35 Strategies For Guiding Readers Through Informational Texts.

35 STRATEGIES FOR GUIDING READERS THROUGH INFORMATIONAL TEXTS. Barbara Moss & Virginia S. Lob. New York,

The Guilford Press, 2010. 178 pp. Paperback, $24.00. This book is a welcome addition to the Teaching Practices That Work series, written in a format that a classroom teacher can readily adapt to students of any age. Moss and Loh tap into decades of K-12 classroom language arts experience as well as experience with university teaching, conference presentations, and numerous professional journals and book publications. Each chapter is set up in a user-friendly design that identifies the strategy, its purpose, and application--all reinforced with a practitioner's example. The strategies are explained in generic terms that make them applicable to all academic disciplines. The authors also provide supportive websites that are accessible to both students and teachers. Numerous charts and graphs throughout the book summarize the essential components of such reading activities as Concept Circles. Readers will be delighted with the multiple teaching tools that they can readily and easily employ.

The book divides strategies into five sections: getting started, building background, vocabulary, comprehension, and writing. Although many of these strategies are familiar to classroom teachers, such as KWL, word sort, and Venn diagrams, the authors go a step beyond to provide a viable product for their audience. In the "What to DO?" portion of the KWL chapter, the authors show how the strategies can be implemented step-by-step, using different methods that are all reinforced with a classroom example. Similarly, the authors' graphic organizer for recording information from text is applicable to all content. Many more supportive tools, such as data charts, semantic maps, text retelling forms, and cause-effect maps, sprinkled throughout the book, address ways to tackle informational text.

This book may serve as a bridge between teachers and administrators, facilitating discussions about implementing reading and writing strategies. Additionally, pre-service teachers would benefit from studying the book's concise, straightforward approaches to presenting literacy strategies. Thus, experienced and novice teachers alike will find this book an asset to their professional reading. Reviewed by Maria O'Hearn, M.A.T., AP Social Studies Coordinator & Teacher, Maury High School, Norfolk, VA.