The Best Children’s Books of the Year, 100th Anniversary Edition. The Children’s Book Committee, Bank Street College of Education, $10.50

Searching for the right book for a toddler’s birthday? Trying to turn your reluctant teen into an avid reader? The Children’s Book Committee has selected the best recently published books for children and young adults in this easy-to-use, annotated and beautifully illustrated guide. Teachers, parents, grandparents and librarians have come to rely on this delightful publication for 100 years. This anniversary edition includes a list of “classic” literature from the last century. Rediscover old favourites that are still relevant today!

Beyond Leveled Books, 2nd Edition. Karen Szymusiak, Franki Sibberson & Lisa Koch, $23.95

Supporting early and transitional readers in grades K to 5.

Big Words for Big Kids: Systematic Sequential Phonics and Spelling, Upper Grades. Patricia Cunningham, $24.50

Big Words for Big Kids provides teachers with hands-on, minds-on, manipulative activities in which children learn to decode and use word roots, prefixes and suffixes.

Boy Writers: Reclaiming Their Voices. Ralph Fletcher, $23.95

Enter the world of boy writers, and imagine the writing classroom from a boy's perspective. This important new book takes a frank look at the challenges of recognizing and engaging boys:

• finding subjects to inspire and motivate boy writers
• understanding both the humour and the violence that boys incorporate into their stories
• improving student-teacher conferencing

The book also discusses a wealth of practical solutions, including improving handwriting, incorporating drawing into the composition process, welcoming boy-friendly genres into the classroom, and much more.

Building ALPHABET Knowledge, Grades PreK-K. Debra Olson Pressnall, $21.50

See, hear, name and write — activities for learning about the letters and their sounds.

Building the Reading Brain, PreK -3. Pamela Nevills & Patricia Wolfe, $53.95

This updated edition of Building the Reading Brain examines brain theory and current research to give educators a clear picture of how children acquire and develop language skills in preparation for reading. Moving through skills acquisition from birth to age eight, this resource provides best teaching practices for fostering critical literacy skills for each age group. Building the Reading Brain sheds light on early childhood cognition and language development to help teachers provide all young learners with a strong foundation for reading success.

Building Real-Life Reading Skills, Grades 3-5. Cindy Harris, $14.99

Eighteen lessons with reproducible activity sheets that help students read and comprehend schedules, forms, labels, menus and more.

Building Student Literacy Through Sustained Silent Reading. Steve Gardiner, $31.95

High school teacher Steve Gardiner offers a powerful and rewarding solution to teachers who want to improve their students' reading ability — let students choose what they read and give them time to read it. Gardiner demonstrates how giving students just 15 minutes of uninterrupted, sustained silent reading every day can help them discover their won abilities and develop lifelong reading habits and skills.

Children’s Language: Connecting Reading, Writing and Talk. Judith Wells Lindfors, $25.50

The more teachers understand about how children learn to talk, the more they can help children become avid, joyful readers and writers. Author Judith Wells Lindfors concisely identifies several important commonalities across oral and written language. Taking the compelling perspective that it’s all language, she traces children’s emergent literacy from infancy through the early school years and describes a set of language principles that teachers can build on as they help young students learn to read and write using the oral language processes they already know.

Conferring: the Keystone of Reader’s Workshop. Patrick Allen, $31.95 (Grades 1-8)

Conferences with students are purposeful conversations that scaffold the reading comprehension strategies that guide a reader`s progress, and ultimately, create independent readers. This powerful book argues that the benefits of conferring are well-worth the effort of learning to do it well. It sets out to show teachers how to overcome all the obstacles, and make the somewhat intangible aspect of conferring tangible.

Contemporary Cursive. Suzanne Lowe Wilke, $14.50

Enhance the handwriting program in your classroom with the practical and creative activities that not only strengthen handwriting skills but thinking and reading as well.

Engaging Children with Print: Building Early Literacy Skills through Quality Read-Alouds. Laura Justice & Amy Sofka, $26.95

Preschool teachers and early childhood professionals know that storybook reading is important, but they may not know how to maximize its benefits for later reading achievement. This indispensable guide presents research-based techniques for using reading aloud to intentionally and systematically build children's knowledge of print. Simple yet powerful strategies are provided for teaching preschoolers about book and print organization, print meaning, letters, and words, all while sharing engaging, commercially available books.

