With 75 tasks on full-color pages, this book offers a literacy instruction plan that ensures students benefit from independent effort and engagement.

The Comprehensive Handbook for Scaffolding Students' Literacy Growth Our readers and writers must "do the doing" if they are to succeed. In The Big Book of Literacy Tasks, Nancy Akhavan offers an instructional plan designed to yield independent effort and engagement. 75 tasks in beautiful full-color two-pagers ensure gradual release by moving more swiftly from the "I do" teacher phase to the "you do," when students benefit from the healthy amount of struggle that is the hallmark of learning. (And spoiler alert: you kick the habit of hovering, over-explaining, and rescuing!) Backed by research and thoughtfully arranged to make day-to-day planning easier, this groundbreaking book provides: • Reading and writing tasks organized into 3 sections-everyday skills, weekly practices, and sometime engagements requiring greater complexity • Mini-lessons that are essential- whether you use a reading program, a workshop approach, or are just transitioning to Balanced Literacy • Colorful teaching charts allowing you to quickly grasp the high points of each lesson • A clear task structure for introducing and managing the stages as you move students toward independent practice • Mid-task "Watch Fors" and "Work Arounds" showing how to coach without risking helicopter teaching • Amazing scaffolding tips for meeting the needs of a range of learners • Sample student work that offers valuable insights on how to use the tasks as formative assessments Practical and engaging, The Big Book of Literacy Tasks gives you a clear framework for "working the minds" of your students, helping them forge their own path to becoming better readers and writers.

Ready-to-go English Language Development tasks that focus on students "doing the doing" of talking, reading, listening, and responding. In recent years, the percentage of English Language Learners (ELLs) has increased in almost every state, so most teachers are faced with the challenge of teaching literacy to students acquiring English alongside English-speaking students. However, in many integrated learning situations, English Language Development (ELD) instruction is strikingly different than the teaching we provide students whose first language is English. The Big Book of Tasks for English Language Development helps teachers meet that challenge head-on! Bestselling author and esteemed education consultant Nancy Akhavan shows that teaching multilingual learners requires changing our instruction to focus on practices that have high impact for students as they acquire language. Yet it’s not about doing more— it’s about doing smarter. It’s about having high expectations for all students and providing scaffolds to support students at all levels of English language proficiency as they learn and grow more confident. All the ready-to-go activities in the book Center on active tasks where students do the thinking, talking, reading, and writing, with appropriate support Activate the domains of language — listening, speaking, reading, and writing — and recognize that these do not develop at the same rate Honor the continuum of language development and build on what students can do Provide teaching tools such as learning targets, suggestions for when to use a task, basic instructions and "teacher talk" for launching a task, and "Watch Fors and Work-Arounds" Focus on the linguistic assets multilingual learners bring to the classroom and provide opportunities to help them collaborate with peers With Akhavan’s signature straight-forward, teacher-friendly style, this book offers an uplifting reminder that with the right teaching strategies, educators can support multilingual learners to achieve their full potential and thrive in their learning journeys.

Help students get more out of books they read with this big collection of tiered, reading-response activities on the topics you teach: plot, character, setting, main idea, dialogue, figurative language, and much more! Each reproducible is written at three levels--easy, medium, challenging--so you can match each child with a reproducible that's just right for them to maximize independent learning. Content meets the Common Core State Standards.

All the tips and tools you need to realize the goal of balanced literacy learning. Students learn to read and write best when their teachers balance literacy instruction. Best-selling authors Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, and Nancy Akhavan help you strike the right balance of skills and knowledge, reading and writing, small and whole group instruction, and direct and dialogic instruction, so that all students can learn to their maximum potential. Using this essential guide, tap your intuition, collaborate with your peers, and put the research-based strategies embedded within to work in your classroom for a strong and successful balanced literacy program.

Guided Practice for Reading Growth provides all you need to support middle grade students reading two or more years below grade level. Twenty-four powerful reading lessons feature original poems and short texts that interest students and encourage them to think deeply. This unique book shows you how to: · Build students’ background knowledge by watching and discussing videos. · Use poems to improve reading and fluency through practice and performance. · Invite students to write about their reading and increase comprehension and recall. · Encourage meaningful talk to enlarge students’ analytical thinking and understanding.

"Every student deserves a great teacher, not by chance, but by design" — Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, & John Hattie What if someone slipped you a piece of paper listing the literacy practices that ensure students demonstrate more than a year’s worth of learning for a year spent in school? Would you keep the paper or throw it away? We think you’d keep it. And that’s precisely why acclaimed educators Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, and John Hattie wrote Visible Learning for Literacy. They know teachers will want to apply Hattie’s head-turning synthesis of more than 15 years of research involving millions of students, which he used to identify the instructional routines that have the biggest impact on student learning. These practices are "visible" for teachers and students to see, because their purpose has been made clear, they are implemented at the right moment in a student’s learning, and their effect is tangible. Yes, the "aha" moments made visible by design. With their trademark clarity and command of the research, and dozens of classroom scenarios to make it all replicable, these authors apply Hattie’s research, and show you: How to use the right approach at the right time, so that you can more intentionally design classroom experiences that hit the surface, deep, and transfer phases of learning, and more expertly see when a student is ready to dive from surface to deep. Which routines are most effective at specific phases of learning, including word sorts, concept mapping, close reading, annotating, discussion, formative assessment, feedback, collaborative learning, reciprocal teaching, and many more. Why the 8 mind frames for teachers apply so well to curriculum planning and can inspire you to be a change agent in students’ lives—and part of a faculty that embraces the idea that visible teaching is a continual evaluation of one’s impact on student’s learning. "Teachers, it’s time we embrace the evidence, update our classrooms, and impact student learning in wildly positive ways," say Doug, Nancy, and John. So let’s see Visible Learning for Literacy for what it is: the book that renews our teaching and reminds us of our influence, just in time.