Teacher’s Guide Contents
In the jump-in-and-get-started Teachers Guide, Gretchen outlines the thinking behind Literate Days and provides an overview of the series’ components and instructional design. She also includes tips for organizing your classroom and tailoring instruction. Strategies for implementing an effective literacy curriculum are supported by planning tools and schedules.
BOOK 1: Grounding Children in Routines and Procedures for Meaningful Learning
The lessons in Book 1, implemented within the first weeks of the P/K/1 school year, provide children with the foundation and background they need to successfully pursue a literate life in your classroom. Children learn, through immersion and guided participation in these lessons, the routines and expectations for the different kinds of literacy instruction they will experience in the classroom. For example, they learn what is expected from them at circle time; they try out shared reading, whole-class read-alouds, and a writing workshop; and they are walked through techniques for making smart use of the core centers in your classroom.
The kidwatching tools in Book 1 are designed to help you get to know your students and to help you make beginning decisions about how to teach them best. These tools should be used selectively, as they meet your particular students’ needs, within your particular curriculum.
BOOK 2: Building, Energizing, and Re-envisioning the Literacy Curriculum
The lessons in Book 2 are designed to offer P/K/1 children continued support as they participate in these classroom literacy practices in ever-expanding ways, and are taught new strategies and skills. With the lessons in Book 2, children begin to explore reading and writing strategies in more depth and through more genres; they are introduced to partner reading and independent reading; and they expand their uses of literacy in the centers.
The kidwatching tools in Book 2 are designed to help you fine tune what you know about your students, to continue to track their growth over time, and to continue to make instructional decisions based on what they know and can do. These tools should be used selectively, as they meet your particular students’ needs, within your particular curriculum.
BOOK 3: Deepening the Scholarship in the Classroom Community
The final set of lessons takes children deeply into life as literate individuals. Because a child working through this set of lessons requires an understanding of the basic concepts and processes necessary for reading and writing (built through the preschool and kindergarten years), as well as a certain level of independence, it is recommended that these lessons be reserved primarily for first-grade students. Kindergarten teachers should choose selectively from Book 3, based on their students’ progress with Books 1 and 2. Through Book 3 lessons, children live, experience, and develop literacy as they learn to take more and more ownership over classroom literacy experiences, and engage in collaborative reading and writing in increasingly more sophisticated ways.
The kidwatching tools in Book 3, to be used selectively, are designed to help children become more and more aware of their developing competencies, to learn to self-evaluate, and to continue to inform your instructional practices.
Lessons from Literate Days DVD includes classroom footage of several lessons from each of the three lesson books. After each lesson, there is a conversation between Gretchen and the classroom teacher.