century thinking, speaking, and writing skills essential for academic communication and college and career readiness. • How to plan, teach, and manage close reading sessions across the academic disciplines, including the kinds of questions to ask, texts to use, and supports to provide. • How to assess close reading and help all students—regardless of linguistic, cultural, or academic background—connect deeply with what they read and derive meaning from complex texts. Equipping students with the tools and process of close reading sets them on the road to becoming analytical and critical thinkers—and empowered and independent learners. In this comprehensive resource, you’ll find everything you need to start their journey.

Skill-building through potent instruction, day by day In these much-anticipated sequels to The Common Core Companion, Janiel Wagstaff and Leslie Blauman provide a collection of connected lessons and formative writing assessments that bring Monday-to-Friday clarity to the task of integrating reading and writing with ELA standards. In each volume, the 50+ lessons are divided into fi ve, week-long learning sequences addressing key literacygoals. A best-practice glossary, If/Then charts, unit-planning calendars, and other tools round out these essential references, both in book and online. Follow each sequence and week by week, you’ll build the instructional potency to help students achieve a year’s worth of growth as you integrate: Writing Narratives with Identifying Sensory Words in Text Research with Identifying Topic and Details Opinion Writing with Close Reading for Text Evidence Comparing and Contrasting with Publishing Using Digital Tools Informative Writing with Use of Text Features

Engage your students in scientific thinking across disciplines! Did you know that scientists spend more than half of their time reading and writing? Students who are science literate can analyze, present, and defend data – both orally and in writing. The updated edition of this bestseller offers strategies to link the new science standards with literacy expectations, and specific ideas you can put to work right away. Features include: A discussion of how to use science to develop essential 21st century skills Instructional routines that help students become better writers Useful strategies for using complex scientific texts in the classroom Tools to monitor student progress through formative assessment Tips for high-stakes test preparation

The latest in the Understanding the Common Core series covers the structure, terminology, and emphases of the standards for both mathematics and English language arts and literacy at the upper elementary level. Here, teachers of grades 3-5 and elementary school leaders will find the insight they need to turn the standards' new and challenging content into coherent curriculum and effective classroom-level lessons.