Make It Real : Strategies for Success with Informational Texts

Feeding students a steady diet of fiction is all too common in the classroom. Yet informational literacy is critical to success in school and beyond. In Make It Real, Linda Hoyt provides a practical, classroom-friendly guide to unlocking the treasures of informational text. What's more, she demonstrates that reading and writing nonfiction can overcome the gender gap, allowing girls and boys to share interests in any subject from bugs and magnets to gardens and cake baking.

Hoyt explains the use of a range of instructional strategies, including shared and guided reading and writing, to help students understand and use nonfiction material to answer questions about the world around them. She shows teachers how to make texts more attainable, scaffold vocabulary, and deal with content-specific words. Her simple suggestions help you get started and maintain your course: having students write about the visuals in their texts, infusing informational texts into guided reading, then using these texts to teach reading strategies. For further help, she includes throughout her book:

• teaching points
• reading strategies
• writing exercises
• checklists, plans, reading logs, and other forms
• vignettes from teachers across the country to serve as real-life models.

When Linda Hoyt is asked what people should know about her professional career, she is often heard to say, "I'm a teacher. That will always be the heart of my professional work." Though she spent many years as a classroom teacher, reading specialist, curriculum developer, staff developer, and Title I District Coordinator, Linda's passion will always center around vigorous and engaging classrooms where teachers and children learn together. This passion for vigorous and engaged learning has led Linda to create twenty-four professional books and video programs, plus numerous instructional resources for children. A few titles from her multidimensional list of Heinemann publications include Revisit, Reflect, Retell; Make It Real; Interactive Read-Alouds; Solutions for Reading Comprehension; and her newest resources, Explorations in Nonfiction Writing and Crafting Nonfiction. Three of her popular Heinemann video programs include Nonfiction Writing (one for primary and one for intermediate) and Navigating Informational Texts. Linda is a full-time author, consultant, and highly requested speaker at conferences throughout the United States, in Canada, and in Australia. Linda and her husband, Steve, live in the mountains of central Oregon where they enjoy outdoor activities and the high-desert climate. Read more from Linda's most recent blogs here: - Just Do It! Informational Writing in the Primary Grades - Guided Writing, Part 1 - Guided Writing, Part 2 - Reading For Life by Laura Robb - Strategies for Teaching Nonfiction Writing (Grades K - 2 3 - 5) Listen to an interview with Linda Hoyt on Education Talk Radio - 11/09/2011 (35:58) Writing - Explorations in Nonfiction Writing - Crafting Nonfiction - Primary and Intermediate - Nonfiction writing DVDs, K-2, 3-5 - "plus pack" at each grade level Reading - Interactive Read Alouds - K-1, 2-3, 4-5 Professional Books: - Make it Real - Revisit, Reflect, Retell