With Literacy Through Play, Gretchen Owocki revealed to thousands of early childhood educators what a virtual gold mine play is for facilitating literacy learning. Now, with Make Way for Literacy!, Owocki offers effective guidelines for creating a classroom community that supports children's developing literacies.

Make Way for Literacy! starts with a brief explanation of how literacy begins to develop, first in a child's home and neighborhood. Owocki points out the various individual traits, family activities, and basic literacy practices that can be so influentialand then focuses on preschool, kindergarten, and the primary grades. Next, the book offers four key principles for understanding and facilitating literacy, along with easy-to-follow techniques for startingor refiningteacher research and inquiry in the classroom.

The bulk of the text is devoted to practical, curriculum-enhancing literacy engagements. For each type of engagement, Owocki explains how it fosters language and literacy development; provides ideas for instruction, assessment, evaluation, and teacher research; offers practical methods and materials for getting the engagement started; suggests related activities involving art, drama, movement, writing, drawing, talk, or play; and includes actual teaching and learning examples from classrooms.
About the Author:

Gretchen Owocki powerfully demonstrates the importance of bringing meaningful instruction to not only traditional reading-instruction topics like comprehension, but also to contemporary issues such as Common Core and RTI. In the bestselling titles The Common Core Writing Book, 6-8; The Common Core Reading Book, 6-8; The Common Core Lesson Book, K-5; The Common Core Writing Book, K-5; and The RTI Daily Planning Book, she masterfully breaks down instructional issues and strategies into manageable chunks that help teachers differentiate instruction, meet curricular goals, and improve as practitioners. For more than 15 years, she has helped teachers find researched-based practices that improve learning by letting students experience curriculum as part of their own development. In other Heinemann titles such as Comprehension; Make Way for Literacy; and Time for Literacy Centers, she shares teaching that engages students through authentic, meaningful tasks and challenges them to grow as readers and writers. A professor at Saginaw Valley State University, Gretchen is a Heinemann Professional Development Services provider. >> Read Gretchen's article "Setting a Course to Maximize the Potential of CCSS" in the Heinemann PD Journal.