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This fantastic site has famous people reading aloud children's books. My students loved when I would use this site on the smartboard and have them listen to the story and look at the pictures. Each story also includes an activity guide and related activities that have comprehension questions about the story. If used in a whole group situation, you can either pause the story and ask the questions along the way or have them answer the questions at the end. There are many stories to choose from and students really seem to enjoy listening to someone else read to them once it awhile.

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Especially if you are a Master's student, I highly recommend getting your own copy of the APA guide. When you do your capstone, you will deal with a wider variety of citation issues. I also recommend spending a few dollars more for the spiral edition. I'll bring mine to class and it might convince you. :)

Finding effective ways to teach today's student population is perhaps the greatest challenge facing literacy educators in the United States. As classrooms become increasingly diverse, educators struggle to find curricula and pedagogical strategies that are inclusive and affirmative yet facilitate the development of academic and critical literacies.

How might you apply some of the researcher's findings in your own (current or future) practice? Do you now of teachers who have implemented aspects of this type of critical literacy?

Prof. Clinton, In my own future practice the application from this article that I found most useful was teaching popular film and media in the classroom. In the new core curriculum I know that one of the standards includes comparing text to its corresponding film and evaluating and analyzing the changes that directors have made in adapting the text to film. It would just be a matter of finding a more current relevant film that has a corresponding novel that is grade appropriate and having students study the book before watching the film. I also see value in evaluating music lyrics in a poetry unit. As of right now the host teacher that I am working with hasn't done any of this. She abhors poetry and pretty much refuses to show films in class, although we haven't had much opportunity to since our school assigns readings based on lexile and right now there is no way to have a whole class read the same novel since their reading levels are all so different. I think with the core curriculum standards rolling out next year we'll really have to.

I re-read this (highlighted) passage from the article about 3 times to absorb it. When I first became a literacy coach about 10 years ago, our district was just transitioning to the idea of leveled text and guided reading. It was all about giving struggling readers text at their instructional level--easier to access. Now the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) necessitate a shift in that thinking as we need to push students to interact with more complex texts at a higher level of thinking. So I think we can still consider instructional levels (and need to) to help students become proficient readers, but we need to "up the ante" in our book talks to help students go deeper into the meaning.

The article I read for this journal focused on the differences between readers who are engaged and those who aren't. An engaged reader is a student who wants to read both to gain knowledge and for their own enjoyment. Sometimes it seems as you talk to students that there aren't that many of these. As you could probably assume, students who are engaged in reading are more likely to be successful readers. The reason that I chose this article was first because it was directly applicable to our class. Another was that I would like to be able to get more students to become engaged readers. If it is possible to get some students to want to read on their own it would be a great accomplishment. I think very often students don't like to read because they aren't interested in the readings they are assigned. If, as a teacher, you are able to find subject matter that can interest students they would be much more likely to be engaged readers. The research in this article found some interesting information. One interesting bit was that students' motivation to read decreased as they aged. This seems to make a lot of sense to me. For one thing I believe that very often the reading that students are assigned is very, for a lack of a better word, boring. It could be a good thing to try to provide students with a greater variety of books that may be able to evoke more motivation to read. Another part of this article spoke to the idea that relating the information in readings to real life experiences. This seems to me to be one of the most important things a teacher can do. If teachers are able to relate the information in the readings to real world experiences the students are more likely to grasp the information. Simply having the students read a text and then not providing any real-world context doesn't accomplish a whole lot. For me, the information that has stuck with me the longest is that which was related directly to stories that the instructor told

Engagement and motivation are huge topics in education right now. Small things we can do to tap into students' interests can provide links to help students make connections between school content and their worlds.

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