First Grade Writers: Units of Study to Help Children Plan, Organize, and Structure Their Ideas. Stephanie Parsons, $22.75

With First Grade Writers, Stephanie Parsons will change how you think about teaching the thinking behind writing. Parsons outlines five specific units of study for your writing workshop that help students prepare thoughtfully to write. Beginning with a September unit specially designed to introduce the writing workshop to first graders and build a classroom community that supports risk taking and learning, each successive unit builds upon the previous one and fosters independence. By June your students will know how to plan for writing out loud and on paper, leading to elegant, well-structured pieces.

Oral and silent reading strategies for building fluency, word recognition and comprehension.

Good Books Matter. Shelley Stagg Peterson & Larry Swartz, $24.95

How to choose and use children’s literature to help students grow as readers.

Good Choice! Supporting Independent Reading and Response, K – 6. Tony Stead, $28.95

Literacy specialist Tony Stead outlines the components that foster successful independent reading in grades K to 6.

Graphic Organizers & Strategy Sheets That Scaffold Writing from Paragraphs to Essays. Anina Robb, $21.99 (Grades 4 to 8)

These student packets for 15 key writing formats include guided lessons, writing models, graphic organizers and planning sheets. The lessons help students build the skills they need to write both in fiction and non-fiction genres — from evocative descriptive paragraphs to powerful persuasive essays.

The Joyful Reading Resource Kit: Teaching Tools, Hands-On Activities and Enrichment Resources. Sally Reis, $35.95  Grades K-8

Materials and tips for supporting and managing independent reading in the classroom, including log sheets, conference tips, assessment rubrics and a reading growth chart.

Knee to Knee, Eye to Eye is a comprehensive, inspiring guide to the art and practice of literature conversations. Create a conversation community in your classroom and watch as students develop deep, reflective conversations as reading becomes an adventure in learning.

Knowing Words: Creating Word-Rich Classrooms. Ruth McQuirter Scott, $44.95

Teachers need to help students go beyond a simplistic understanding of words to a deeper appreciation of words on many levels. Students need to realize the power of words — to entertain, persuade, describe — and to recognize how writers create powerful texts.

Knowing Words is a detailed and practical resource for teachers, Grades 3-8. Each concept and idea is presented with concrete examples of how to apply this knowledge in elementary school settings. Knowing Words will be a valuable resource to support any language arts curriculum.

The Next Step in Guided Reading, Grades K-8. Jan Richardson, $36.99

Focused assessments and targeted lessons for helping every student become a better reader.

Of Primary Importance: What’s Essential to Teaching Young Writers. Ann Marie Corgill, $28.95 (Grades 1 – 3)

A look at the idiosyncratic journey of teaching young children to write.

One to One: the Art of Conferring with Young Writers. Lucy Calkins, Amanda Hartman & Zoë White, $35.30

In One to One, Lucy Calkins and her colleagues Amanda Hartman and Zoë White show you the practices and principles that create effective conferences. They dispel the myth that master teachers have a magic touch and show you that effective teachers do not reinvent the conference with each student, but rather use predictable, principled interactions that follow a few simple frameworks.

Phonics They Use: Words for Reading and Writing, 4th Edition. Patricia Cunningham, $39.75

The new editions of this popular resource is packed with new activities and strategies for teaching reading, weaving together the complex and varied strategic approaches needed to help students develop reading and writing skills.

A Place for Wonder: Reading and Writing Nonfiction in the Primary Grades. Georgia Heard & Jennifer McDonough, $26.95

Discover the wonder of a primary classroom where curiosity, engagement, imagination, creativity, and exploration are facts of everyday learning. For it is these characteristics that will develop intelligent, inquiring, lifelong learners.

This thoughtful book provides teachers with numerous practical ways — setting up "wonder centers," gathering data through senses, teaching nonfiction craft — they can create a classroom environment where students` questions and observations are a part of daily work. A Place for Wonder will help teachers reclaim their classrooms as a place where true learning is the norm.

Playful Reading: Positive, Fun Ways to Build the Bond between Preschoolers, Books, and You. Carolyn Munson-Benson, $39.95

Want to boost a child’s love of reading while making your time together more fun and meaningful? Playful Reading takes readers on a joyful romp through asset-rich children's picture books, emphasizing early literacy skills, reading for pleasure, and the eight asset categories. This collection is a terrific resource for teachers, daycare providers, parents, grandparents—anyone who spends time with children. Playful Reading comes full of activities, discussion topics, and ways to create memorable moments between children and the adults who read to them.

