Literacy and the Common Core: Recipes for Action

Passionate and Energetic Ideas for Interpreting Common Core Objectives & Creating Lesson Plans

This is Tantillo's second book on teaching literacy skills. I'd read her first book The Literacy Cookbook: A Practical Guide to Effective Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening Instruction and appreciate her direct manner of writing and her passion for using effective teaching strategies in order to reach students to achieve learning objectives. In that first book she focused on teaching teachers how to teach, how to assess if learning is actually happening and how to develop lesson plans. In Literacy and the Common Core, Tantillo attacks the CC objectives head on. She says teachers are upset that not enough curriculum has been published yet to instantly begin using, so in this book she aims to teach teachers how to develop lessons plans from the most crucial CC objectives. The book explains the objectives in layman's terms so administrators can also understand the expectations. Thus this book contains new material to explain the CC objectives, along with mixing in some information from the first book (not a problem to revisit if you already read the first book). Tantillo speaks directly, sometimes criticizing teachers (not to rely on today's lesson plan depending on completion of last night's homework as it will fail for students who didn't do it) or administrators (i.e. don't pick the book to read that's the inferior one that the school already owns 500 copies of). She sometimes finds fault with the CC, such as saying Black Beauty may not be the best book for fourth graders after all. Although overall Tantillo is happy to have solid objectives for each grade level instead of "by the end of fourth grade" and "by the end of eighth grade". She supports one set of objectives for the whole country for continuity. I read her first book because I am a homeschooling mother who has created her own lesson plans for multiple classes for both of my kids every year. I found her techniques helpful as I was homeschooling grades 7-8 and 10-11 at that time. The first book foc...