Content Literacy 101

My Top Five Resources

If I could recommend five texts to begin building your content literacy library, it would be these:

1. Power Tools for Adolescent Literacy: Strategies for Learning by Jan Rozelle and Carol Scearce (2009)
This book contains many useful strategies that can be applied to a variety of content areas and grade levels. Additionally, it features many worksheet reproducibles, which can either be copied from the text or downloaded from the publisher's website.

2. A Handbook of Content Literacy Strategies: 125 Practical Reading and Writing Ideas (2nd Ed.) by Elaine C. Stephens and Jean E. Brown (2005)
As the title implies, this book is full of strategies. All of these ideas are categorized based on what stage of the content literacy process is involved, what skill is built, and how many students can use it (i.e. individual, small group, whole class.) Many of the strategies also feature helpful variations.

3. Do I Really Have to Teach Reading? by Cris Tovani (2004)
Immensely readable, this book is a great introduction for the content literacy beginner. It features helpful sidebars with specific strategies, as well as many "real world" classroom examples to illustrate the concepts being presented.

4. Read It Aloud! Using Literature in the Secondary Content Classroom by Judy S. Richardson (2000)
While this book is much more specialized than the other texts, it is great at what it does cover. The author has provided sample read-alouds for many different content areas, as well as providing excellent book lists for the following disciplines: science, math and geography, social studies, language arts, music, art, and physical education, second language learners, and special populations.

5. Words, Words, Words: Teaching Vocabulary in Grades 4-12 by Janet Allen (1999)
Even though I did not reference this book while designing my website, I had used in during one of my methods courses and found it very helpful for teaching vocabulary (plus, Janet Allen is one of the "big guns" in content literacy). It features several great appendixes, including one on prefixes and suffixes, and one of vocabulary games.

My Top 5 Websites for Finding Resources