Click here to take an interactive tour of this exciting new book! Core Ready is a dynamic series of books providing educators with critical tools for navigating the Common Core Standards effectively, fluidly, and successfully. In the pages of these books, readers see how to take complex concepts related to the standards and turn them into practical, specific, everyday instruction. The series is founded on the author’s 4 Doors to Core Ready, an easy to use yet strikingly brilliant way to access and organize all of the content within the standards: The Journey to Meaning: Comprehension and Critique The Shape of Story: Yesterday and Today The Road to Knowledge: Information and Research The Power to Persuade: Opinion and Argument   The foundational book in the series, Be Core Ready: Powerful, Effective Steps to Implementing and Achieving Common Core State Standards, provides the cornerstone plan for successfully reaching all students and inspiring them to become Core Ready scholars. The books that follow provide daily lessons that, when taught in total, ensure a standards-aligned year of joyful, effective, research-based literacy curriculum.   About this Book: This compelling book is the foundation for The Core Ready Program. A powerful resource, Be Core Ready: Powerful, Effective Steps to Implementing and Achieving Common Core State Standards provides a dynamic road map of the hot topics for literacy education in the era of the Common Core Standards and provides practical strategies for implementing new core ideas that will transform all learners into scholars who are truly college and career ready--reading and writing, speaking and listening, and using language in powerful ways.   Students in The Core Ready Program will: Receive the highest quality literacy education via outstanding lesson sets combining reading, writing, speaking and listening, and language use--all driving toward the standards. Meet and exceed the core standards. Engage with their families and teachers as Core Ready partners. Make content-area connections for reading, writing, using language, speaking and listening. Incorporate new media in reading, writing, using language, speaking and listening expertly. Experience the pleasure, value, and lasting impact of great literature through the highest levels of close reading and in collaborative reading groups. Navigate complex informational texts. Critique and analyze texts across all genres. Master strategies for engaging with complex text to break through from struggle to success. Use persuasive writing skills to master the craft of argument. Master the art of writing to marshal evidence for a big idea. Harness the power of writing to convey ideas about reading. Come to know themselves as readers, writers, speakers, and listeners through quality performance based assessments. Become lifelong readers, writers, speakers, and listeners with college and career ready goals.   Be Core Ready: Powerful, Effective Steps to Implementing and Achieving Common Core State Standards is a seminal text that provides far more than simply an overview of the Core Standards.  It provides readers with a critical analysis of the standards by a literacy expert at the forefront of her field, as well as avibrant  and useful solution for organizing the standards into curriculum for reading, writing, speaking and listening: the 4 Doors to Core Ready.   Be Core Ready: Powerful, Effective Steps to Implementing and Achieving Common Core State Standards guides readers to fill the implementation gap between what is currently taught and what now must be added, but with the joy and confidence that educators can have it all.   The coverage of close reading, text complexity, assessment, and the role of new media in literacy learning in Be Core Ready: Powerful, Effective Steps to Implementing and Achieving Common Core State Standards is guided by the breakthrough concept that the Common Core is a new Literacy Bill of Rights for children. Teachers, leaders, and prospective educators will gain concrete knowledge and best practices for creating a Core Ready classroom–one that focuses on helping students achieve and exceed standards in literacy. The goal of this book is to level the playing field and raise expectations for all readers and writers. Core Ready ensures students will meet those goals.   Be Core Ready: Powerful, Effective Steps to Implementing and Achieving Common Core State Standards also guides educators to teach reading and writing skills across content areas, to move from literature-heavy, one-novel-only instruction, to a richer and more complete balance of fiction and nonfiction, and to integrate new learning standards in time to be measured by new state assessments.   Be Core Ready: Powerful, Effective Steps to Implementing and Achieving Common Core State Standards and the accompanying Core Ready program help students to master close reads of texts of all kinds, to reach out and connect with peers from around the world, to recognize and use classic story structures for all kinds of reading, and to use new media literacy skills to make meaning deeper, richer, and more accessible to themselves and those around them. The lesson sets in the accompanying books are chock full of literature resources, short texts, rubrics, and strategy lessons.   Beginning with this book, the entire Core Ready program offers a groundbreaking, dignified approach to working with ELL students that exposes English Language Learners to rich text, gives ample opportunities to discuss and argue, and challenges them to write for real purposes. Core Ready offers educators the scaffolding strategies and implementation support to make this a reality.   Core Ready also supports all diverse learners. Special needs students are deeply valued and coached in the Core Ready classroom. The lessons and approach help them to reach and exceed standards. The attention to diverse learners is powerful and profound and will deeply inspire.     For teachers, Be Core Ready: Powerful, Effective Steps to Implementing and Achieving Common Core State Standards provides an overview of essential teaching of reading, writing, speaking and listening in the Core era and practical considerations and tools for building a Core Ready classroom including exactly what to teach and how to teach it.   For teacher leaders, Be Core Ready: Powerful, Effective Steps to Implementing and Achieving Common Core State Standards provides a manageable outline and truly delightful material to use in coaching sessions, study groups, or faculty meetings.   For administrative leaders, Be Core Ready: Powerful, Effective Steps to Implementing and Achieving Common Core State Standards provides a road map for what the key issues are in literacy education right now (briefly told, for the busy leader) and how to achieve standards for all children via the Core Ready approach.   For student teachers, Be Core Ready: Powerful, Effective Steps to Implementing and Achieving Common Core State Standards provides a foundation for all the key elements of a complete literacy-rich classroom--what English language arts curriculum should look like and how to deliver it most effectively and enjoyably. Read Less