Books in Maupin House series

Take your students from emergent to elaborate writers. This book shows you how. The most complete guide available to conducting a daily writing workshop in the primary grades, this easy-to-use professional resource includes models for managing the writing process. Teaching the Youngest Writers explains the expository, descriptive, and personal-narrative writing techniques your students need to become fluent writers. Includes stages of emergent writing, how to set up your room, how to schedule and manage the daily writing workshop, how to conduct an Author's Chair, and how to model writing and efficient peer conferences. A classic and complete resource.

Now there’s a grammar handbook for students in grades 5 and up to easily unlock the grammar rules. It’s written in friendly language and with humor, so students will be sure to visit this handbook over and over again to brush up on general grammar rules and tips. This grammar handbook takes you step-by-step through the writing conventions, including parts of speech, tenses, modifiers, punctuation, parallelism, and much more. The Guide to Grammar is perfect for students and teachers and aligns with the new Common Core State Standards. Twenty-seven practice worksheets are included.

Small-group instruction becomes a strategic, differentiated tool for Response to Intervention in Dr. Nancy N. Boyle’s new resource, Rethinking Small-group Instruction in the Intermediate Grades. In this complete and ready-to-go resource, Dr. Boyles answers key questions about transforming small-group instruction to meet RTI objectives: How can I teach comprehension strategies during small-group instruction?; How do I align high-stakes standards with comprehension objectives?; Where do fluency, vocabulary, and author’s craft fit in small-group discussion?; How can I explicitly teach skills and promote meaningful discussions?; and How do I effectively include intermediate-grade students who function at a primary level? Rethinking Small-group Instruction in the Intermediate Grades provides sixteen options to differentiate small-group instruction. Teachers focus on reinforcing comprehension skills and strategies while explicitly teaching students how to construct basic meaning about both literary and informational texts and master the art of discourse, which leads to higher-level critical and creative thinking. Boyles shows intermediate teachers how to embed the Common Core State Standards into small-group instruction and provides all of the rubrics, checklists, planning templates, and prompts necessary to implement these instructional formats in both the book and the included CD. The useful CD also contains target sheets matched to each objective that explain how to find the best evidence to meet the objective. Let Rethinking Small-group Instruction maximize the power of your small-group instruction to differentiate your teaching and efficiently meet RTI goals and national standards at the same time.

Now there’s a way to blend balanced literacy and formative assessment. This book infuses research-based best practices of formative assessment through the lens of Common Core, with assessment support in these areas: read-alouds, guiding language into reading, language and literacy centers, and independent reading and writing. It also includes the "how" for novice and veteran K-8 teachers, administrators, and school literacy teams. Resources are included to help educators collect information and provide feedback to students.

Open Christina’s scrapbook and enter a world where girls rule and boys drool, where hormones rage, and where poetry captures the impassioned, lovesick, humiliated, and hilarious voice of the middle school student. College-bound Christina Curtis scrapbooks her years in middle school as a member of the Digital Poets, a group of students who find their voices through verse. Weaving her own narrative into the poems of her peers, Christina tells the story of her friendship with Steven Gilley, the obnoxious, girl-teasing, and “unbearably immature” boy who incites her to write her first poem. But Steven holds a secret that makes him wise beyond his years, leaving Christina to wonder if there isn’t more to this “unbearable” boy than meets the eye. From best friends and crushes, to underarm hair, and an all-out battle-of-the-sexes poetry war, the varied voices of the Digital Poets reflect both the humor and angst of middle school students coming of age in the Hormone Jungle. Hormone Jungle won the Association of Educational Publishers' 2007 Distinguished Achievement Award, the 2007 Independent Publisher Gold Book Award, the 2008 International Reading Association's Young Adults' Choices Award, and the 2009 Gold Mom's Choice Award!

