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The Café Book is written by The Two Sisters, Joan Moser and Gail Boushey. The book is written in conjunction with The Daily 5, also written by them. The Daily 5 is a management system for a readers workshop style literacy block. The Café Book is the content to go along. Café is centered around the Café Board. Each letter for Café represents a reading strategy, which are also the heading on the board. The four heading are comprehension, accuracy, fluency, and expanded vocabulary. The idea behind Café is that during the Daily 5 mini lessons the teacher teaches different strategies to go under each heading on the Café board. For example, one of the first Café lessons taught to the students is "Go Back and Reread." This strategy goes under the comprehension heading on the Café Board. This board gives students a reference for all of the different reading strategies that they learn throughout the year. Along with the mini-lessons and Café Board, The Café Book also focuses on strategy groups and reading conferencing. The Two Sisters suggests that rather than meeting with students of the same abilities, meeting with students that are focusing on the same reading strategy. Along with the strategy groups, the teachers meet with individuals during reading conferences. During this time the teacher can ensure that each student is reading just right books and practicing the reading strategy that they are focusing on. I run both The Daily 5 and Café currently in my classroom. I believe both are amazing. Although I have not tried it, I think that Café is most successful when The Daily 5 is also implemented. My students reference the Café board daily. They use the strategies to help them be more successful readers. This year was the first year that I have used The Daily 5 and Café. I have not fully implemented all aspects of Café. I am using the board, but have yet to use strategy groups. I am still grouping my students based on ability

 http://www.amazon.com/Motivation-Breakthrough-Secrets-Turning-Tuned-Out/dp/0743289617/ref=sr_1_cc_2?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1328620537&sr=1-2-catcorr The Motivation Breakthrough: 6 Secrets to Turning On the Tuned-Out Child, author Richard Lavoie, is a well written resource guide for teachers who wish to figure out how to motivate their students. Parents can learn from the guide as well, but the author primarily addresses educators who seek to improve relations with their students and figure out how to help them work to potential. Richard Lavoie is a consultant and a lecturer with over thirty years of experience as a teacher and an administrator at special education facilities. He explores strategies and techniques that are proven to inspire children to learn. He outlines strategies that will be most effective in igniting the interest and eagerness of kids, especially given their different needs. He outlines several different ways that children are motivated to do their best work. He teaches of the six Ps to motivate children. Some seek praise; others seek prizes, power, projects, or prestige. Some are people-oriented and are motivated when they work with people. Six different chapters address the various motivating factors and how they can be identified and used in the classroom. Personal accounts from Lavoie's years as a teacher allow us to see how he has put his lessons into practice. I appreciate the way that Lavoie challenges teachers to find out what motivates their students, even those students with special needs or who are classified as difficult. He encourages parents and teachers to work together to spark any child to reach his/her full potential. He covers learned hel

Wendy, it looks like maybe your review got cut off. You can add to it by adding an additional comment.

This sounds like an interesting book, and strategies for inspiring students to learn is always a good thing. I would like to add this book to my professional library. Even though I will not be a special education teacher per se, I have special education students in my classroom. Anything that I can do to help them will be valuable.

Very often students, and even some adults don't understand the what is in the food they are putting in their bodies. This site gives an explanation of what a nutrition label is, along with have an interactive nutrition label. The interactive label gives you the ability to scroll over various macromolecules that are on a label and gives you an explanation of what they are and how much of these you need. This would be a good site to incorporate into a lesson on nutrition. I am actually starting one this week, so I am planning on using this site.

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Diversity Lesson Plans and Activities Elementary School Middle School High School Multicultural Education Research Guide For background information on multicultural education of all types and for all levels. This website provides countless lesson links on a wide variety of diversity issues. It has links to the excerpts it recommends you use as well as objectives and essential questions. If you are looking for a lesson for teaching diversity, this is the website for you!

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Jabberwocky is a poem written by Lewis Carroll. It is from his novel: Through the Looking Glass. It is written in nonsense language and has potential to be a fun poetry lesson for high school. The website offers ideas for using as well as background information on the poem. My kids knew about it from Johnny Depp in the current Alice in Wonderland movie. It might also work as a short piece of text for teaching some of the strategies we have talked about in class.

