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.
Power of Picture Books, The: Using Content Area Literature in Middle School
Reading for Learning: Using Discipline-Based Texts to Build Content Knowledge
Heather Lattimer provides practical, classroom-tested approaches to helping students access and critically respond to content-based texts.
Teaching YA Lit through Differentiated Instruction
Authors Susan L. Groenke and Lisa Scherff offer suggestions for incorporating YA lit into the high school curriculum.
Tim O'Brien in the Classroom: "This too is true: Stories can save us"
As part of the NCTE High School Literature Series, Tim O'Brien in the Classroom focuses on opportunities for classroom discussion and writing assignments, including lessons, open-ended prompts, and student writing samples.
A Failure of the Imagination
This article discusses the imaginative activities and assignments that teachers often assign that violate the text around which the lesson is focused and that mislead students about its meaning.
Finding the Thread: Character, Setting, and Theme
An annotated bibliography of books that exemplify the plot elements, character, setting, and theme. Includes guidelines on how to do a book talk.
Teaching Reading with YA Literature: Complex Texts, Complex Lives
This book is designed to help teachers develop their own version of YA pedagogy and a vision for teaching YA lit in the middle and secondary classroom.
Zora Neale Hurston in the Classroom: "With a Harp and a Sword in My Hands"
The book offers a practical approach to Hurston using a range of student-centered activities for teaching Hurston's nonfiction, short stories, and the print and film versions of Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Sherman Alexie in the Classroom: "This is not a silent movie. Our voices will save our lives."
Provides high school teachers with teaching strategies, classroom activities, and student samples for teaching the works of Sherman Alexie.
Langston Hughes in the Classroom: "Do Nothin' till You Hear from Me"
Carmaletta M. Williams provides high school teachers with background on Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance as well as help in teaching Hughes's poetry, short stories, novels, and autobiography.
Amy Tan in the Classroom: "The art of invisible strength"
Offers high school teachers an activity-based approach to teaching the works of Amy Tan, especially The Joy Luck Club and The Opposite of Fate.
Reading in the Reel World: Teaching Documentaries and Other Nonfiction Texts
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.