Teaching the Common Core Literature Standards in Grades 2-5 : Strategies, Mentor Texts, and Units of Study

Shifting your literature instruction to meet the Common Core can be tricky. The standards are specific about how students should analyze characters, themes, point of view, and more. In this new book, Lisa Morris makes it easy by taking you through the standards and offering tons of practical strategies, tools, and mentor texts for grades 2-5. She shows you how to combine the standards into effective units of study so that you can teach with depth rather than worry about coverage. Topics covered include:

• Teaching questioning, inferring, and author’s purpose;
• Guiding readers to look at themes and write summaries;
• Showing students how to recognize structural elements of literature;
• Teaching the craft of writing and vocabulary development; and
• Helping students analyse characters and character development.

Throughout this highly practical book, you’ll find a variety of charts and other graphic organizers that can be easily adapted for classroom use. A list of suggested mentor texts is also available as a free eResource from our website, www.routledge.com/books/details/9781138856172.

Lisa Morris is a language arts teacher at Bluewater Elementary in Niceville, Florida and an adjunct professor of education at Northwest Florida State College. She is also author of Awakening Brilliance in the Writer’s Workshop: Using Notebooks, Mentor Texts, and the Writing Process (Routledge, 2012).