Applied Literacy in the Middle Grades: Introducing Children to Authentic Inquiry

This book describes ways of teaching children to employ their reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills to access, assess, and communicate information. Applied Literacy in the Middle Grades addresses the needs of middle school reading courses. This much-needed book focuses on and is intended for classroom teachers offering a rich source of real classroom applications. Erickson provides superb ideas about motivating students, meeting state learning goals, teaching critical thinking, and evaluating primary and secondary sources of information. A goldmine of detailed material from actual classrooms (grades 5-8) helps illustrate literacy activities in science, language arts, and social sciences. Additional key topics include inquiring teaching, thematic units, schoolwork connections, literacy and content areas, and accountability. Middle school teachers, curriculum developers, literacy coordinators and school administrators