Gretchen Courtney & Associates, Ltd., has worked successfully with Pre-K - 12 educators and students to improve the quality of literacy instruction over the past two decades.
Our clients depend on our expertise to help them make informed purchasing decisions. Each presentation we make features the best fiction and nonfiction titles available to classroom teachers today. Our consulting provides publishers with direct access to classrooms that are on the cutting edge of excellent literacy instruction.
Contact us today to learn how we can work together to:
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Align front and backlist titles with research-based literacy instruction
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Develop grade-level collections correlated with curriculum and instruction in balanced literacy, including read aloud, shared, and guided reading
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Promote your best front and backlist titles during our professional development sessions
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Develop bibliographies designed to support school districts’ literacy curricula
Thinking Aloud
Picture books have a place in every classroom.
Picture books are published for all interest and reading levels and have a place in elementary, middle, and high school instruction. Timothy Rasinski, in The Fluent Reader, explains how good readers often have a conversation with themselves while they are reading. Teachers can model this practice by “thinking aloud” while they read aloud.
Picture books provide an excellent opportunity to model complex processes with engaging texts. Teachers, by making their thinking transparent, provide struggling readers with an initial look at what active reading looks like.
– Rasinski, Timothy V. (2003). The Fluent Reader: Oral Reading Strategies for Building Word Recognition, Fluency, and Comprehension. New York: Scholastic Professional Books.
