Differentiated Reading Instruction: Strategies for Primary Grades.

DIFFERENTIATED READING INSTRUCTION: Strategies for Primary Grades. Sharon Walpole & Michael C. McKenna. New York: The Guilford Press, 2007. 180 pp. $24.00. Differentiated Reading Instruction: Strategies for the Primary Grades could be the answer to effective reading instruction in the primary grades. Throughout the book, Sharon Walpole and Michael McKenna urge teachers, literacy coaches, reading specialists, principals, and district curriculum specialists to plan and be flexible. They also provide a conceptual map to help readers make plans for individual students, groups of students, and whole-class instruction. The authors engaged in what they called "trial by fire" experiments to ensure that the concepts introduced in this book will help support gains in student achievement in reading.

This work lends itself to helping design a daily literacy block that is sensible and sensitive to all students' learning styles. Students have diverse learning needs, and some require accelerated literacy development within regular reading instruction. The authors are both professors of reading, and they have drawn from their extensive experience in reading to develop a book that takes into account both the theory and what they know to be good practice. Walpole and McKenna have expertise in comprehension in content settings, reading attitudes, classroom and school level correlates of student achievement, beginning reading, and schools engaged in improvement efforts. They spent several years working with teachers, reading specialists, reading coaches, and administrators to determine the concerns that these individuals have about providing effective reading instruction. The book provides an array of strategies to help differentiate reading instruction for the primary grades. The main goal of this book is to provide resources for meeting students' individual learning needs in order to continue fostering reading achievement.

This work is geared toward educators who provide instruction in reading for primary students. I think the book has many positive elements that provide structure and direction to differentiating reading instruction. The book is a resource to use when planning reading instruction if you have limited access to reading strategies or limited knowledge of how to teach reading. I found the book's first two chapters--on the general knowledge of reading and assessments--to have the most useful information. These two chapters will help you identify which strategies in the remaining chapters you will wish to incorporate in your reading program. I highly recommend this book as an additional resource of instructional ideas. Reviewed by Natre Key, 4th-grade teacher, Miami Gardens Elementary School, Miami Gardens, FL.