Why Does the Volume of Reading Matter?

See how the volume of reading influences reading comprehension. Could the volume of reading matter more than intelligence in reading comprehension?

What did Anne S. Cunningham and Keith Stanovich discover in their research?

https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/cunningham.pdf

What are the barriers to more reading which Cunningham and Stanovich advocate?
How do literacy practices influence the achievement gap in high schools?

Why do school districts rely so heavily on textbooks in high school history classrooms? What are the consequences of this decision?

The excerpt below is from The Wasted Years: American Youth, Race, and the Literacy Gap by James McCabe. Rowman and Littlefield, 2003. It describes the decision of the Montgomery County school system to depend on textbooks alone in most of the history courses being offered in high schools, and what the consequences of this decision are. While the spending numbers in this chapter are out-of-date, the recommendations at the end of the chapter may still useful to you as you work improve the reading skills of the students in your high school.

And for a very recent look at the barriers teachers face ordering books in Montgomery County, Maryland, see this abbreviated description of the instructional materials review process. The total process is here. It looks like nineteen steps are involved. Each must be fulfilled before a simple biography can arrive in a classroom. Obviously, the process makes it extremely difficult for teachers to obtain exciting books for their classes.

Here is the chapter with the recommendations about changing literacy practices.

Chapter 7: Books in Montgomery County High Schools

Quality

Samples of all of our titles are available on Amazon so that you and your faculty, and students can see if the narratives are engaging.

The ebooks are a combination of young adult and regular trade biographies. These books were not published in the last couple of years. Typically, they are trade biographies or young adult titles published in the 60s, 70s, 80s or 90s. They are out of print in paper. We contacted the writers or the heirs of the writers and contracted with them for re-publication in ebook form. A few are public domain titles not available on Project Gutenberg or Internet Archive.

They are good reads and quality books; many were written by journalists whose mission was to inform without overwhelming readers with technical details. Other were written by authors who specialized in books for young adults such as the prize-winning Emma Gelders Sterne. Several were reviewed in the New York Times and other newspapers at publication. One of our writers was the first woman to win a Pulitzer prize as a foreign correspondent. Her ebook, War in Korea: The Report of a Woman War Correspondent  is an easy to read account of the chaos in the first year of the Korean War.

And the FAQ section of our website contains advice on how to share the ebooks which you have downloaded from our site with your students.

Armed Soldiers Marching to the Right

Free ebook: Death is Incidental, A Story of Revolution in Mexico by Heath Bowman and Stirling Dickinson

The writer, Heath Bowman, does not slow down to spell out the details of the two revolutions in this story. So the preface and introduction which add  some details about the settings which may be useful to you.

People have died to own land for generations around the world. Bowman asks us when these deaths are necessary. Would you join a revolution for more land and more food for your family if it might mean your death or the deaths of your friends and neighbors?

Download the pdf version of Death is Incidental.

To read this ebook using Readium on a computer, or for Google Play Books on your tablet, or iBooks on an iPad, download this epub format.

To read on a device from Amazon, here is the ebook in mobi format.

Directions on how to email this file to your device are here.
To add this mobi file to your Kindle for PC software to read the chapters on your computer, see instructions at http://tinyurl.com/y8gsazq.