Cornerstone Literacy
129 W. 29th Street
9th Floor South
New York, NY 10001
(917) 284-9880
Cornerstone Literacy Director of Programs Rebecca McKay serves up a select list of books on strategy instruction and literacy learning. Check out Rebecca’s Library to find out what she’s reading, her favorites, recommendations on the following topics, and more.
- Author Study: Charlotte Zolotow: A fine author for study because of the beautiful language and themes presented in the text.
- Author Study: Eve Miriam: Eve Miriam is important to classroom instruction because her books and poetry anthologies are based on common childhood themes. These books are helpful for an author study at the beginning of the year. Crafting sessions on these books followed with inquiry and conversation related to connections made to this author and her work offer powerful ways to build classroom community.
- Creating Mental Images Strategy Instruction: Readers use sensory images to enrich their reading comprehension. The research supporting this strategy shows how we can deepen understanding and become acutely connected to text while reading, as well as after reading.
- Determining the Importance of Strategy Instruction: Readers use their conclusions concerning the big ideas in texts as a focus for their reading. Furthermore, they learn to ignore the unimportant details from reading memory.
- Inference Strategy Instruction: The use of schema and text to interpret reading, critique text, and draw critical text conclusions occurs in various forms such as predictions, conclusions, and new thinking. This strategy of drawing inference from reading promotes active reading.
- Monitoring for Meaning Strategy Instruction: Comprehension repair is what proficient readers do when meaning goes awry. When repairing comprehension breakdowns, the six cueing (or language) systems from the interactive model of reading are called upon by the reader to restore meaning. The key here is that some readers utilize these systems and seem to know which system fits a specific comprehension problem. But all readers need monitoring for meaning strategies when meaning breaks down. Poetry is a good genre text source.
- Questioning Strategy Instruction: Readers ask questions before, during, and after reading to clarify meaning, predict text, determine author's style, attend to text components, and locate a specific answer.
- Schema Strategy Instruction: Schema is defined as an integrative means to bring together concepts that are occurring in the mind. The process brings thinking into an orderly representation. Researchers have conducted studies that support the use of prior knowledge as a tool against which readers measure the meaning they compose while reading. This research supports the idea that schema is used as an aid to store new information into existing knowledge.
- Synthesis Strategy Instruction: Proficient readers pay attention to the most relevant text information as they build an ever-changing synthesis of text meaning. This aspect of comprehending includes retelling, but extends to adding a personal interpretation to the recount of the text. Readers synthesize to aid and increase memory for text at a deep level.
You should also check out Rebecca's blog, Books for Literacy Teachers, which offers recommendations on books for teachers as professionals, as well as books that can be shared with children as part of powerful literacy instruction.