Reading Doesn't Matter Anymore: Shattering the Myths Of Literacy. David Booth, $16.95

This witty narrative argues that we must work to redefine reading, taking it beyond the boundaries of literature, if we wish to convince kids of its value in their lives. This groundbreaking book outlines twelve simple steps to help teachers and parents revolutionize the way they view and encourage children's reading in all genres and formats. The twelve succinct chapters cover topics such as redefining reading, understanding that technology is a part of the new literacy, exploring how words work, and turning printed text into active learning. Lively anecdotes and personal reflections throughout the book create a highly-readable narrative that makes a compelling case for recognizing the intrinsic value of reading … almost anything.

The Reading Edge: Using Phonics Strategically To Teach Reading. Kaz & Cathy Miyata, $24.95

Looking for concrete ways to help your students begin to recognize patterns in language, and better understand how printed words and letters fit together? The Reading Edge offers all the tools you need to help children become knowledgeable, enthusiastic readers … Poignant classroom vignettes throughout the book put literacy, phonics, and learning into context. Ready-to-use tools include assessment and tracking sheets, playful activities, and mini-worksheets.

Reading Pathways: Simple Exercises to Improve Reading Fluency, 5th Edition. Dolores Hiskes, $29.99 (all ages)

Now in its fifth edition, Reading Pathways offers an easy-to-use, highly effective approach to teaching reading accuracy and fluency to students of all ages, using a unique pyramid format. Reading pyramids begin with one word, and slowly build into phrases and sentences of gradually increasing complexity … Progressively building up the amount of text per line increases eye span, strengthens eye tracking, and develops reading fluency. The book also features more challenging multi-syllable word pyramid exercises and games to further develop fluency and vocabulary. Learning to read long words by syllables removes the fear and mystique of multi-syllable words and helps students build the strong vocabulary so critical for success in reading and writing.

Reading Power: Teaching Students to Think While They Read. Adrienne Gear, $24.95

A simple approach to teaching reading comprehension with effective strategies to help students think while they read. This practical book features chapters on the five powerful reading/thinking strategies — connecting, questioning, visualizing, inferring, and transforming. It offers techniques for helping children recognize what happens in their heads while they read, with simple applications that can be incorporated into any classroom routine. A valuable handbook that promotes reading independence with sequential lessons, teacher-modeling tips, and suggestions for guided practice.

Reading with Meaning: Teaching Comprehension in the Primary Grades. Debbie Miller, $33.95

Imagine a primary-grade classroom where all the children are engaged and motivated; where the buzz of excited, emerging readers fills the air; where simultaneously words are sounded out and connections are made between the books of their choice and the experiences of their lives. Welcome to Debbie Miller's classroom where students are learning to love to read, to write, and are together creating a collaborative and caring environment… Through explicit instruction, modeling, classroom discussion and by gradually releasing responsibility to her students, Debbie provides a model for creating a climate and culture of thinking and learning.

The Reading Zone: How to Help Kids Become Skilled, Passionate, Habitual, Critical Readers. Nancie Atwell, $20.99

Long an advocate of frequent, voluminous reading in schools, the author draws on evidence gathered in twenty years of classroom teaching to make the case for reading workshop more powerful than ever. The book establishes the top ten conditions for making engaged classroom reading possible for students at all levels and provides the practical support and structures necessary for achieving them.

Responsive Guided Reading in Grades K-5: Simplifying Small-Group Instruction. Jennifer Berne & Sophie Degener, $27.95

Guided reading is a staple of elementary literacy instruction, yet planning and conducting reading groups can be time consuming and challenging. This hands-on book presents numerous classroom examples which illustrate how to organize groups and select suitably challenging materials, structure group sessions, provide scaffolding and cues while listening to students read, and balance small-group with whole-class instruction. Special features include scheduling aids and lists of common cues for beginning and older readers, as well as suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter.

Rip the Page! Adventures in Creative Writing. Karen Benke, $17.95

Here are the ideas, experiments, and inspiration to unfold your imagination and get your writing to flow off the page! This is the everything-you-need guide to spark new poems and unstick old stories, including lists of big, small, gross-out, and favorite words; adventurous and zany prompts to leap from; dares and double dares to help you mash up truths and lies into outrageous paragraphs; and letters of encouragement written directly to you from famous authors. This is your journal for inward-bound adventures — use it to write, brainstorm, explore, imagine — and even rip!

Sharing the Secrets: Teach Your Child to Spell. Ruth McQuirter Scott & Sharon Siamon, $28.95

Sharing the Secrets is designed for parents who are concerned about their child’s progress in spelling. This popular learn-to-spell program is designed to help spellers from grade 3 to Junior High in just 15 minutes a day. These short, easy-to-manage sessions help children learn to recognize common spelling patterns that often baffle students and to gain a skill that will last a lifetime.

