This thought-provoking book will provide masters students, teachers and researchers with a toolkit and theoretical framework for teaching literacy through children's literature. It features innovative ideas for developing student and teacher experiences with literature and popular culture texts in the classroom, providing practical examples and teaching aids throughout. Taking a collaborative approach, Curtin explores how teachers and learners can engage with literature and its authors for the development of literacy in classroom practice. Connecting reader and writer identities and worlds through interviews with and suggested classroom activities from authors themselves, this text combines author, teacher and learner perspectives in the development of creative pedagogies that extend understandings of literacy beyond reading, writing and text. Exploring fairy-tales, comic books and graphic novels, children living in literature (i.e., texts which portray children, their lives and experiences), popular culture, young adult fiction, and non-fiction and digital texts such as blogs etc, this text develops a sociocultural understanding of literacy as a lived and contextually dependent practice where meaning is derived through relationships between people, settings and culture. Different contexts for literacy are explored, including reading and writing strategically (to learn about literacy and literature), widely (for personal purposes) and deeply (to transform understanding) (Short, 2011). This text will be an invaluable resource for teachers, researchers or anyone interested in reading and writing stories. The author interviews will also be of particular interest to older learners themselves as a way to develop their understanding of their own reading and writing practices. Pedagogies can be adapted to any age group, ranging from the early years to young adult.

Now in its ninth edition, Phonics Pathways (with help from Dewey the Bookworm™) teaches students of all ages the rudiments of phonics and spelling with an efficient, practical, and foolproof method. Written in an easy-to-use format, Phonics Pathways is organized by sounds and spelling patterns. The patterns are introduced one at a time and slowly built into syllables, words, phrases, and sentences. Printed in a large 8-1/2" x 11" lay-flat format for easy photocopying, Phonics Pathways is filled with illustrative examples, word lists, and practice readings that are 100 percent decodable. While appropriate for K-2 emergent readers, this award-winning book has also been used successfully with adolescent and adult learners, as well as second language learners and students with learning disabilities such as dyslexia. Dewey® and Dewey Decimal Classification® are proprietary trademarks of OCLC Online Computer Library Center, and are used with permission. Dewey the Bookworm™, Dewey D. System, Bookwormus Giganticus™, and the design mark of the character Dewey are trademarks of Dolores G. Hiskes and are also used with permission.

Thanks to the success of franchises such as The Hunger Games and Twilight, young adult literature has reached a new level of prominence and popularity. Teens and adults alike are drawn to the genre's coming-of-age themes, fast pacing, and vivid emotional portrayals. The essays in this volume suggest ways high school and college instructors can incorporate YA texts into courses in literature, education, library science, and general education. The first group of essays explores key issues in YA literature, situates works in cultural contexts, and addresses questions of text selection and censorship. The second section discusses a range of genres within YA literature, including both realistic and speculative fiction as well as verse narratives, comics, and film. The final section offers ideas for assignments, including interdisciplinary and digital projects, in a variety of courses.

Now in its fifth edition, Reading Pathways (with help from Dewey the Bookwormâ?¢) offers an easy-to-use, highly effective approach to teaching reading accuracy and fluency to students of all ages, using a unique pyramid format. Reading pyramids begins with one word, and slowly build into phrases and sentences of gradually increasing complexity. As the student moves from the pinnacle to the base of each pyramid, the phrase or sentence becomes a more interesting and expansive, and the student's confidence grows with each line completed. Progressively building up the amount of text per line increases eye span, strengthens eye tracking, and develops reading fluency. The book also features more challenging multi-syllable word pyramid exercises and games to further develop fluency and vocabulary. Learning to read long words by syllables removes the fear and mystique of multi-syllable words and helps students build the strong vocabulary so critical for success in reading and writing. Dewey® and Dewey Decimal Classification® are proprietary trademarks of OCLC Online Computer Library Center, and are used with permission. Dewey the Bookworm™, Dewey D. System, Bookwormus Giganticus™, and the design mark of the character Dewey are trademarks of Dolores G. Hiskes and are also used with permission.

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.

This multidisciplinary handbook pulls together in one volume the research on children's and young adult literature which is currently scattered across three intersecting disciplines: education, English, and library and information science.

Winner of the Children’s Literature Association’s 2018 Edited Book Award Contributions by Robin Calland, Lauren Causey, Karen Coats, Sara K. Day, Lisa Rowe Fraustino, Dorina K. Lazo Gilmore, Anna Katrina Gutierrez, Adrienne Kertzer, Kouen Kim, Alexandra Kotanko, Jennifer Mitchell, Mary Jeanette Moran, Julie Pfeiffer, and Donelle Ruwe Living or dead, present or absent, sadly dysfunctional or merrily adequate, the figure of the mother bears enormous freight across a child's emotional and intellectual life. Given the vital role literary mothers play in books for young readers, it is remarkable how little scholarly attention has been paid to the representation of mothers outside of fairy tales and beyond studies of gender stereotypes. This collection of thirteen essays begins to fill a critical gap by bringing together a range of theoretical perspectives by a rich mix of senior scholars and new voices. Following an introduction in which the coeditors describe key trends in interdisciplinary scholarship, the book's first section focuses on the pedagogical roots of maternal influence in early children's literature. The next section explores the shifting cultural perspectives and subjectivities of the twentieth century. The third section examines the interplay of fantasy, reality, and the ethical dimensions of literary mothers. The collection ends with readings of postfeminist motherhood, from contemporary realism to dystopian fantasy. The range of critical approaches in this volume will provide multiple inroads for scholars to investigate richer readings of mothers in children's and young adult literature.