Opening Doors To Reading »

DEE L. FABRY is Vice President Assessment Programs, LightSpan San Diego, California.

SALLY A. SEIER is a teacher, Cherry Creek School District, Denver, Colorado.

This integrated, technology-based reading curriculum helps you build school-to-work skills in middle school learners-especially those who have reading difficulties. Based on a field-tested program (the STARR curriculum), it is specifically designed to meet student needs in the workplace and uses best practices research, SCANS foundations skills and competencies, and middle school research. Components include speaking, technology, analysis, reading, and research.

KLIATT

This is a comprehensive guide to the STARR curriculum (Speaking, Technology, Analysis, and Reading through Research)—an integrated, inquiry-based reading program that targets below-level middle schoolers. The authors of this teaching package are teachers at a middle school in Denver, Colorado, which serves an increasingly diverse population of students. Based on the premise that students learn best when they are motivated by research-based projects and assignments that build school-to-work skills such as reading, writing, computing, problem-solving, and team-work, the guide is divided into nine sections. In the first, the authors trace the design and development of the STARR Curriculum and outline the SCANS report (Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills) on which the curriculum is based. Each of the next five sections focuses on one of the five skills from which the curriculum takes its name. A wealth of detailed lesson plans—complete with reproducible activity sheets, rubrics, letters to parents, and resource lists—is provided. Some representative assignments include creating a mandala as a visual aid, writing a paragraph about popularity, completing an on-line scavenger hunt for information about women of the Civil War, using particular reference books (e.g., biographical dictionaries and atlases) to complete reproducible activity sheets, researching enigmas, and using HyperStudio and PowerPoint to create slideshows about dragons. Perhaps the most useful unit of the book is "Planning for the Research Project," which contains helpful advice on how to select a topic or research question, how to locate resources, evaluation forms (for student, parent, andteacher), organizational handouts with due dates for each step from start to finish, traditional and web outline models and forms, and information on note-taking, editing, revising. (Any teacher who has ever found the task of leading students through the steps from beginning to end of a research paper just a bit daunting will appreciate this section.) A well-organized index rounds out this useful resource. 2001, Libraries Unltd., Teacher Ideas Press, 282p. bibliog. index., $32.00. Ages adult. Reviewer: Gloria Levine; Reading Teacher, Hoover M.S., Potomac, MD , September 2001 (Vol. 35 No. 5)