Choice Literacy Articles & Videos
The Choice Literacy library contains over 3,000 articles and 900 videos from 150+ contributors. Classic Classroom and Literacy Leadership subscribers have access to the entire library. Content is updated continuously, with 5 – 6 new features published each week.
In this two-minute video, Andie Cunningham reinforces the concept of spacing words with her kindergartners using her own writing and a brainstorming web.
Jennifer Allen reflects on essential layers that provide a safety net for the challenges facing beginning teachers.
Max Brand considers how rereading helps students understand and enjoy texts.
Shirl McPhillips recalls a junior high experience that promoted serious "attitude" and an uproar among her peers.
Aimee Buckner shares three essential "power tools" for writers.
Gayle Gentry reflects on how a colleague’s simple request to reorganize a classroom library turned into coaching opportunities that had a direct impact on student learning.
Moving a child from simple to complex sentences is the goal in this second-grade writing conference.
Jennifer Allen makes connections between her new professional life as a literacy coach and her beginning as a classroom teacher.
Larisa is a six-year-old who speaks Russian at home, and is in the “silent period” in school. In this conference, Ruth Shagoury demonstrates different strategies for eliciting responses from Larisa.
In this interview with Ruth Shagoury, English language learner Zerina talks about her growing confidence as a writer as she shares her writing with high school classmates. She also talks about how her father encouraged her to write down her most poignant memory of war in their homeland, Bosnia.
Anna is a five-year-old student in an Oregon kindergarten classroom who speaks Vietnamese at home. In this conference with Ruth Shagoury, she shares writing about her classmates and a snake, testing out her growing knowledge of the alphabet, sounds, and the purposes of writing.
Andie Cunningham and Ruth Shagoury share the assessment tools they use to track Andie’s kindergarten writers.
In this video from Linda Karamatic’s second-grade classroom, boys discuss the book Fudge using the protocol provided by Linda.
In this video from her fourth-grade classroom, Aimee Buckner teaches the “listing” strategy, using the book This Is the Tree: A Story of the Baobab as a mentor text. Aimee talks about mentor texts, using her own writing as a model, and the needs of intermediate readers and writers during the lesson and interview.
Teachers continue to puzzle over and sort through the terminology in the Common Core related to opinion and persuasive writing. Amanda Adrian and Heather Rader consider terms and teaching strategies.
Debbie Miller goes against the grain, advocating for “the luscious feeling of endless time” as we slow down to confer with children.
Gretchen Schroeder shares the building blocks she uses to define equity for herself and her students, as well as a practical way to put them into action in her rural high school classroom.
Jesabel Centeno helps her emergent bilingual learners respond orally to texts and share favorite books with classmates.
Interviews early in the year are a potent tool for building a class community.
Franki Sibberson works to expand her views of spelling and word work, redefining routines in her grades 3 and 4 classroom.
Suzy Kaback catches a young learner near and dear to her in the process of plagiarizing. She uses the experience to develop a template to help students and colleagues with notetaking.
Who is a “drive-thru” reader? One who zips through the start of a book and discards it before finishing, moving ever more quickly through random books. Aimee Buckner has some minilesson suggestions for dealing with those students who can’t or won’t finish any books they start.
Franki Sibberson wants her students to be more than just good spellers — she wants them to understand words in sophisticated ways, from many different angles. Children's books are a tool for reaching that goal.
Tara Smith finds her sixth graders have years of experience with writer's notebooks by the time they reach her classroom. How to inspire enthusiasm for a familiar tool? Mix old favorite tasks and lessons with fresh texts and tech-savvy options.
Mary Lee Hahn prepares for classroom visitors, and the process of viewing her room with fresh eyes makes her question routines and wall displays.
Hayley Whitaker confers with a kindergartner and helps him make meaning through drawings.
Linda Karamatic works with a student who is reading the Stink series as he tries out a new tool for documenting inferences as he reads.
Tara Barnett and Kate Mills continue their series on independent projects with nuts and bolts advice on management.
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