"This is an important book for teachers, administrators, prospective teachers, college professors, or anyone seeking to provide quality teaching to children in their first years of schooling." - Harvard Educational Review

Among the many changes to sweep American literacy education has been a move toward whole class instruction. Nonetheless, children still bring to literacy a wide range of experiences and competencies. How, then, might teachers best support a literate community yet still meet the needs of individual readers? For Fountas and Pinnell, the answer lies in guided reading, which allows children to develop as individual readers within the context of a small group. Their new book is the richest, most comprehensive guided reading resource available today and the first systematic offering of instructional support for guided reading adherents.

"Guided Reading" was written for K-3 classroom teachers, reading resource teachers, teacher educators, preservice teachers, researchers, administrators, and staff developers. Based on the authors' nine years of research and development, it explains how to create a balanced literacy program based on guided reading and supported by read aloud, shared reading, interactive writing, and other approaches. While there is an entire chapter devoted solely to the process by which children become literate, every chapter clearly presents the theoretical underpinnings of the practices it suggests. Also included are guidelines for:

• observation and assessment
• dynamic grouping of readers
• creating sets of leveled books
• selecting and introducing books
• teaching for strategies
• classroom management.

Best of all, there are well over 2,500 leveled books in the Appendixes, along with many other reproducible resources that teachers will use for years to come.

"Good first teaching is the foundation of education and the right of every child," assert the authors. With the publication of this book, educators themselves will find the foundation in reading skills instruction they so rightly deserve.

A recent explosion of volunteerism has occurred in classrooms, libraries, boardrooms, and church basements across the nation - and nowhere has this trend been more keenly felt than in literacy programs. Here, unpaid workers want to help meet the challenge of teaching America to read. But who teaches them to work with children? With teachers' time already stretched to the limit and many volunteers lacking sufficient training, the need for a concise and practical handbook has never been greater. Help America Read fills the void, containing everything you would want a literacy volunteer to know about tutoring children.

Designed to help the volunteer become more self-reliant, this handbook includes: ten specific ways of working with children, with guides and suggestions for each; many book lists, including multicultural titles, at several grade levels; concrete suggestions, without assuming that a volunteer knows how to perform basic teaching tasks; sample lesson plans; time management tips; basic information on phonics and fluency in reading and writing; and guidelines for working with individuals as well as groups.

Since the authors are Gay Su Pinnell and Irene Fountas, two of our nation's leading literacy educators, teachers and leaders can be certain that they are providing a resource based upon sound research on how children learn to read and write. Literacy volunteers will learn how to gain children's trust, monitor their comfort level, and create a positive learning environment. Perhaps most important, they will feel valued and encouraged to continue their all-important work, now when we need them most.