Sounds Easy! Phonics, Spelling and Pronunciation. Sharron Bassano, $33.50 (Grades 5 to Adult)

These photocopy ready exercises are designed for beginning English language learners who have little academic background and whoa re learning the English alphabet while concurrently building their vocabulary, listening and speaking skills.

Storytime: Young Children's Literary Understanding in the Classroom. Lawrence Sipe, $34.95

The author draws on his own extensive research in urban classrooms to present a grounded theoretical model of young children’s understanding of picture storybooks. Advancing a much broader and deeper theory of literary understanding, Lawrence Sipe suggests that children respond in five different ways during picture storybook readings; that these responses reveal that children are engaged in five different types of literary meaning-making; and that these five types of meaning-making are instantiations of five foundational aspects of literary understanding.

Strategies and Lessons for Improving Basic Early Literacy Skills. Bob Algozzine, Mary Beth Marr, Tina McClanahan & Emme Barnes, $38.95

Addressing the needs of a diverse classroom, this book is designed for educators teaching children of any proficiency level.

Strategies That Work, 2nd Edition: Teaching Comprehension for Understanding And Engagement. Stephanie Harvey & Anne Goudvis, $ 39.95

Since its publication in 2000, Strategies That Work has become an indispensable resource for teachers who want to explicitly teach thinking strategies so that students become engaged, thoughtful, independent readers. This revised and expanded guide adds 20 completely new comprehension lessons, extending the scope of the book and exploring the central role that activating background knowledge plays in understanding.

Supporting Children’s Reading, 2nd Edition. Margaret Hughes & Peter Guppy, $55.50

A complete short course for teaching assistants, volunteer helpers and parents.

Talking, Drawing, Writing: Lessons for Our Youngest Writers. Martha Horn & Mary Ellen Giacobbe, $30.95

In the early grades, talking and drawing provide natural pathways to writing. This exciting new book offers lessons that are designed to evaluate and fit into students' current skill levels, and then lead gently into writing. They include oral storytelling, drawing, writing words, assessment, introducing booklets, and moving forward. More than just a book of lessons, Talking, Drawing, Writing presents a vision of what successful beginning writing can look and sound like.

Teaching the Brain to Read: Strategies for Improving Fluency, Vocabulary and Comprehension. Judy Willis, $27.95

Neurologist and middle school teacher Judy Willis connects what teachers do in the classroom to what happens in the brain when students learn how to read. With each revelation about the neurology of reading instruction, Willis provides whole-class and individualized activities, lessons, and units that can be used in every grade and subject to help all students become better readers.

Teaching Fluency Beyond the Primary Grades. Midge Madden & Jane Sullivan, $20.99 (Gr. 4 – 6)

When asking upper-grade students to read aloud, it’s not only struggling readers who sound disfluent – otherwise good readers are often unable to read naturally, with expression and understanding. This practical guide offers scaffolded lessons that help students achieve accurate, well-paced and expressive oral reading with a variety of texts. As they build oral fluency, students also gain confidence in authentic speaking and increase their reading comprehension.

Teaching New Literacies in Grades K-3: Resources for 21st Century Classrooms. Edited by Barbara Moss & Diane Lapp, $34.50

Teaching New Literacies in Grades 4-6: Resources for 21st Century Classrooms. Edited by Barbara Moss & Diane Lapp, $34.50

These teacher-friendly handbooks are packed with creative strategies for introducing students to fiction, poetry and plays; informational texts; graphic novels; digital storytelling; Web-based and multimodal texts; hip-hop; advertisements; math problems; and many other types of texts. Prominent authorities explain the research base underlying the books’ lessons and provide practical activities and assessments for promoting decoding, fluency, comprehension, and other key literacy skills. Snapshots of diverse classrooms bring the material to life; helpful reproducibles are included.

Teaching Reading Comprehension to Students with Learning Difficulties. Janette Klingner, Sharon Vaughn, & Alison Boardman, $30.50

A highly practical resource for the classroom, this book offers clear, research-based recommendations for helping students at all grade levels understand and learn from what they read. Explaining the skills and strategies that good readers use to comprehend text, the authors show how to support struggling students in developing these skills. They present a variety of effective assessment procedures, ways to enhance vocabulary instruction and teach students about different text structures, and instructional practices that promote comprehension before, during, and after reading. Special features include discussion questions in every chapter and reproducible instructional materials and lesson plans.

