Teaching for Comprehending and Fluency: Thinking

Teaching for Comprehending and Fluency, K—8 is the next new breakthrough from Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell. Offering a complete picture of how to skillfully teach meaning making and fluency within any instructional context, Teaching for Comprehending and Fluency, K—8, supports you with frameworks for high-quality instruction that describe appropriate expectations for comprehending, fluency, and vocabulary development.

Fountas and Pinnell’s teaching and assessment frames will give you a firm understanding of your students’ reading levels: where they are, where they should be, and what they need to do to get there–for any reader, in any grade, at any moment. You’ll also gain insight about the specific demands that fiction and nonfiction texts place on readers and about how effective readers think within a text, beyond a text, and about a text to gain rich understandings. As you learn about how the characteristics of texts help or hinder a reader’s improvement, you’ll find effective teaching strategies for:

comprehending, word solving, fluency, and vocabulary
writing about reading in a variety of genres and using writing as a tool for thinking
using guided reading with fiction and nonfiction books
discussing books during interactive read-aloud and literature study
taking part in shared and performance reading.
Fountas and Pinnell’s teaching tips, smart strategies, proven classroom ideas, and professional-learning opportunities will lead the way as you discover how to help readers develop effective systems of strategic actions over time. You’ll also learn how to take running records of reading behavior to assess comprehension and fluency then use those assessments to inform and differentiate your teaching.

In addition, Fountas and Pinnell have also added a dynamic companion resource to Teaching for Comprehending and Fluency, K—8: a DVD containing short, focused video segments that illustrate concepts from the book and demonstrate exemplar teaching in real classroom settings. The DVD is also a repository of useful materials to support your work–including blackline masters, forms, checklists, and numerous other classroom tools.