Reading With Purpose : Selecting and Using Children?s Literature for Inquiry and Engagement

From the authors of the popular blog and resource for teachers, The Classroom Bookshelf, this book offers a framework and teaching ideas for using recently released children’s and young adult literature to build a culture of inquiry and engagement from a text-first approach. Reading With Purpose is designed to help K–8 teachers tap into their inner reader, to make intentional text selections for their students, and to create joyful and purpose-driven literacy learning experiences. The heart of the book is organized according to four purposes for selecting and using literature: care for ourselves and one another, connect with the past to understand the present, closely observe the world around us, and cultivate critical consciousness. Each chapter includes classroom stories, accessible research, reasons for why this matters now, and criteria for selecting for this purpose. A final section provides teaching invitations that pair with suggested books but can also be used with any high-quality book teachers may already have in their classrooms.

Book Features:

• Builds on important work from thought leaders, urging teachers to create their own reading identities so they can help their students do the same.
• Describes a simple, sustainable framework teachers and teacher educators can use immediately to make more purposeful text selections.
• Provides myriad teaching ideas, narrative anecdotes from diverse classrooms, student work samples, and reflective questions.
• Offers a list of recommended, recently published children’s and young adult literature.

Erika Thulin Dawes is a professor and chair of the Language and Literacy Department in the Graduate School of Education at Lesley University. Katie Egan Cunningham is an associate professor of teacher education at Sacred Heart University. Grace Enriquez is a professor of language and literacy at Lesley University. Mary Ann Cappiello is a professor of language and literacy in the Graduate School of Education at Lesley University. Together, they are the coauthors of The Classroom Bookshelf blog.