Reading & Writing with English Learners offers kindergarten through fifth grade reading and writing educators a user-friendly guide and framework for supporting English learners in balanced literacy classrooms. Authors Valentina Gonzalez and Melinda Miller lead readers in exploring the components of Reading & Writing with English Learners with a special eye for increasing the effectiveness of instructional methods and quality of instruction to serve English learners. This book shares practical and effective techniques for accommodating reading and writing instruction to design learning that simultaneously increases literacy and language development. Reading & Writing with English Learners was written for: • K-5 Classroom Teachers • ESL Teachers • Reading and Writing Instructional Coaches • District Leaders Reading & Writing with English Learners includes: • the components of Reading & Writing Workshop • accommodations that support English Learners • high yield practices for Reading & Writing Workshop during remote teaching • the role of phonics • a culturally inclusive booklist • activities that support Reading & Writing Workshop And more!

The ROOTS OF READING • Writing is the ability to leave information through symbols while reading is the ability to retrieve information previously written. • Writing is transcribing words we speak into understandable symbols that we see. • We are not born speaking but we are wired to acquire the speech that we hear in a relatively short time flawlessly. • We have the inherent capacity to form concepts and label concepts with words. • Reading is an outgrowth of speaking. It follows that to be a good reader one must be a fluent speaker and commands a wide range of vocabulary. • Unlike speaking, we need to be taught to read and write. We build a vocabulary of using symbols to represent the sounds that make up words. Similarly we represent auditory signs with visual signs. These signs are represented by the letters of the alphabet. • We communicate verbally through speaking and listening. • For written communication, we use writing (sending a message) and reading (retrieving message). The method of representing sounds that make up words with signs is called phonics. • Writing is simply representing the sounds (letters) we use in saying a word. Reading is retrieving the message we wrote. • Analyzing the sounds that make up a word is called decoding. Choosing letters to represent the sounds of the word we want to say is encoding. Decoding and encoding are the cornerstones of reading and writing. • At first the process of decoding is slow but with practice, automaticity sets in and decoding is faster. Decoding then is reading. • To be an effective reader one needs to develop a subset of skills as follows: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension.