Heinemann Resources

I absolutely love professional development reading. While at the beginning of the year I was immersing myself in YA and middle grades novels, I started to miss teaching books. This winter and spring I have been enjoying Heinemann and Stenhouse resources (my two favorite publishers - I can never get enough of them). The main advertising that pulls me in to wanting to buy Heinemann books are their detailed mailers about their latest books. This week I received two and already ordered one, Interactive Notebooks and English Language Learners: How to Scaffold Content for Academic Success by Marcia J. Carter, Anita C. Hernandez, and Jeannine Richison. I am not familiar with any of the authors, but I have come to trust Heinemann and their authors' writing styles. Most of my colleagues attended GLAD training the year before I was hired and I have heard them talk about interactive notebooks. I know that they could be very powerful and want to hear more about them. Watch for a review early this summer.

The other resource that I am looking into is Linda Hoyt and Lynnette Brent Sandovold's Interctive Read-Alouds: Linking Standards, Fluency, and Comprehension Grades 6-7. I looked over a slide show talking about the series which is also available for other grade levels. From the comments I can tell that it closely aligns with my literacy philosophy and that it would be a natural fit for my classroom; however, I am not sure if I will buy it or not because it sounds like something that I could create on my own. It does always save time when someone has already created something ready to use though, as long as it is a good pedagogical fit which seems to be the case here. Also, I know that I would gain more ideas from the teacher materials that I would be able to apply to other texts that I do choose on my own. I imagine that although a lot of it will reaffirm what I already consider as ideal, there is always something new to learn.

If I do get the resource I know that it will fit in well with my literacy block for next year. It will work well for our whole class and small group instruction and goals. I also remember and enjoyed Hoyt's other book Revise, Reflect, Retell, which is now available in an updated edition.

Edit:
Let's make that three in the week. I was just sorting through some mail that I set aside and did not get through this week, and I realized that there is also another book that I would love to read, Pauline Gibbons' English Learners Academic Literacy and Thinking: Learning in the Challenge Zone. I enjoyed her book Scaffolding Language, Scaffolding Learning when I was in my undergraduate program.

Heinemann does have a sample chapter available on line, but since it is the first chapter, it is the research base chapter. I prefer to view the strategies (that is one of the reasons I prefer Stenhouse's set up of showing the whole book so that I can look at the table of contents and then briefly skim the sections that I am most interested in to make sure it is what I think it is before ordering). However, there was a hint of what it would be like with the brochure in the mail and it looks like it would be helpful, especially the academic literacy section and the writing scaffolding.