Teaching Reading Across the Day, Grades K-8: Methods and Structures for Engaging, Explicit Instruction

This timely, thorough text from educator and author Serravallo (The Reading Strategies Book) presents a convincing case for integrating reading throughout K-8 students’ school day, as well as concrete strategies and structures for making it happen. After two chapters focused on the foundations of reading education and the importance of explicit reading instruction across the disciplines, the subsequent chapters each highlight a specific structure for explicitly engaging students in reading, from read-alouds to reader’s theater. Each chapter in this “Lesson Structures” section is full of detailed examples, research, and resources for lesson planning. Serravallo employs a consistent format in each chapter, opening with an annotated lesson example before providing summaries of the research related to this lesson type, considerations for planning, videos of sample lessons in action, and practical suggestions for teaching the lesson structure. The content of the book is sound, but the text does suffer somewhat from its design choices. The use of annotations in text bubbles for the example lesson discussions and lesson plans is distracting and breaks the flow of the text for readers. Furthermore, in some chapters, nearly every element is in some sort of chart, colored box, text box, callout, or other visual design. These choices might make it difficult to read the book as a full text and, instead, readers may find themselves picking and choosing what sections or specifics to explore.