Language Arts/English Curriculum Frameworks - Albemarle County ...

Atwell, N. (1998). In the Middle: New Understanding about Writing, Reading, and
Learning, 2 nd edition. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook.
Published ten years after the original edition, the second edition of In the Middle includes
updated reflections, resources, and guidelines for transforming virtually any middle school
language arts classroom into an interactive reading and writing workshop enivronment. While
the book is divided into chapters, it incorporates mini-lessons to use in daily teaching. A
thorough and helpful resource for teachers looking to establish workshops in their classrooms.
Atwell, N. (2002). Lessons that Change Writers. Portsmouth: Heinemann.
This collection of mini-lessons within the writing workshop construct gives teachers and
students access to meaningful examples that move writing forward. The companion notebook
of reproducible pages allows teachers to immediately apply the mini-lessons in their own
classrooms.
Beck, I., McKeown, M.G. and Kucan, L. (2002). Bringing Words to Life. New York:
Guilford Press.
Using a broad research base, the authors address the challenges of teaching vocabulary. The
authors present a brilliant rationale for delivering lively and direct vocabulary instruction. They
offer excellent advice on how to select rich words, present them to students, and help them
revel in their usefulness. They provide many strategies and examples at various levels of the
K-12 continuum that will allow kids to enter a lifelong fascination with words.
Beers, K. (2003). When Kids Can’t Read, What Teachers Can Do. Portsmouth:
Heinemann.
This in-depth resource takes strategies from theory into practice. Throughout the text, Beers
weaves in narrative and student samples to demonstrate how the reading strategies work and
which reading issues they address. The text can be taken in order or in pieces. It is likely the
most user-friendly reading resource to emerge in the last decade.
Buckner, A. (2005). Notebook know-how: strategies for the writer's notebook.
Portland, ME: Stenhouse.
This book is filled with tips for launching a notebook, teaching mini-lessons throughout the year
to help students become more skilled in keeping notebooks, helping struggling students
transfer their notebook writing to other forms of written expression, organizing notebooks for
flexibility and easy access to information, utilizing writer notebooks to help students become
better readers, and effectively assessing notebooks.
Burke, J. (1999). The English Teacher’s Companion. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
This book truly is an English teacher’s companion. It describes everything from teaching writing
to getting a job as an English teacher. Though there is much discussion on theories, there are
also a multitude of practical applications regarding those theories.
Calkins, L. (2000). The art of teaching reading. 1st ed. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn
and Bacon.
Nationally acclaimed educator Lucy Calkins offers a compelling look at the methods, insights
and day-to-day classroom practices used by hundreds of highly effective reading teachers. She
tells the stories of brilliant teachers whose children eagerly learn to read and then talk and
write about their reading in amazing ways.
© Albemarle County Public Schools, April 2006.
Appendix K
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