Whether you're a new teacher or a seasoned pro, Prepared Classroom: Ready to Teach, Ready to Learn is your ultimate guide to starting the school year with confidence and maintaining a productive, engaged classroom all year long.
Section 1 focuses on you, the teacher. It provides practical strategies to maximize student engagement, create a positive classroom environment, and establish smooth, effective routines. Section 2 is all about the students, with 52 actionable lessons that communicate expectations and help students thrive in their learning space.
This book isn't just for the start of the year—it's a resource you'll turn to again and again throughout the year. Filled with evidence-based practices for instruction, relationships, and classroom management, Prepared Classroom ensures you have a solid plan to keep students ready and excited to learn.
It’s time to wave goodbye to feeling overwhelmed and say hello to a classroom where both you and your students can experience joy and excel. Ready . . . Set . . . Go!
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**Ready-to-use lessons to support readers in grades 4–8**
A structured series of ready-to-use lessons that explore the “how” and the “why” of the English language with students. The engaging activities reflect the needs of all students, covering a wide range of abilities. Carefully curated word lists scaffold instruction for emergent to competent readers. The lessons are based on extensive classroom experience and include suggestions from teachers who have used the lessons in real classrooms. An ideal resource for using the spelling block to instruct, strengthen, and address gaps in phonics, morphology, and vocabulary knowledge for students in grades 4-8.
"This book will be very helpful to teachers who work with dyslexic and other struggling readers. There are many useful insights into the reading process and how to improve the reading skills of all students." — Dr. Linda Siegel
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Learning to Relearn challenges educators to embark on a transformative journey toward creating classrooms that embrace diversity, equity, and inclusion. Rooted in the principles of antibias, antiracist (ABAR) education, this book offers a dynamic roadmap for teachers seeking to dismantle systemic biases and foster inclusive spaces that honor intersectional student identities.
Sarfo-Mensah skillfully weaves together theory and practice, providing accessible strategies for cultivating antibias, antiracist pedagogies that address the unique experiences of students navigating multiple layers of identity. From inclusive curriculum development to fostering empathetic classroom discussions, this book empowers educators to navigate the nuanced landscape of supporting identities with intentionality and sensitivity.
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Come along as we follow classroom teacher Tammy Mulligan’s journey to plan and facilitate small but powerful moments of practice that help students grow as readers, writers, and community members. Chapter by chapter, Mulligan explores how to bring different categories of quick and frequent practice to life in the classroom including:
Written with the practical lens of a teacher, The Power of Quick and Frequent Practice outlines how to make these practice moves a part of daily and weekly instructional routines, utilize simple tools you already have in your classroom, and weave moments of student leadership throughout the practice times to help children celebrate their growth. Mulligan shares strategies, routines, and tips for planning, managing, and implementing the kind of engaging and meaningful literacy practice that learners need.
Coming in February 2025 — Pre-order today!
When Writing Workshop Isn't Working: Answers to Ten Tough Questions, Grades 2–5 provides practical advice to overcome common problems and get your writing workshop back on track. Acknowledging the process-based nature of the writing workshop, this book does not offer formulaic, program-based, one-size-fits-all answers, but presents multiple suggestions based on what works in real classrooms. This second edition includes updated ideas for common issues in the workshop and features new chapters on technology and resistant writers.
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**What literacy instruction looks like in today’s classrooms**
This engaging book provides an overview of language arts instruction, the background information teachers need, and countless strategies to ensure effective instruction. Grounded in practicality, Karen supports teachers with setting up the classroom for literacy instruction and planning the year, and provides many specifics for effective reading and writing instruction. Topics include orthographic mapping, the teaching of morphology, the Three Tiers of Vocabulary, and the importance of writing to learn. Karen also provides many ways to leverage oral language across the curriculum. At the heart of the book is Karen’s passion for literacy and desire to empower teachers.
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**Making time for every learner, every lesson, every day**
Teaching literacy often feels like a balancing act between best practices and instructional time. This book offers a practical solution for creating a research-based literacy program that is responsive, manageable, and meets the needs of diverse students.. It provides a clear structure for whole-class lessons, small groups, and independent practice in reading, writing, and word work, allowing teachers to maximize instructional time while incorporating existing practices. With concrete strategies, “low-floor high-ceiling” activities, and real-life examples, this book helps teachers reach every learner, build a literacy-rich environment, and feel confident that they are making time for it all.
Coming in June 2025 — Pre-order today!
Written for beginning or seasoned teachers, homeschoolers, teacher educators, as well as parents who want to fully engage in their child’s literacy development, this updated and highly readable new edition presents brain science, reading research, and theory in ways that can be understood and directly applied in teaching, ultimately leading to efficacious science of reading based literacy instruction.
Gentry and Ouellette show how an understanding of the science of reading can shape teaching to help make all students literate. Building on their science of reading based framework of “brain words”—dictionaries in the brain where students store and access word spelling, pronunciation, and meaning—the authors offer a wealth of information to transform your thinking and practice.
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Drawing on the work and experience of more than a dozen educators and activists, this timely book explores a range of ways to engender and nurture belonging. Full of practical strategies and activities to add to educators’ and leaders’ toolboxes, it deals with many aspects of inclusion, including dismantling racism and using strength-based approaches to practice culturally relevant and responsive education. Promoting belonging as positive and joyful, real-life examples and stories support the idea that educators can learn, unlearn, and relearn their approach to making classrooms a place of learning for all.
