Recommended by the Ontario Ministry of Education

Authors Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell have already helped hundreds of thousands of K-3 teachers engage, inform, and inspire early readers and writers. Now, with Guiding Readers and Writers (Grades 3-6), Fountas and Pinnell support teachers on the next leg of the literacy journey, addressing the unique challenges of teaching upper elementary students. The product of many years of work with classroom teachers, this is one of the most comprehensive, authoritative guides available today. It explores all the essential components of a quality literacy program in six separate sections:

• Breakthrough to Literacy where the basic structure of the language/literacy program is presented within a breakthrough framework that encompasses the building of community through language, word study, reading, writing, and the visual arts. The framework plays out as three "blocks," which can be interpreted as conceptual units as well as segments of time within the school day. A practical chapter on organizing and managing the classroom will help you implement the principles in your own classroom.
• Independent Reading is essential for students to develop interests and tastes as readers, selecting books for themselves every day. Fountas and Pinnell devote four chapters to independent reading, exploring how to structure teaching, minilessons, conferences, groupshare, and ways to use response journals as part of a reading workshop.
• The Guided Reading section provides detailed information on planning for guided reading, dynamic grouping for effective teaching, and selecting, introducing, and using leveled texts.
• Literature Study discusses how to make students’ experiences with literature as rich as possible. The authors offer specific suggestions for forming groups, guiding student choices, and establishing and teaching routines for literature discussion.
• Teaching for Comprehension and Word Analysis explores both oral and silent reading, processes and behaviors related to comprehension, and ways to help students construct meaning.
• The Reading and Writing Connection showcases the instructional contexts—poetry, writer’s notebooks, writer’s talks, genre, content literacy, and student research—that support students in connected reading and writing. An informative overview of the characteristics of fiction and nonfiction will help you teach students to read and write a variety of genres.
• A special feature appears at the end of each section, in which Fountas and Pinnell provide indispensable suggestions for working with struggling readers and writers