Teaching Reading: Strategies & Resources for Grades K-6. Rachel McCormack & Susan Lee Pasquarelli, $41.95

Elementary teachers of reading have one essential goal—to prepare diverse children to be independent, strategic readers in real life. This innovative text helps teachers achieve this goal by providing knowledge and research-based strategies for teaching phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, all aspects of comprehension, and writing in response to literature. Special features include sample lessons and photographs of literacy-rich classrooms. Uniquely interactive, the text is complete with pencil-and-paper exercises and reproducibles that facilitate learning, making it ideal for course use. Readers are invited to respond to reflection questions, design lessons, and start constructing a professional teaching portfolio.

Teaching Writing: Balancing Process and Product, 4th Edition. Gail E. Tompkins, $49.95

Accessible and practical, Teaching Writing: Balancing Process and Product addresses both the process and the product of writing. This revised edition is filled with strategies for teaching pre-writing, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing through writing workshops, literature and thematic units. Author Gail Tomkins also includes techniques for helping children develop ideas, organize writing, choose vocabulary, apply stylistic devices, and correct mechanical errors; and she offers five levels of scaffolded composition instruction: modeled, shared, interactive, guided, and independent writing.

Text Structures: Teaching Patterns in Reading and Writing. Dianne Dillabough, $29.99 (Grades 3 to 8)

Text Structures provides a clear-cut, step-by-step instructional approach to teaching students the structures of expository or nonfiction text. Practical classroom applications, blackline masters and lesson planning are included.

Think Again.  JonArno Lawson, illustrated by Julie Morstad, $18.95

This collection of quietly beautiful and surprisingly humorous short poems reveals first love’s uncertainties, frustrations and joys.

The 3 Habits of Successful Reading Teachers: a Quick and Easy Approach to Helping All Students Succeed. Megan Milani, $24.95

Timely and sensitive, the book illustrates the creation of an environment where students feel comfortable, appreciated, and safe. It explores effective ways to empower all students to express themselves and derive deep meaning from text. It shows teachers how to place students at the core of their learning, and build classrooms where all students can thrive.

Traits of Writing: the Complete Guide to Middle School. Ruth Culham, $41.99 (grades 6-8)

The Traits of Writing: the Complete Guide for Middle School contains classroom-tested materials developed just for teachers of grades 6-8. Brand-new scoring guides, scored sample papers, warm-up exercises, focus lessons, and activities for each trait, organized by that trait's key qualities, make it easy to assess writing and deliver targeted instruction. With CD of reproducible forms.

The Vocabulary Teacher's Book of Lists. Edward Fry, $42.99

The Vocabulary Teacher’s Book of Lists offers content for literally hundreds of vocabulary improvement lessons for elementary and secondary teachers, self-improving adults, home-schoolers, and students studying for their SATs. While there are dozens of shorter high interest lists of words, the core of the book is based on Latin and Greek roots and prefixes. But the largest list is Homophones. In fact it is one of the largest lists of homophones you will ever use. This list, like many others, is appropriate for spelling lessons or writer s reference as well as vocabulary improvement. There are two dozen teaching methods in the Methods chapter and teaching suggestions to help improve reading and writing are scattered throughout the book. The lessons can be as short as a word-a-day or as long as a school year. The range of difficulty can go from upper elementary to college freshman classes, and be as diverse as adult education to English language learners.

What Really Matters in Writing. Patricia Cunningham & James Cunningham, $46.75

Research-based practices across the elementary curriculum.

The Write Beginning: Instruction That Starts with the End in Mind and Guides Students to become More Effective Writers. Lisa Donohue, $24.95

The Write Beginning argues that when young writers use success as a guide, they are able to develop a clear understanding of the process and set realistic goals for themselves. It explores the features of successful writing in different forms around the four areas of learning — knowledge, thinking, communication, and application. The book goes on to illustrate how teachers can use the success criteria as a framework for providing descriptive feedback to students as a way of guiding and improving their learning. Graphic organizers, sample rubrics, checklists, and student samples round out this comprehensive resource.

Yes, But… If They Like It, They'll Learn It! Susan Church, Jane Baskwill & Margaret Swain, $24.95

This innovative book explores constructive ways teachers can meet the literacy learning needs of a diverse range of students with engaging practices that are both authentic and accountable. The book is committed to connecting students' existing knowledge, experiences, and interests to classroom literacy learning that is relevant and purposeful.