Help America Read: A Handbook for Volunteers

A recent explosion of volunteerism has occurred in classrooms, libraries, boardrooms, and church basements across the nationand nowhere has this trend been more keenly felt than in literacy programs. Here, unpaid workers want to help meet the challenge of teaching America to read. But who teaches them to work with children? With teachers' time already stretched to the limit and many volunteers lacking sufficient training, the need for a concise and practical handbook has never been greater. Help America Read fills the void, containing everything you would want a literacy volunteer to know about tutoring children.

Designed to help the volunteer become more self-reliant, this handbook includes: ten specific ways of working with children, with guides and suggestions for each; many book lists, including multicultural titles, at several grade levels; concrete suggestions, without assuming that a volunteer knows how to perform basic teaching tasks; sample lesson plans; time management tips; basic information on phonics and fluency in reading and writing; and guidelines for working with individuals as well as groups.

Since the authors are Gay Su Pinnell and Irene Fountas, two of our nation's leading literacy educators, teachers and leaders can be certain that they are providing a resource based upon sound research on how children learn to read and write. Literacy volunteers will learn how to gain children's trust, monitor their comfort level, and create a positive learning environment. Perhaps most important, they will feel valued and encouraged to continue their all-important work, now when we need them most.