Nancy Zelenka
Coach, Scranton Elementary, Cleveland, OH

Whenever we, as teachers, go to a workshop or attend a meeting, most often we come back with "stuff." This "stuff" comes in the form of summaries of the presenter's lecture, some handouts about resources available to incorporate the topic discussed into your teaching methods, or a nice notebook, pen or fancy pencil. This is the "stuff" teachers come to expect when attending inservice meetings or workshops.

When Scranton became involved in the Cornerstone Initiative, our teachers again wanted "stuff." But now, they wanted a blueprint, a step-by-step guide on how to implement the Cornerstone Initiative. As we all know, there is no blueprint. Implementation is unique to every Cornerstone school. I wanted to provide our staff with something tangible, but more importantly, something that they would USE, not put up on a shelf to collect dust.

While working through the first year of Cornerstone, I was looking for literature to teach the deep structure strategies. I used my tried and true favorites---Judith Viorst's Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad, Patricia Polacco's The Keeping Quilt. However, when I exhausted my repertoire of favorites---I panicked! What books match which strategies? Several times I e-mailed Ellin..."What would be a good book for text-to-world connections?" and, "The fifth grade teacher wants me to model a lesson to her low achieving students, what do you suggest?" Of course, her suggestions were always perfect, but, I knew I couldn't e-mail her every time I had a question. I needed to come up with my own resources. Thus, the idea for my Strategy Resource File emerged.

I initially used the list Ellin gave us, but found that several of the titles were unavailable. It was around this time that I was invited to participate in a Children's Literature Study Group. What a wonderful opportunity it was! Our study group read forty five current children's books (published in the past 5 years) and discussed them. I took advantage of having these 45 books in my hands and added them to my resource file.

The Strategy Resource File is organized by the seven deep structure comprehension strategies outlined in Ellin's book, Mosaic of Thought. Each page identifies the book title, author and illustrator, the ISBN number, and the year it was published. Additionally, a category or theme is given as well as a short summary. Most importantly, the books are matched to the deep structure comprehension strategies.

These files were purposely not bound. I wanted teachers to add pages for the books they use and identify the strategies they used with the book. It thus becomes a continuous work in progress. It's a great tool for coaches to use when a colleague asks, "Would you come into my room and model a lesson in Determining Importance In Text?" You can immediately go the file and find several books that are matched to that strategy.

The Strategy Resource File --- it's great "STUFF!"