Literacy work stations are being embraced in many elementary schools as a way to ensure students of all ages are completing thoughtful, challenging tasks while their teachers meet with small groups of students. Debbie Diller, author of the book Literacy Work Stations, takes you into two primary classrooms to demonstrate how to create a thriving stations program. Patty Terry's first grade students and Vicky Georgas' second graders work in stations...

It's a common dilemma: teachers need time to work in one-on-one conferences and in small groups with students during literacy workshop. And yet assigning 'busy work' to the rest of the class won't help all students to develop the essential reading and writing skills they need. Can we really expect young readers and writers to tackle challenging work on their own without constant support and intervention from teachers? This question led Gail Boushey...

The ability to select just-right books is a key element in developing confident, successful, independent readers. Gail starts this mini-lesson with Joan's K-2 multiage students by modeling how she picks a pair of shoes that are a good fit for her. Having engaged the class, Boushey and Moser show how to use a similar five-step process to select appropriate books: look at the book, consider the purpose and decide, am I interested in it? Do I comprehend...

Do you have students who lack stamina and struggle when it comes to sticking with difficult texts? So does Cris Tovani. In this new video, which complements So what do they really know? her groundbreaking book on formative assessment, she takes you inside the classroom, where she faces the same challenges you do. Follow Cris as she confers with Irving and guides him to access and connect his background knowledge, or as she buckles down with Israel...

When learning how to write well, there is nothing more powerful than examining the work of the writers we admire. Real writers need mentors - those writers who inspire us and demonstrate through their style and craft how we, too, can be successful writers. In Writing with mentors, Lynne Dorfman and Rose Cappelli, authors of Mentor texts and Nonfiction mentor texts, take us inside two Pennsylvania classrooms and show us how we can use children's literature...

Editing invitations takes you into Jeff Anderson's sixth-grade classroom as Jeff demonstrates how he naturally links grammar instruction to writer's craft through his 'Invitations to Notice'. The invitations are a warm-up activity used at the beginning of writer's workshops to help students learn to play close attention to mechanics, style and craft. They can be used as an alternative to daily oral language for those teachers who are looking for stronger...