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Here is a very helpful link. It talks about all of the ways to teach reading in the elementary classrooms. It describes shared reading, readers theater, and guided reading just to name a few. I found it very helpful and a great resource,

This article provides five strategies for improving adolescent literacy. The first stragegy is to help students with explicit vocabulary instructions, and then on to comprehension strategies like being careful about what text you select and showing them the strategies to use for that type of text. The third strategy was providing extended forum for discussing vocabulary and text, and that is something that I need to work on with my ninth graders. One of the goals of this article is to improve adolescent literacy and the strategy is to increase student motivation and engagement, which I latched on to right away. One of the ways this article suggest doing it is by making "literacy experiences more relevant to student interests, everyday life, or important current events." I am using this technique in my Ninth-Grade Civics class this semester. Students are learning that the way you read a newspaper is different than reading a textbook. Each week they must select a current event related to Civics and write a brief report about it. Three students are randomly selected to give information on their current event each week. I use a form to help guide them through current event articles, and focus on textual evidence in articles. In other words, what statistics and facts are the writers using to make his/her point? Also, what adjectives, adverbs, nouns, and verbs does the writer use to convey a message or tone of the article? The students' vocabulary and reading are increasing, and they are becoming more informed citizens. It brings Civics alive for them and into the present day.

Although this article is brief, it details three techniques that teachers can use to improve skills needed for informational reading. The techniques that the article details are: text impression, guided questions, and retelling pyramid. If you hope to encourage your students to read informational text and understand it, the three techniques described in the article are simple ways that can help you teach these skills to your class.

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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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This is the cutest website ever! If I taught elementary school, I would use this starfall website. There are different links from the main page that will help guide a young students learning. I looked at the first topic which was about teaching the sounds of the alphabet to students. I loved all the graphics and how the announcer sounded out each letter clearly. Very great tool. Check it out!!!! Starfall.com opened in September of 2002 as a free public service to teach children to read with phonics. Our systematic phonics approach, in conjunction with phonemic awareness practice, is perfect for preschool, kindergarten, first grade, second grade, special education, homeschool, and English language development (ELD, ELL, ESL).

This past week I watched my three year old nephew Brady. We tried out the Starfall website together, and Brady loved it. He knows most of his letters in the alphabet, but he really enjoyed the picutres that came after each letter. Great website and it was wonderful to see Brady so excited to interact with the picutres.

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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. :)

This article gives excellent advise on how to step-by-step teach non-fiction writing to ELLs. It gives tips on do's and don't's and reasons why things work and don't work when teaching students new to the country that are especially helpful for grades 3 and up. I believe strongly that reading and writing need to be linked to have meaning for students. As we teach reading in our content areas, we also need to teach writing skills to go with those reading skills.

The article says that most ELL students who had schooling in their former country will try to write in their own language and then translate into English and this becomes problematic, because the formats of sentence structure do not match in most languages. I don't really have this problem, but understand how this could become a problem. I do have the problem of sentence structure with the way my students speak, therefore when they write, the sentence structure is not proper. The article gives a step-by-step guide starting with organizers to teach non-fiction writing. I really liked the fact that it said to use sentences in the organizers. I have been using organizers with my class and trying to teach them to write fragments and then write the sentences later and found that problematic. I thought that I was trying to teach them to get their ideas on paper quicker, but after reading the article believe that it would be easier to teach them to write the proper sentence in the organizer and then transfer it to paper.

I do love it when I find something that contradicts what I've previously done or known. Gives me pause to think. It will be interesting to see if this change in your thinking produces results in your students' writing. Keep us posted!

Ediger, M. (2000). Teaching Reading In The Social Studies [Abstract]. College Student Journal. Retrieved January 29, 2012, from http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FCR/is_1_34/ai_62839401/?tag=content;col1 For my first journal article I choose an article that covers teaching in reading in social studies. The article discusses how teachers should use methods of guiding students to comprehension and understanding of ideas in print. Students need word recognition skills which can lead to meaningful learning. This is crucial for students to develop necessary skills to achieve a higher understanding in this subject area. To do this teaching reading across the subject will benefit as students learn the important facts, concepts, and ideas the curriculum. As a social studies teacher, you need to be active in students reading by helping with comprehension which can lead to a better understanding of the material. The article offers several methods on how to do this. These include adding new words found in readings as vocabulary, reading orally in small groups, using a student aid to read orally, using tape recordings of the section, individual readings, and using journals during readings. Overall I thought this article was great because while it provided you many ideas and practices that you could actually use in your classroom. In the end, having actual methods to use first hand will benefit us as teachers the most. It will just be up to use to master using them in the classroom.