Featuring descriptions and activities for fifty exceptional titles, Mary Jo Fresch and Peggy Harkins offer a wealth of ideas for harnessing the power of picture books to improve reading and writing in the content areas.

Through Eileen Murphy Buckley's 360-degree approach to teaching critical literacy, students investigate texts through a full spectrum of learning modalities, harnessing the excitement of performance, imitation, creative writing, and argument/debate activities to become more powerful thinkers, readers, and writers.

By designing lessons to activate prior knowledge and linking these activities to reading and writing, teachers found that students were more engaged, that they learned more material more quickly, and that they more willingly incorporated reading into their lives.

John Golden offers middle and high school teachers a practical guide for using documentary film in the classroom to improve students' reading, writing, and thinking skills.

This collection of essays by classroom teachers demonstrates how to pair graphic novels with classic literature (including both canonical and YA lit).