Constructing Meaning Through Kid-Friendly Comprehension Strategy Instruction: (Maupin House)

Nancy's comprehension and written response strategies give teachers the first-tier Response-to-Intervention (RTI) help they need to get students off to a great start! Good readers think about reading while they are reading. But how does a teacher teach students to apply comprehension strategies as they read? By applying the explicit teaching model to comprehension strategy instruction, Dr. Nancy Boyles offers teachers an easy, effective, and innovative approach to improve students' reading comprehension. Using her book -- rich with models, teacher-talk, and real-life examples -- teachers learn how to explicitly teach students to apply comprehension strategies competently while they read. And with Dr. Boyles' detailed lesson plans and templates, teachers can embed comprehension strategy instruction into guided, shared, and independent reading for both literacy and content-area instruction. Constructing Meaning shows teachers: A kid-friendly way to introduce and model a blended repertoire of comprehension strategies concurrently, so students practice strategies as readers actually use them: flexibly and as an integrated whole while reading; How to refine students' comprehension of fiction and informational text during shared, guided, and independent reading with focused lessons in specific strategy applications; and How to monitor students' progress in reading comprehension and comprehension-strategy use through follow-up activities, rubrics with discrete assessment criteria, and questions that make kids think. Teachers can reproduce classroom-ready visual supports from the book or customize them from the included CD

About the Author :
Dr. Nancy Boyles was a classroom teacher for many years and is now Professor Emerita at Southern Connecticut State University where she was Professor of Reading and Graduate Reading Program Coordinator. Previously, she spent 25 years as a classroom teacher at various elementary grade levels. She was named Teacher of the Year in her district and was a semi-finalist for Connecticut Teacher of the Year. She received her doctorate in reading and language from Boston University and has received numerous awards over the years for her contribution to the field of literacy. She currently consults with districts and other organizations and agencies, providing workshops, modeling best practices in classrooms, and assisting with curriculum development. Workshop topics include Close Reading for the Common Core; Comprehension Strategies, Small Group Instruction, Explicit Comprehension Instruction, Rigorous Assessment, and Author's Craft. Nancy is the author of several books, including Teaching Written Response to Text, Constructing Meaning through Kid-Friendly Comprehension Strategy Instruction, Hands-On Literacy Coaching, That's a GREAT Answer!, Rethinking Small Group Instruction in the Intermediate Grades, Launching RTI Comprehension Instruction with Shared Reading, Closer Reading in Grades 3-6, and Lessons and Units for Close Reading.

Review :
Constructing Meaning is an expert and professionally written guidebook to honing one's teaching skills and bringing out the best in one's students.-- "The BookWatch, The Midwest Book Review" I am an instructional coach at an elementary school in Colorado. I recently purchased your book, Constructing Meaning Through Kid-Friendly Comprehension Strategy Instruction, and absolutely love it; I will encourage teachers to purchase it as I feel it is well worth it. Integrating writing with reading enhances comprehension (Brandenburg, 2002) because the two are reciprocal processes. Writing to learn engages students, extends thinking, deepens understanding, and energizes the meaning-making process . . . Writing to learn is an opportunity for students to recall, clarify, and question what they know about a subject and what they still wonder about with regard to that subject matter. Students also discover what they know about their content focus, their language, themselves, and their ability to communicate all of that to a variety of audiences. Without doubt, writing can optimize student learning of content subjects. Being able to express thinking in writing is a skill students take with them beyond the elementary social studies and science classrooms.-- "The Reading Teacher"