Increasingly, educators are recognizing that for children to thrive intellectually they need socially and emotionally healthy classrooms. Conveniently, this is exactly what parents have always wanted for their children - classrooms that offer and grow positive relationships and behavior, emotional self-regulation, and a sense of well-being. Using the guiding principles from Peter Johnston's best-selling professional resources, Choice Words and Opening Minds, Peter and six colleagues began a journey to create just such classrooms - environments in which children meaningfully engage with each other through reading, writing, making, and discussing books.In Engaging Literate Minds, you'll discover how these teachers struggled and succeeded in building such classrooms. Inside you'll find the following: Practical ways to develop a caring learning community and children's socio-emotional competence Powerful teaching practices from real classrooms Engaging ways to encourage inquiry and student agency Suggestions on how to use formative assessment in everyday teaching practices Helpful research behind the classroom practices and children's development Ways to help students inspire and support each other Building a just, caring, literate society has never been more important than it is today. By embracing the ideas and teaching strategies in Engaging Literate Minds, you can help children to become socially, emotionally, and intellectually healthy. Not only do these classroom practices develop the skills to achieve district benchmarks and beyond, they help develop children's humanity.

""Introducing a spelling test to a student by saying, 'Let's see how many words you know, ' is different from saying, 'Let's see how many words you know already.' It is only one word, but the already suggests that any words the child knows are ahead of expectation and, most important, that there is nothing permanent about what is known and not known."
" -- Peter Johnston

Sometimes a single word changes everything. In his groundbreaking book "Choice Words," Peter Johnston demonstrated how the things teachers say (and don't say) have surprising consequences for the literate lives of students. Now, in "Opening Minds: Using Language to Change Lives," Peter shows how the words teachers choose affect the worlds students inhabit in the classroom, and ultimately their futures. He explains how to engage children with more productive talk and to create classrooms that support not only students' intellectual development, but their development as human beings.

Grounded in research, "Opening Minds: Using Language to Change Lives "shows how words can shape students' learning, their sense of self, and their social, emotional and moral development. Make no mistake: words have the power to open minds - or close them.