The Everything Guide to Informational Texts, K-2: Best Texts, Best Practices

"Do monarch butterflies have a nose?" a kindergartener inquires.

"Does it rain on the moon?" a first-grader wonders.

"Does a white shark really produce 30 million teeth?"asks a second grader.

These incisive, critical quests for additional knowledge about the world are precisely what children do when the Common Core State Standards for informational texts go right in K-2. And with The Everything Guide to Informational Texts, the Common Core will go right in K-2.

Authors Kathy Barclay and Laura Stewart have written the book that teachers like you have been pleading for―a resource that delivers the "what I need to know Monday through Friday" to engage kids in a significant amount of informational text reading experiences. 

No filler, no lofty ideals about college and career readiness, but instead, the information on how to find lesson-worthy texts and create developmentally appropriate instructional plans that truly help young readers comprehend grade-level texts.

What you’ll love most:

• The how-to’s on selecting stellar informational texts
• High-impact comprehension strategies for nonfiction
• Suggestions on providing sufficient challenge in guided reading, read alouds, and other practices
• Model text lessons and lesson plan templates across each grade
• An annotated list of 449 informational texts for read alouds, guided reading, and independent reading

It’s time to bring in to our classrooms all the high-quality informational texts that are available. It’s time to demonstrate to students how to read them, and to allow the authors of these children’s texts to take readers into rich, complex ideas they can handle with our support. If ever there were a book to quell our concern about how Common Core expectations will play out in grades K-2, this is it.

Dr. Kathy H. Barclay has her Ed.D degree with a major in Reading and minor in Learning Disabilities from Northwestern State University, Natchitoches, LA. Her areas of specialization are emergent literacy, reading, language arts, parent/community involvement and early childhood education. Active in her profession, Dr. Barclay is a frequent presenter at state, national and international education conferences and has served as an Editorial Advisor for the Reading Teacher, the foremost publication in the field of elementary reading. She is editor of the Illinois Reading Journal and serves as a member of the Publications Committee for the International Reading Association. Dr. Barclay has authored over seventy professional publications, including three textbooks.

Laura Stewart is currently Vice President of Professional Development at the Rowland Reading Foundation in Middleton, WI. She has been in education for more than 25 years, working as a classroom teacher, building and district administrator, adjunct professor, and director of numerous professional development initiatives. In addition to directing the professional development for Reading First in the state of Wisconsin, Laura directed long-term projects in Los Angeles, New Orleans, Milwaukee, and El Paso on topics from pre-K literacy to differentiated instruction. She has completed extensive postgraduate coursework in literacy education and has presented on the topic of literacy throughout the United States and internationally. Laura is the author of 12 children′s books, numerous teacher′s guides, and dozens of training workshops.