There's Room for Me Here: Literacy Workshop in the Middle School by Janet Allen, Kyle Gonzalez

From the Publisher

What do you do with students who cannot or will not read and write? This portrait of Kyle Gonzalez's classroom offers teachers theory-based strategies for helping students become motivated and successful readers and writers. You will see how one middle school teacher sets up her literacy classroom, offers intervention and support for struggling students, and assesses their progress. Rich in description of Kyle's successes, the book also looks honestly at why some practices were ineffective in her setting.

With Janet's and Kyle's practical and detailed suggestions for creating a literate environment, you'll learn how to:

• establish a literacy workshop;
  
• choose and use effective resources;
  
• implement effective, informative record-keeping;
  
• help students establish goals and assess progress;
  
• use read-alouds as well as shared, guided, and independent reading and writing;
  
• instill reading and writing practices that help students read content-specific texts.
  

Voice of Youth Advocates

The book is especially valuable because of its focus on students with very low levels of reading, most of whom come from economically disadvantaged, often troubled families. This should be required reading for teachers in grades three through twelve, and young adult librarians will also find value here.

Florida Reading Quarterly

The book reads like a novel and invites you inside Kyle's classroom where you get to know her, her students, and their struggles and successes. To ensure her student's success, Kyle enlists Janet's help, and together they study, learn and problem solve. Through their efforts they are able to offer teachers practical theory-based strategies for helping struggling students become excited and successful readers. There's Room For Me Here provides detailed suggestions for creating a literate environment and should be useful to teachers and other educators grades four through twelve. (Florida Reading Quarterly Vol 34, 4, June 1998)

VOYA

This book grew out of a pilot project in Orange County, Florida, to create special workshops for middle school students who had a track record of school failure due, for the most part, to poor literacy skills. It is a nuts and bolts approach, developmentally based, that includes the methods used, the research that informs the process, and appendices that contain forms, suggested titles, and resources. The authors do not gloss over the difficulties and failures they experienced, but their successes, illustrated anecdotes, and samples of student writing make this inspirational book hard to put down. One student's letter to censors is great ammunition for defending young adults' rights to read whatever they want to. The heavy use of audiobooks paired with print versions of favorite young adult titles, extensive classroom collections of paperbacks, reading aloud, and other techniques combine to entice the most reluctant readers to participate. The book is especially valuable because of its focus on students with very low levels of reading, most of whom come from economically disadvantaged, often troubled families, and makes an excellent companion to Nancie Atwell's In the Middle: Reading, Writing, and Learning with Adolescents (Boynton/Cook, 1998). This should be required reading for teachers in grades three through twelve, and young adult librarians will also find value here. School librarians should purchase several copies for their professional shelves and make sure that their teachers know.

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