Every Minute Matters: 40+ Activities for Literacy-Rich Classroom Transitions (Corwin Literacy)

Make the most of every instructional minute with engaging literacy activities

Time―or lack thereof―may be the most precious commodity in the classroom. From covering all the necessary curriculum and imparting life skills to attending meetings and answering emails, educators are faced with real challenges when there never seems to be enough time to do it all. Although teachers don’t have the power to create more minutes in the school day, they do have the power to be effective and efficient with the time given.

Molly Ness asks teachers first to examine their use of time in the classroom in order to make more space for literacy. She then introduces 40 innovative activities designed to replace seatwork. These literacy-rich alternatives for classroom transitions are presented alongside

• Research on instructional time in K–5 classrooms
• Strategies for how to maximize every minute of instruction
• Suggestions for improving efficiency to expand independent reading and writing time
• Reflective practices to help teachers examine how they use the time they have

The instructional day is ripe for redesign with a thoughtful and authentic time audit. Every Minute Matters guides educators through that process by outlining literacy-rich activities to optimize transitional times and minimize lost instructional minutes.

Molly Ness is an associate professor at Fordham University’s Graduate School of Education.  She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Johns Hopkins University, and earned her PhD in Reading Education from the University of Virginia.  Her research focuses on reading comprehension instruction, the instructional decisions and beliefs of preservice and inservice teachers, and the assessment and diagnosis of struggling readers.  A former Teach For America corps member, she is an experienced classroom teacher.  She is the author of Lessons to Learn: Voices from the Front Lines of Teach For America (Routledge Falmer, 2004).  Her research has been published in national and international peer-reviewed journals including The Reading Teacher, Educational Leadership, Reading Horizons, Journal of Reading Education, Reading Psychology, and Journal of Research in Childhood Education.  She is an active member of the following professional organizations: Association of Literacy Educators and Researchers (ALER), National Council of the Teachers of English (NCTE), Literacy Research Association (LRA), International Reading Association (IRA), Professors of Reading Teacher Educators, Organization of Teacher Educators in Reading, and Phi Delta Kappa.  Her book, The Question is the Answer, was published in 2015 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.