Engaging Young Children with Informational Books (Classroom Insights from Educational Psychology)

Because nonfiction and young readers are a natural fit! Common Core or not, providing our youngest readers with a thorough grounding in nonfiction is just good teaching. There’s no better way to ensure our students acquire the background knowledge and vocabulary so essential to their understanding of subjects like science and social studies. Helen Patrick and Panayota Mantzicopoulos have written this book to assist you with this all-important effort. What makes Engaging Young Children so unique? Above all else it’s realistic. It describes immediately useable strategies for using informational reading and writing to both enrich and expand the curriculum. Taking their lead from the Common Core, the authors provide: • Criteria for choosing books • Strategies for shared reading and reading aloud • Informational writing activities • Ways to guide parent involvement • Real-life classroom success stories Read the book, try out some of the strategies, and you’ll quickly see for yourself just how engaging, informative, and formative nonfiction can be. " I am very grateful to Patrick and Mantzicopoulos for reminding me how essential informational reading and writing are, not only to the development of language arts skills, but to the reintroduction of science and social studies to daily elementary education." —Nina Orellana, Title I Teacher Palm Bay Academy Charter School, Palm Bay, FL "This book is a must have for elementary educators, teachers, and professional faculty.  It illustrates the power of reading while also introducing the whole idea of students and how others interpret success with them." —Robert E. Yager, Professor of Science Education University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA