Fresh Voices : Composition at Cal Poly

This book is designed to help pre-service and in-service teachers increase their ELA content knowledge and instructional skills for teaching their students to become competent readers. RICA-like tasks, identifying needs from assessments and appropriate instructional strategies, will prepare pre-service teachers to take California's Reading Instruction Competence Assessment (RICA). Over 50 effective instructional strategies from classroom research and information from reading research on the reading process, curricular approaches, differentiated instruction, planning instruction, and assessment are organized around 8 sub-topics of Reading/Language Arts-oral and written language development, early reading development, phonics, fluency, comprehension, vocabulary, literary analysis, and comprehension of informational texts. Strategies in action are illustrated with step-by-step procedure and teacher's think alouds, using excerpts from literary and expository textbooks and trade books and lists of words from kindergarten through grade 8. Strategies for instruction and assessment and ELA content concepts explicitly presented in this book are comprehensible even for readers with little background knowledge in reading instruction.