Take Five! for Science transforms those first five minutes of class into engaging writing opportunities. Students will brainstorm their way through 75 topics within three main science divisions: earth, life, and physical science. All prompts are aligned with NGSS and ELA CCSS as students debate, compare, investigate, question, and design in response to 150 prompts. Whether your students are working to save endangered ecosystems, investigating distant constellations, creating unusual animals, or constructing a design solution, these diverse and creative prompts will have students looking forward to each day when they're asked to "Take Five!" for Science. Begin every day of the school year with a burst of writing in the science discipline with this comprehensive and fun resource. Ready? Set? Take Five!

Non-fiction text structures organize information into comprehensible patterns. Knowing how to recognize and use these structures to navigate non-fiction text greatly improves students’ understanding of what they read. Gail Saunders-Smith simplifies the process by providing teachers of grades 4-8 with: ways to teach each of the five non-fiction text structures: compare/contrast, cause/effect, sequence/procedure, question/answer, and exemplification; engaging whole-class and small-group activities using written, verbal, image, three-dimensional, and technology responses; study skills for locating, recording, and using information; tools for assessing student understanding, and explanations of the text features that organize information within the text structures; and mini-lessons for whole-class, small-group, and independent application of students' text structure knowledge. Examples, photographs, student samples, and graphic organizers support your teaching, and a bibliography of professional books and resources for locating leveled non-fiction texts make this a complete, ready-to-use guide for improving student comprehension.

When K-5 students understand how to read text features like bullets, insets, and bold print, they are reading the whole page―essential for deep comprehension of non-fiction and fiction text. In Reading the Whole Page: Teaching and Assessing Text Features to Meet K-5 Common Core Standards, seasoned educators Michelle Kelley and Nicki Clausen-Grace show you how to explicitly teach K-5 students to read text features, use them to navigate text, and include them in their own writing. The classroom-proven mini-lessons, activities, and assessment tools in Reading the Whole Page help you: Teach relevant Common Core Reading Standards and grade-level expectations; Diagnose, monitor, and meet student needs with one of two level-appropriate assessments; Evaluate knowledge with a unique picture book on CD that illustrates all the text features; and Monitor and guide differentiated instruction with a convenient class profile. &&/UL&&Sixty mini-lessons for teaching print, graphic, and organizational features provide ample choices for meeting the standards while adapting to students’ needs. Flexible lessons, which follow the gradual release of responsibility model and increase in difficulty, can be used within the typical ninety-minute reading block, during content-area instruction, in small groups, and as part of independent practice opportunities like literacy centers. Each lesson offers concept review, suggestions for differentiation, assessment options, and technology connections, requiring students to find, explore, manipulate, and create text features in their own writing. Even more activities―from text feature walks to scavenger hunts―help students integrate text feature knowledge as they read. The included CD provides important resources and convenient lesson supports, such as interactive thinksheets that can be filled out directly on the computer, visual examples of each text feature, rubrics, the assessment picture book, and readers’ theatre scripts.

Creating differentiated instruction is an essential yet time-consuming component of effective teaching. Since students learn at different paces and in different ways, some students may be able to apply a targeted comprehension skill in cognitively complex ways immediately after being taught the skill while other students may need additional scaffolding in order to grasp it. All students, regardless of their skill level, benefit from activities that are at their just right level. This means activities are not too difficult or too easy. In this book, Nancy Witherell and Mary McMackin share easy-to-follow lesson plans that address key reading skills for students in grades 3 to 5. A set of three, tiered, differentiated follow-up activities accompanies each lesson. Fiction and nonfiction mentor text suggestions are included.

Today, it is more essential than ever that students develop the knowledge and skills necessary to become college and career ready. There is a nationwide focus on the skills and strategies students need in order to be successful. At the core are the assessments currently in circulation. From the Classroom to the Test: How to Improve Student Achievement on the Summative ELA Assessments is a comprehensive book to help educators of grades 3-8 support students in these efforts. It provides information for adjusting instruction to enhance reading comprehension, close reading, vocabulary development, writing and media skills, speaking and listening, and much more. Sample test items for each grade level round out this resource.