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This is an important book for teachers, administrators, prospective teachers, college professors, or anyone seeking to provide quality teaching to children in their first years of schooling.
- Harvard Educational Review

Among the many changes to sweep American literacy education has been a move toward whole class instruction. Nonetheless, children still bring to literacy a wide range of experiences and competencies. How, then, might teachers best support a literate community yet still meet the needs of individual readers? For Fountas and Pinnell, the answer lies in guided reading, which allows children to develop as individual readers within the context of a small group. Their new book is the richest, most comprehensive guided reading resource available today and the first systematic offering of instructional support for guided reading adherents.

Guided Reading was written for K-3 classroom teachers, reading resource teachers, teacher educators, preservice teachers, researchers, administrators, and staff developers. Based on the authors' nine years of research and development, it explains how to create a balanced literacy program based on guided reading and supported by read aloud, shared reading, interactive writing, and other approaches. While there is an entire chapter devoted solely to the process by which children become literate, every chapter clearly presents the theoretical underpinnings of the practices it suggests. Also included are guidelines for:

Best of all, there are well over 2,500 leveled books in the Appendixes, along with many other reproducible resources that teachers will use for years to come.

"Good first teaching is the foundation of education and the right of every child," assert the authors. With the publication of this book, educators themselves will find the foundation in reading skills instruction they so rightly deserve.

With its careful balance between the theory and the practice, this book always gives readers the theories behind the methods, encouraging them to choose, adapt, and construct their own approaches as they create a balanced program of literacy instruction. Special emphasis has been given to adapting instruction for English language learners, struggling readers and writers and special needs students throughout the book. Unlike comparable texts, the new edition stresses effective steps for closing the gap between achieving and struggling readers as mandated by the No Child Left Behind legislation and Reading First. Reading Methods, Comprehension, Assessment, Emergent Literacy, Reading for student with special needs. Elementary Reading Methods.

• boosting classroom-wide comprehension levels
• building students' understanding of genres
• helping students craft specific responses to texts
• supporting success on state-mandated tests.