Coming in September 2025 — Pre-order today!
**Use student-directed learning to promote engagement and empower students**
This transformational book shows you how to put your students in the driver’s seat of their learning. It gives you step-by-step protocols and tools to empower student voice and choice: choosing mode, topics, outcomes, and ideas to make learning matter. Based on extensive classroom experience, the book celebrates joyful learning that also supports soft skills including personal organization, time management, collaboration, communication, and more. It promotes an approach to classroom management, teaching, and assessment to drive learning forward and personalize learning to the needs of individual students. An ideal resource for empowering your students to take charge of their learning!
Coming in June 2025 — Pre-order today!
All students can drive their own learning when we show them how. Humanized, equitable classrooms start with a commitment to building student agency. Step Aside offers clear, streamlined guidance for launching secondary students into high-level work that hinges on their ideas and insights.
Sarah Zerwin writes from the complex and challenging space of daily life in a classroom. She knows student-driven learning does not mean students make all the decisions about what happens in the classroom. It occupies a more nuanced space where teachers carefully curate the classroom experience and teach students how to navigate it on their own.
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Just in time for its 20th anniversary, this long awaited second edition of Mechanically Inclined continues to merge the best of writer's workshop elements with relevant theory about how and why skills should be taught. It connects theory about using grammar in context with practical instructional strategies, explains why kids often don't understand or apply grammar and mechanics correctly, focuses on attending to the “high payoff,” or most common errors in student writing, and shows how to carefully construct a workshop environment that can best support grammar and mechanics concepts. In this new edition, longtime colleague, Lisa Thibodeaux joins Jeff in emphasizing four key elements for grammar instruction:
Comprising an overview of the research-based context for grammar instruction, a series of over forty detailed lessons, updated research, compelling new mentor texts, and an appendix of helpful forms and instructional tools, Mechanically Inclined is a boon to teachers regardless of their level of grammar-phobia. It shifts the negative, rule-plagued emphasis of much grammar instruction into one which celebrates the power and beauty these tools have in shaping all forms of writing.
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**90 activities that support key math concepts**
I Can Do Math is a simple tool teachers can use to help kids have fun and build foundational math skills. The 90 single-page, reproducible lessons involve children in developing fine motor skills as they explore key math concepts. Children use color to demonstrate what they know and solve engaging puzzles and exercises as they measure, cut, and fold their own library of unique minibooks. Based on curriculum essentials for K–2 students, the activities investigate counting and numbers, addition and subtraction, problem solving, and geometry. Ideal for active learning, meaningful review, and assessment throughout the year.
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Follow along with Cain & Faith as they fold their own minibooks!
In the years since Choice Words: How Our Language Affects Children’s Learning was first published and quickly became a beloved bestseller, countless educators and their students have been impacted by this short, but powerful book. Throughout it, author Peter Johnston provides examples of seemingly ordinary words, phrases, and uses of language that are pivotal in the orchestration of the classroom. Grounded in a balance of research and classroom practice, Choice Words demonstrates how and what we say (and don't say) have surprising consequences for what children learn and for who they become as literate people.
Now, in this second edition, Peter Johnston returns to the central message of the book—that teachers’ language is their most powerful tool for impacting children’s learning and creating classroom community. With updates throughout the chapters to both the research and classroom examples, and new chapters on social-emotional learning and mindsets, this book has much to offer to both those familiar with Choice Words and those who will read it for the first time.
This book will be enlightening for any teacher who wishes to be more conscious of the many ways their language helps children acquire literacy skills and view the world, their peers, and themselves in new ways.
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Teachers at all grade levels in all subjects have speaking assignments for students, but many teachers believe they don't know how to teach speaking, and many even fear speaking to groups themselves.
In Well Spoken veteran teacher and education consultant Erik Palmer shares the art of teaching speaking in any classroom. Teachers will find thoughtful and engaging strategies, lessons, and tips for integrating speaking skills throughout the curriculum. Palmer stresses the essential elements of all effective oral communication used in one-to-one, small group, large group, formal, informal, in-person, and digital situations including:
Building a Speech: Audience, Content, Organization, Visual Aids, and Appearance
Performing a Speech: Poise, Voice, Life, Eye Contact, Gestures, and Speed
Evaluating a Speech: Creating Effective Rubrics, Guiding Students to Excellence
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**Hands-on activities that motivate children to learn**
This practical book shows teachers what Reggio-inspired experiences look like in primary classrooms. Based on extensive classroom experience, the real-life examples explore how teachers can observe children to better motivate, engage, and inspire them. Teachers will find simple ways to guide children to become effective problem solvers and build deeper learning in reading, writing, oral language, and listening. The hands-on activities revolve around topics children care about and are designed to foster skills in communication, collaboration, and finding meaning in the world around them. This mixture of theory and Reggio-inspired practices puts the child at the centre of their learning.
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**An essential guide for helping students explain, question, and refine their thinking and learning**
This essential resource shows teachers how to observe students at work and use those observations to inform classroom instruction. It explores effective ways to collect evidence of student learning and guide them towards becoming active participants in the learning process. Helping students understand and clarify what they know and how to use success criteria to guide their work is a key focus. This practical book on assessment and feedback offers hands-on tools to help students track, document, and articulate their learning. These tools are designed to inform reflection and encourage conversation, so students can better explain, question, and refine their thinking.
Both editions available now — Order today!