Jamaica doesn't want a younger child to play with her, until she remembers how she felt when her older brother excluded her from his games.

When her older brother refuses to let her tag along with him, Jamaica goes off by herself and allows a younger child to play with her.

Many standard reading assessment approaches fail to capture the strengths and needs of students from diverse sociocultural, linguistic, and academic backgrounds. From expert authors, this book guides educators in planning and conducting meaningful, equitable assessments that empower K–5 teachers and students, inform responsive instruction, and help to guard against bias. The book's holistic view of reading encompasses areas from text comprehension and constrained skills to building trusting relationships and promoting students’ agency. Twenty-eight assessment strategies are explained in step-by-step detail, including helpful implementation examples and 32 reproducible forms that teachers can download and print in a convenient 8 1/2" x 11" size.

This wonderful resource from two authors with an infectious enthusiasm for children's literature will help readers select and share quality books for and with young children. Specifically focused on infants through the third grade, Sharing the Journey contains descriptive book annotations, instructive commentary, and creative teaching activities tailored for those important years. Extensive book lists throughout will help readers build a library of quality children's literature. Books representing other cultures are included to help celebrate diversity as well as cultural connection. Genre chapters include poetry, fantasy, and realistic and historical fiction. A chapter on informational books demonstrates how young children can be introduced to, and learn to enjoy, nonfiction.

Provides teaching strategies, activities, and resources to help students with specific problems.

This book is about effective literacy instruction for students in grades K-4 who use the language variety that many linguists call African American English, but which, as explained in the Introduction, the author calls Black Communications (BC). Throughout, considerable attention is given to discussing the integral and complex interconnections among African American language, culture, and history, drawing significantly on examples from African American historical and literary sources. Although it is theoretical in its description of the BC system and its discussion of research on language socialization in African American communities, the major focus of this book is pedagogy. Many concrete examples of successful classroom practices are included so that teachers can readily visualize and use the strategies and principles presented. *Part I, ‘What is Black Communications?” presents an overview of the BC system, providing a basic introduction to the major components of the language—phonology, grammar, lexicon, and pragmatics, and illustrating how these components work in synchrony to create a coherent whole. *Part II, “Language Socialization in the African American Discourse Community,” examines existing research on African American children’s language socialization. *Part III, “Using African American Children’s Literature,” draws connections between strategy instruction and the linguistic and rhetorical abilities discussed in Part II. Each chapter ends with suggestions for using African American literature to help children develop their speaking and writing abilities. *Part IV, “Children Using Language,” moves from a focus on teaching comprehension strategies to helping BC speakers learn to decode text. This volume is directed to researchers, faculty, and graduate students in the fields of language and literacy education and linguistics, and is well-suited as a text for graduate-level courses in these areas.

Get books moving off the library shelves and into the hands of children with this integrated package for thematic instruction. Sixteen chapters, based on such lively themes as Risky Reading (adventure stories), Horrendous Fun (monster stories), and Book, Line, and Sinker (ocean world) contain introductions to the themes, introductory activities, booktalks, annotated bibliographies, and reproducible activity pages that extend learning across the curriculum. Activities are coded by grade level. A valuable tool for cooperative planning between librarians and teachers, this book helps librarians choose, present, and promote book titles appropriate to specific themes. It also helps teachers plan corresponding activities. Grades K-3..