Bücher von Karen Tankersley

Now that the No Child Left Behind Act has left its mark on public education, educators across the United States are all the more invested in preparing their students for state and national assessments. In Tests That Teach: Using Standardized Tests to Improve Instruction, Karen Tankersley guides you with proven tips and instructional strategies to help your students perform to their potential. Covering all core contents areas-language arts, social studies, math, and science-and respecting all levels of student performance, Tankersley*Examines the various types of questions that routinely appear on these assessments; *Provides sample multiple-choice and constructed-response questions from the tests; *Offers guidelines on how to create daily lessons that encourage students to practice the skills and demonstrate the knowledge they'll need to use on the high-stakes tests; *Suggests word lists, games, discussion topics, and testing ideas for your classroom; and *Describes how school staff can create a learning community that fosters collaboration among teachers and high performance in students.Also included are a wealth of online resources for lesson plans, daily classroom activities, and virtual field trips, as well as links to every state's released materials on its own assessment. As Tankersley explains, teaching students the skills they need to do well on constructed-response tests will better prepare students both to score well on state and national assessments and to take their place as thoughtful and organized thinkers in a rapidly changing, competitive society.

How can teachers make sure that all students gain the reading skills they need to be successful in school and in life? In this book, Karen Tankersley describes the six foundational "threads" that students need to study in order to become effective readers: phonemic awareness, phonics and decoding, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, and higher-order processing.For each area, the author explains how students acquire the reading skills they need and offers a series of skill-building strategies and activities that teachers can use in the classroom. Although reading is perhaps most intensely taught in the kindergarten and 1st-grade classrooms, Tankersley emphasizes that helping students become lifelong readers is a task for all teachers, including content-area teachers in middle and high schools.The Threads of Reading addresses key questions about literacy, such as*What makes a difference in reading achievement?*How much reading time is enough?*How can teachers use writing to build reading skills?*How can teachers help students make meaning from their reading?The strategies in this book address many situations, from individual instruction to small- or large-group instruction, from kindergarten to high school. Teachers will appreciate the multitude of activities provided, and administrators will learn to better evaluate the reading programs in place in their districts and schools. Grounded in both research and "teacher lore" from actual classrooms, this book is a solid guide to helping students become lifelong readers.