Literature, Literacy, and Comprehension Strategies in the Elementary School

Author(s): Joy F. Moss

How can we—as elementary school teachers—move beyond basal readers to strategies that encourage our students to truly understand what they’re reading and connect the work they’re doing in the classroom with the world around them?

For Joy F. Moss, the answer has been to build a literature program in which both struggling and highly able readers learn a series of “reading-thinking strategies” as they study literature together. This program is made up of literature units designed to help students grow as independent readers and writers and develop long-term connections with literature that allow them to more fully understand texts, themselves, and others. These practical units are structured around cumulative read-aloud/think-aloud group sessions in which students collaborate to construct meaning and explore intertextual links between increasingly complex and diverse texts.

In addition to the rich annotated lists of children’s and young adult literature found in this book, Moss offers teachers a framework for developing units in which comprehension instruction is embedded in the study of text sets that are geared to the particular interests and needs of their students. This helps teachers bring the literary/literacy learning experiences into their own classrooms.

279 pp. 2005. Grades K–8. ISBN 0-8141-2990-0.

No. 29900

Click here for related ReadWriteThink lesson plans by Joy Moss.

View a Sample Chapter/Article

View a Sample Table of Contents

* Journal articles are provided in PDF format and can be opened using the free Adobe® Reader® program or a comparable viewer. Click here to download and install the most recent version of Adobe Reader.

ISBN: 0-8141-2990-0

Grade Level(s): Elementary, Middle