Feeding students a steady diet of fiction is all too common in the classroom. Yet informational literacy is critical to success in school and beyond. In Make It Real, Linda Hoyt provides a practical, classroom-friendly guide to unlocking the treasures of informational text. What's more, she demonstrates that reading and writing nonfiction can overcome the gender gap, allowing girls and boys to share interests in any subject from bugs and magnets to gardens and cake baking.
Hoyt explains the use of a range of instructional strategies, including shared and guided reading and writing, to help students understand and use nonfiction material to answer questions about the world around them. She shows teachers how to make texts more attainable, scaffold vocabulary, and deal with content-specific words. Her simple suggestions help you get started and maintain your course: having students write about the visuals in their texts, infusing informational texts into guided reading, then using these texts to teach reading strategies. For further help, she includes throughout her book:
- teaching points
- reading strategies
- writing exercises
- checklists, plans, reading logs, and other forms
- vignettes from teachers across the country to serve as real-life models.
Do a better job linking up the curriculum. Teach skills and strategies applicable across content areas. See students' natural curiosities aroused. Take the tips from
Make It Real, teach informational text, and hear comments like one from an enthusiastic first grader, "We're learning about the world
and learning how to read, too!"
When Linda Hoyt is asked what people should know about her professional career, she is often heard to say, “I’m a teacher. That will always be the heart of my professional work.” Though she spent many years as a classroom teacher, reading specialist, curriculum developer, staff developer, and Title I District Coordinator, Linda’s passion will always center around vigorous and engaging classrooms where teachers and children learn together.
This passion for vigorous and engaged learning has led Linda to create twenty-four professional books and video programs, plus numerous instructional resources for children. A few titles from her multidimensional list of Heinemann publications include Revisit, Reflect, Retell; Make It Real; Interactive Read-Alouds; Solutions for Reading Comprehension; and her newest resources, Explorations in Nonfiction Writing and Crafting Nonfiction. Three of her popular Heinemann video programs include Nonfiction Writing (one for primary and one for intermediate) and Navigating Informational Texts. Linda is a full-time author, consultant, and highly requested speaker at conferences throughout the United States, in Canada, and in Australia.
Linda and her husband, Steve, live in the mountains of central Oregon where they enjoy outdoor activities and the high-desert climate.
Read more from Linda's most recent blogs here:
Listen to an interview with Linda Hoyt on Education Talk Radio—11/09/2011 (35:58)
Writing
Reading
Professional Books:
