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Use these activities from The Word Study That Sticks Companion by Pamela Koutrakos with your young readers to expand their word learning.

What if the key to increasing the long-term impact of our classrooms and schools was doing fewer things much better? Read the full blog from Dave Stuart Jr., author of These 6 Things, to learn more about how to focus your teaching on what actually matters.

In this excerpt from What Are You Grouping For? Grades 3-8, discover the differences between guided reading and small group instruction.

In this excerpt from Every Child Can Write, Grades 2-5, by Melanie Meehan, you’ll discover how to determine where and how students get stuck in their process, and how we can help them find the right entry point.

Use this chart from Word Study That Sticks by Pamela Koutrakos to inspire ideas for getting your class to reflect on and celebrate their progress.

In this excerpt from Planning Powerful Instruction, Grades 6-12, the authors clearly define the difference between traditional or informational teaching and transformational teaching or the pedagogy of EMPOWERment.

This activity from Planning Powerful Instruction, Grades 6-12, primes and orients students through discussion of controversial concepts that they will explore in the unit. Students also practice complex processes like making claims, supporting reasoning with evidence, listening and mirroring, summarizing, and addressing opposing viewpoints and reservations to their own thinking.

In this activity from Planning Powerful Instruction, Grades 6-12, students will use a picture map to walk through the skills of (1) identifying key details and capturing the connections among them in order to (2) identify topics, then (3) identify patterns of key details in order to identify main ideas and make deeper meaning of the text.

This three-level questioning guide from Planning Powerful Instruction, Grades 6-12, moves learners through the levels of literal, inferential, and reflective evaluation and application questions.

Instructional time is a precious commodity, so it’s worth thinking about ways to make transitions as efficient as possible. In this blog post from Every Child Can Write author Melanie Meehan, she explains that, when we teach explicit strategies for transitioning smoothly and efficiently, we unlock more time for instruction.

In this blog post from Pamela Koutrakos, author of Word Study That Sticks and The Word Study That Sticks Companion, she explains that, for word study to be an integral part of your classroom routine, you can't wait until the “perfect time” to get started. Read her tips to going right away. 

Teachers can serve as curators of texts in much the same way as museum curators. Julie Wright, author of What Are You Grouping For?, explains how we can make deliberate moves to pique interest, evoke emotion, and urge action in readers. And we can invite our students to be curators, too.