[.ca] Reading with Meaning (ISBN 1571103074)

A "MUST HAVE" for teachers who teach reading!:
I teach 2nd grade and this is a wonderful resource to help teach reading comprehension. My student's comprehension skills have greatly increased and I've been teaching for 10 years. Debbie provides tons of examples and it is written in an easy to understand way. I would recommend for veteran and new teachers.

Elementary Teachers - This is the book with the answers!!:
I have been an elementary teacher for over 20 years and I've spent 17 of those years working with struggling readers. I wish this book had been written and published 20+ years ago. Debbie has detailed in this book the best way to teach children how to understand what reading is all about whether it is fiction or non-fiction. Strategies are explained thoroughly from the beginning of the year to the end. They are easy to follow and simple to implement. This book is worth its weight in gold!! You will not be disappointed.

A Must-Have for Any Primary Grade Teacher:
There are certain "must have" books for teachers. This is one of them. Miller takes a decade of reading research (as synthesized by Pearson, et. al., 1992), and puts it into practice in her classroom. We move through the year with her, watching as she scaffolds for us and her students explicit reading instruction that truly works. In Chapter 1, Miller goes straight to the crux of the matter: Gradually release responsibility to students; teach a few strategies of great consequence in depth over time; give students the gifts of time, choice, response, community, and structure. Chapter 2 tells us how-and why-we should create a sense of community in the classroom. "Real classroom communities," writes Miller, "are more than just a look. Real communities flourish when we bring together the voices, hearts, and souls of the people who inhabit them." We must be "deliberate" in September if we are to create the type of environment in which growth and authentic learning will occur. The Reader's Workshop is the topic of Chapter 3. Wait a minute, you may be saying, how does one have a "Reader's Workshop" when most of the students are not yet reading? "Readers' workshop in September," Miller writes, "is less about teaching children how to read and more about modeling and teaching children what it is that good readers do, setting the tone for the workshop and establishing its expectations and procedures, and engaging and motivating children to want to learn to read." And so Miller shows us, in detail, how we can go about this foundation-building. She begins with "Book Selection," then "Reading Aloud, Mini-Lessons, Reading and Conferring," and finally "Sharing." With our solid underpinning in place we are now ready to settle in---the topic of Chapter 3. Here we learn how and why to give children choices when selecting books. Miller also discusses briefly phonics and word identification---two things that she believes should be taught side-by-side with comprehension strategies. In the next two chapters Miller delves in depth into the comprehension strategies of schema and visualizing. She then devotes a chapter to "Digging Deeper." It is now January, she notes, and "\ot\che time is right for increasing the sophistication of the read-alouds, showing them how to engage in more challenging dialogue and making connections from our past experiences to more in-depth learning." Timing, as they say, is everything. It is this type of knowledge and the ability to exploit the foundation that has been so carefully laid that makes Miller a teacher extraordinaire. Chapter 8 through 10 are devoted to the remaining reading strategies of inferring, questioning, determining importance, and synthesizing. Miller includes numerous anecdotes, vignettes, lesson models, tips, techniques, and more. A list of references and a detailed index are included. Practical and brilliant, this is one book that is definitely required reading for primary grade teachers. Reviewed by the Education Oasis staff

Primary Teachers you really do NEED this book!:
I had bought this book after it was highlighted at a conference I attended. Shortly after, it was one of the book choices for a literature circle I was participating in during a grad class. Now nearly all the teachers in my district have read it or are familiar with it. My reading intervention teacher teaches her lessons directly from the examples in the books. It proves that you really can do a lot with comprehension in the younger grades and you can teach them to use adult language (teacher terms) to convey their thoughts. A workshop I attended yesterday focused primarly on how the teacher incorporates all the aspects of comprehension as listed by Debbie Miller in her 1 and 2nd grade looping classroom. It is an EASY/Fun professional read that gives you precise examples of lessons, activities and student responses. There is also a video series that goes along with it which has the folks from Strategies that Work leading the conversations. A MUST HAVE in any primary classroom to teach comprehension and reading effectively.

THE ULTIMATE TEXT FOR READING WORKSHOP K-2:
If you are a K-2 teacher considering Reading Workshop implementation and can only afford to buy one book, THIS IS THE BOOK TO BUY! Debbie Miller takes you by the hand and walks you through all the aspects of Reading Workshop. The writing is easy to read and practical; yet full of necessary information which will allow the reader to implement Reading Workshop confidently. This book is the real-world application of the strategies from MOSAIC OF THOUGHT. I have recommended it to all my K-2 colleagues.I can't wait until school starts to try this out!