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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 five to six new features published each week.
Latest Content
The Big Fresh March 3, 2018 Irish Sushi
We look at read alouds in this week’s Big Fresh.
Writing Minilesson: Feelings
Katrina Edwards uses read alouds as mentor texts for writing minilessons in her first-grade classroom. In this example she focuses on character feelings.
Questioning Within Read Alouds
Melanie Meehan looks at the issue of engagement through the lens of student questions during read alouds, and shares a strategy to provoke more thoughtful student participation.
Leveraging Read Aloud
Christy Rush-Levine finds that administrators are questioning the value of read alouds, especially with older students. She shares how she uses the picture book Love in her middle school classroom to launch challenging discussions about timely themes.
End-of-Year Read Alouds
Bitsy Parks explains how the ending weeks of read alouds in her first-grade classroom are designed to celebrate learning and shared experiences from the entire year.
The Big Fresh February 24, 2018 Failure and Feedback
We look at assessment and grading in this week’s Big Fresh.
Building Stronger Wordsmiths
Maria Caplin is integrating vocabulary work into content areas.
Conferring in First Grade: Focus on Goals and Strengths
Katrina Edwards confers with first grader Wyatt about his goal of increasing the volume of his reading, helping him self-assess what’s going well and what lies ahead.
Meaningful Data
Ruth Ayres explains how data can make students and teachers feel empowered or deflated—so much depends on what you are looking for and how you present it.
Asking Students to Grade Themselves
Asking students to assess and grade their own work cements learning and deepens understanding for many students, but only if it is done in a thoughtful, collaborative way. Melanie Meehan takes you step-by-step through the process in a fifth-grade classroom.
Leveraging Reading Assessment Benchmarks
Benchmark assessments can be incredibly time-consuming for teachers to complete. Tara Barnett and Kate Mills describe how they leverage the time spent by using the assessments in strategy conferences with students.
The Big Fresh February 17, 2018 Memory Box
We look at how to foster student independence in this week’s Big Fresh.
An Editing Strategy for Run-On Sentences
Is your problem writers whose sentences never seem to end? Tara Barnett and Kate Mills have a strategy for grappling with run-on sentences.
Students Watching Teachers
Students are always watching us, whether we realize it or not. Jennifer Schwanke explains how we can capitalize on that interest to build independent reading and writing habits.
Big Question Minilesson
Katherine Sokolowski models how readers make choices as questions arise while reading independently. She also demonstrates how she moves between a novel and web resources.
Writing Workshop Bingo
Carly Ulmer develops a bingo board to use with her middle school students to give them more choice and foster independence while crafting writing in specific genres.
Bulletin Board of Independence
Melanie Meehan uses independence bulletin boards to provide students with options when working on their own during units of study.
The Big Fresh February 10, 2018 Again and Again
We consider how to improve lessons in this week’s Big Fresh.
One Text, Many Lessons
Tara Barnett and Kate Mills share how one book can serve as an anchor for lessons on everything from writer’s craft to test-taking skills.
Keeping Minilessons Short
Melanie Meehan gives three quick management tips for tackling the challenge many teachers face — keeping minilessons short.
The Importance of Context Minilesson
Christy Rush-Levine uses a vivid anecdote from her youth to teach her middle school students about the importance of context in literary analysis.
The Big Fresh February 3, 2018 When Your Car Is Your Teacher
We look at slowing down and paying close attention in this week’s Big Fresh.
Close Attention and Reading Response: Conferring with Tori
Christy Rush-Levine confers with eighth grader Tori about her reading response to Why We Broke Up. She encourages Tori to make connections between the characters in her current book and her previous reading by paying close attention to surprising action.
The Big Fresh January 27, 2018 Rosie’s Bucket List
We look at rereading and retelling in this week’s Big Fresh.
Revising Thinking Through Multiple Readings
We’ve all had that student — the one who blurts out a misreading of a text, only to have classmates agree with the analysis. Christy Rush-Levine explains how she uses “first-, second-, and third-draft readings” to help her middle school students develop stronger comprehension skills.
Fostering More Rereading in Classrooms
Stella Villalba explains why rereading is especially useful for young English language learners, and shares some simple strategies for integrating more rereading strategies into reading and writing workshops
Questions for Rereaders
Lifelong readers often have books they love to reread, sometimes more than once. But young readers can also get into ruts. Jennifer Schwanke explores when rereading is fine for students, and when it should be challenged. She includes a series of questions for teachers to use when conferring with children who are rereading favorite books.
Minilesson: How to Retell a Story
Katrina Edwards uses the children’s books They All Saw a Cat and Be a Friend for a minilesson with her first-grade students on how to retell stories with a partner during reading workshop.
Why Bother? Practical Answers to Questions About Close Reading
Why bother with close reading? Jennifer Schwanke finds many teachers asking themselves if close reading is worth the time, when schedules are already overstuffed. She shares some prompts to help assess when close reading makes sense.
Bin of the Week
Shari Frost and a teacher she is assisting notice some bins collecting dust in the classroom library. When the teacher resists removing the books, they work together to find creative ways to help students develop enthusiasm for neglected series and authors.
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