Now you can use quality children's literature to teach traditional reading skills! Providing a balance between traditional and literature-based instruction, these books include stimulating and instructive lessons based on approximately 150 skills commonly found in basal readers. These lessons utilize a variety of strategies that can be applied to teaching myriad skills-from alphabet and alphabetization to word recognition skills. Each featured book includes a variety of activities and a list of related books. Semantic feature analysis, attribute charts, writing activities, problem-solving, genre analysis, wordplay, and phonetic analysis are just some of the strategies covered. Wonderful tools for enlivening reading instruction, these resources reconcile the need to teach basic skills with the desire to use children's literature.

Suzanne I. Barchers, EdD, is the author of two college textbooks, over 20 readers theatre and teacher resource books, and more than 100 educational books for children. She is past president of the Association of Educational Publishers and serves on the PBS Kids Next Generation Advisory Board. Barchers has served as a public school teacher, affiliate faculty for the University of Colorado-Denver, acquisitions editor for Teacher Ideas Press, editor and chief of Leapfrog, and managing editor at Weekly Reader. Barchers writes and consults from her home.