Quantity and Quality: Increasing the Volume and Complexity of Students' Reading

"The premise of this book is simple: that establishing the reading of books as the center of our literacy curriculum is the secret to academic achievement."
―Sandra Wilde

The research is unambiguous: when students read more, they read better, acquire more background knowledge, and do better on academic assessments. “Students need to read more books and to gradually move into harder books,” writes Sandra Wilde in Quantity and Quality. “This isn’t mere recreational reading, nor is it requiring them to read ‘grade-level’ books. It’s getting kids reading, and making sure that readers are growing.”

Quantity and Quality is ideal for study groups and whole schools. It provides doable ways to add as much reading time to your curriculum as possible. Sandra presents the compelling rationale for putting more reading into the school day, answering questions like “How much time?” “How many books?” and “How hard should the books be?” Then she gets you going with details on:

• creating the time, space, and inspiration for more reading
• matching kids with increasingly complex books
• working with beginning readers, ELLs, struggling readers, and reluctant readers
• teaching reading skills and concepts
• documenting readers’ progress.

“If students are really reading more books and pushing into harder books,” writes Sandra Wilde, “they’ll master the standards, acquire cultural literacy, and pass standardized tests.” Read Quantity and Quality, and discover why the solution for text complexity can be surprisingly simple.

Read a sample chapter from Quantity and Quality.

Sandra Wilde, Ph.D., is the author of numerous Heinemann professional books including Quantity & Quality and  Funner Grammar as well as the firsthand classroom resource Strategic Spelling. She is widely recognized for her expertise in developmental spelling and her advocacy of holistic approaches to spelling and phonics.

She is Professor of Curriculum and Teaching at Hunter College, City University of New York. She is best known for her work in invented spelling, phonics and miscue analysis. She specializes in showing teachers how kids' invented spellings and miscues can help us work with them in more sophisticated and learner-centered ways.

Looking at what kids do as they read and write is at the heart of Sandra's presentations and workshops. She can do lively keynote presentations that highlight the interesting things that we can learn by paying close attention to students' invented spellings and miscues, as well as workshops of varying lengths that focus on student-centered teaching of spelling and phonics. She has recently begun offering workshops that focus on understanding students' miscues as a guide to appropriate instruction, particularly for struggling readers. She lives in New York City.

Sandra is quoted in this Huffington Post article about trends in grammar instruction in the Common Core era.