Make It Real: Strategies for Success with Informational Texts

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!"

Linda Hoyt provides a practical, classroom-friendly guide to unlocking the treasures of informational text.

Linda Hoyt is a nationally recognized consultant who creates environments where engaged children are active participants in their own learning. She is the author, co-author, or editor of Solutions for Reading Comprehension, Revisit, Reflect, Retell, Updated Edition; Spotlight on Comprehension; Exploring Informational Texts; Make It Real; and Snapshots as well as Snapshots the DVD and the Navigating Informational Texts staff development DVD - all published by Heinemann. In addition, she is the author of Interactive Read-Alouds for grades K - 1, 2 - 3, 4 - 5, and 6 - 7, classroom materials offered by firsthand. Comprehension Strategies: That Help Your Struggling Students Be More Successful Readers, Grades 2 - 5, Linda's BER video series, illustrates many of the strategies found in Revisit, Reflect, Retell, Updated Edition, and is used around the country as a staff development resource for enhancing teachers' understanding of comprehension. Linda Hoyt is a Heinemann Professional Development Provider.

Move Over Fiction

Through a New Lens: Informational Text at the Heart of Reading Instruction

Read Alouds: Celebrating Informational Texts

Shared Reading: Big Books and Overheads on Deck

Independent Reading with Informational Texts: Making It Personal

Learning to Read AND Reading to Learn

Yes They Can! Emergent Readers and Informational Texts

Supporting English Language Learners: Building Content Knowledge and Language

Teaching Reading Skills with Informational Texts

Where's the Door? Finding the Path Through Informational Texts

Prereading Strategies: Building Understanding for Content and Vocabulary

Taking Time to Wonder: Questioning Strategies to Build Comprehension

Love Those Visuals: Photographs, Diagrams, Learning to Love Captions

Text Features: It Isn't Just the Words

Small-Group Experiences with Informational Texts

Guided Reading with Informational Texts

Multilevel Theme Sets: Differentiating Instruction

Literature Circles with Informational Texts

Move Over Guided Reading: Reciprocal Teaching Comes Back

Write All About It

Modeled, Shared and Interactive Writing

Guided Writing with Nonfiction

Research Strategies

Investigations