That’s a Great Answer!: Teaching Literature-Response Strategies to Elementary, ELL, and Struggling Readers, 2e

The ability to comprehend and to respond meaningfully to text is a skill students need every day, not just on test day. That’s a GREAT Answer! provides complete and ready-to-go support to help teachers get great answers to open-ended comprehension questions from the students who need help the most elementary students, struggling older readers, and English language learners.

In this revised second edition, Nancy Boyles now includes new Common Core State Standards-based objectives, step-by-step lesson sequences, collaborative tasks that link teaching to learning, insightful new teaching tips, updated and enhanced bibliographies, and student targets on the CD that specify how to meet each objective and answer a particular comprehension question.

Her ready-to-go student scaffolds then break comprehension objectives into fifty-three specific, measurable, open-ended questions divided among four thinking strands. A chart shows the correlation between all objectives and the Common Core State Standards for comprehension easily aligned to the literacy objectives of any state curriculum.

Each open-ended question includes: a step-by-step lesson sequence; a template for a related oral collaborative task
teaching tips; a bibliography of fiction and nonfiction picture books aligned with the question; a template instructing students how to find key evidence for the objective before writing their response; an answer frame scaffold for initial response practice that helps students at any grade level organize and elaborate; a target on the CD that specifies for students how to meet each objective and answer a particular comprehension question. The included CD provides all of the answer frames and targets for the open-ended questions, as well as rubrics, criteria charts, planners, and an extensive master bibliography that matches key fiction and nonfiction literature models with appropriate objectives.

From setting a foundation with great standards, books, and instruction through guidelines for assessment, Thats a GREAT Answer offers a (now more) complete, great answer for teachers who want to empower their students to respond well to open-ended questions.