Written by educators from diverse experiences, Text Sets: Multimodal Learning for Multicultural Students provides ready-to-use multicultural text sets complete with annotations, instructional activities, and multimedia tools, as well as a framework for building and using new sets.

In order to understand a topic deeply, learners must access information from a variety of sources and in many different text genres and media--yet our comprehension instruction often focuses on strategies for understanding single texts in isolation. In this book, a gifted teacher shares a powerful approach she's developed for teaching students to explore a topic using multigenre text sets. She includes sample standards-based units of study for a range of grade levels and planning templates for developing your own units built around text sets in a range of genres. You'll also find other supports such as detailed instructions for helping students to assemble their own text sets that they can use independently. This unique resource will help you prepare your students for the complex, multigenre literacy demands of the 21st century. For use with Grades 2-5.

Looking for a way to increase engagement, differentiate instruction, and incorporate more informational text and student writing into your curriculum? Teaching with Text Sets is your answer! This must-have resource walks you through the steps to create and use multi-genre, multimodal text sets for content-area and language arts study. It provides detailed information to support you as you choose topics, locate and evaluate texts, organize texts for instruction, and assess student learning. This guide is an excellent resource to help you meet the College and Career Readiness and other state standards.

Finding ways to organize your classroom instruction for knowledge building and literacy learning can be challenging. How can you incorporate more nonfiction and informational text in your content area curriculum while expanding and deepening representation with diverse texts? What can motivate student learning while providing equity and access for different learning styles and needs? Text sets are the answer!In Text Sets in Action: Pathways Through Content Area Literacy, authors Erika Thulin Dawes and Mary Ann Cappiello demonstrate how text sets offer students the opportunity to build critical thinking skills and informational literacy while generating interest and engagement across the content areas. Put your students in the center of the meaning-making in your classroom with multimodal multi-genre text sets in action. In Text Sets in Action, the authors: Model how text sets build foundational skills and metacognitive strategies as students experience a carefully scaffolded and sequenced exploration of ideas, academic, and content vocabulary Explain how text sets encourage classroom discussion by having students ask questions about what they read, debate different perspectives, and relate the texts to their own personal experiences and the changes they would like to see in the world Show how children's literature and multimodal, multi-genre texts can serve as mentor texts for student writing and inspire creativity and advocacy Demonstrate how to curate text sets that can introduce diverse and underrepresented voices into the classroom, fostering appreciation for different points of view and generate deeper critical thinking Provide resources and suggestions for designing text sets a multimodal, multi-genre text set can include children's literature of all genres, as well as digital texts, YouTube videos, news articles, podcasts, and more Text Sets in Action will help you create a collection of text sets that can be added to or edited over the years to align with your lesson plan goals. Teachers who have adopted this approach saw greater student reading comprehension and critical thinking skills. By introducing a multitude of text, teachers will ignite a spirit of inquiry and engagement for lifelong learning.

Today's multimedia, multimodal world necessitates literacy instruction that includes a variety of text forms (such as film, print, music, Internet, photographs). Strop and Carlson provide all types of learners with the lifelong tools they need to explore and interpret texts. This book will help teachers and students reach beyond printed texts to expand perspectives, understand different text forms and genres, make intertextual connections, and transcend strategy-based instruction. Multimedia Text Sets includes: -ideas for explicit teaching of how to read different forms and genres of texts. -real stories, which demonstrate the power of multiple literacies, from three teachers who incorporate multimedia text sets in their classrooms. -engaging ideas for instruction you can use to help develop your own students' reading/writing practices with a variety of text forms. -practical suggestions on how to create your own multimedia text sets. Contributors to this book are Holly Dionne, Richard Kuhnen, and Stephanie Reid.

A guide to bringing nonfiction into the curriculum in third through eighth-grade classrooms, with strategies and ideas for reading nonfiction, conducting research, and writing reports.

What are the patterns of teaching and learning that make a classroom holistic? How do children invent oral and written language? How do they create the culture and curriculum of a classroom? How does the spirit of community and collaboration develop among children and teachers? What are the relationships between literacy, schooling, and socialization as they form among the children? These are a few of the broad questions that Kathy Whitmore and Caryl Crowell answer in this absorbing portrait of Caryl's third-grade classroom, "the Sunshine Room." Over the span of a school year, we watch the students in this bicultural classroom within a bilingual, working-class neighborhood work and develop together as a community of learners. It is the story of how the Sunshine Room, like many whole language classrooms, invents itself; and how in this process the children themselves are continually inventing oral and written language, culture, and curriculum. In two separate collaborative voices, the authors carry readers through several critical events in the life of the classroom: the process through which the children and the teachers negotiate the curriculum, the creation of a theme study about the Middle Ages, and a vicarious experience of the Middle East war through children's literature and discussions. On an individual level, the deep friendship between Seaaira, an English-speaking child from the volunteer community, and Lolita, a bilingual Latina from the barrio, is symbolic of the bicultural experience fostered in the Sunshine Room.