About the "Reading Puzzle Series": In her best-selling book "Teach Them All To Read", Elaine McEwan provides a great discussion of the most current reading research regarding how students learn to read so educators can make informed decisions about instruction. Research about reading has given us insight into the skills on which we need to focus our efforts to improve reading and comprehension. Now we can identify the skills that require reinforcement and intervene with explicit, thoughtful instruction. The activities in "The Reading Puzzle" series will help the teacher accomplish this goal. "The Reading Puzzle" series provides instructional tools teachers can use immediately as part of the reading curriculum. "The Reading Puzzle" series contains 10 books for Kindergarten through Grade 8 centered on the skills identified by the National Reading Panel as critical to reading success. Each of these books in the series helps unlock one piece of the reading puzzle and contains standards-based, ready-to-use activities that can be used to supplement any reading program: Phonemic Awareness - "Grades K-3 Phonics": "Grades K-3 Vocabulary", "Grades K-3 Fluency", "Grades K-3 Comprehension", "Grades K-3 Word Analysis", "Grades 4-8 Spelling", "Grades 4-8 Vocabulary", "Grades 4-8 Fluency", "Grades 4-8 Comprehension", "Grades 4-8". These activity books contain ready-to-use activities that make it easy to put McEwan's highly-successful strategies into practice. The strategies and activities will support struggling readers and enhance existing skill to encourage improvement in all students' reading skills. "Vocabulary, Grades K-3": Because vocabulary has been identified by the National Reading Panel (2000) as one of the critical areas of reading instruction, this book focuses on vocabulary instruction for all students, and especially those whose underdeveloped word knowledge negatively impacts their academic performance. This underperformance is characterized by a partial knowledge of word meanings, confusion of words of similar sound, and limited knowledge of how and when words are typically used. To help at-risk students, several essential instructional factors must be consciously addressed. This book has been designed to put theory and research into practice and provide students with the targeted and direct vocabulary instruction that they need. 'Choosing Appropriate Read-Alouds' helps you choose vocabulary-building books that children can learn from as well as enjoy. 'Word Selection and Definition' provides you with concrete ways to select vocabulary words and plan lessons. 'Take Five' includes presentation techniques so you can make the most of each lesson and provide an atmosphere in which all students will learn. 'Extensive Reading Lessons' focuses on ways for students to improve their vocabulary in a natural way, through reading and listening to stories. 'Vocabulary Instruction Lessons' is dedicated to direct instruction of vocabulary words and contains a multitude of activities. These activities should be presented in sequence, as one activity builds on the other. 'Strategy Lessons' provides the 'best kept secrets' of good readers. Young learners, at-risk learners and struggling readers should be taught these strategies explicitly and in order, with repeated practice. Some of these strategies include using picture clues, context clues, prefixes, suffixes, and multiple-meaning word strategies in determining meaning. 'Word Awareness Lessons' focuses on increasing word consciousness. This final chapter provides activities to increase word awareness in all language tasks: listening, speaking, reading, and writing.