Every Reading Communities guide contains four sections. The section called What's It All About? describes the book, highlights thematic units of study, and provides information about the book's author and artist. In Reading Activities, you'll find lessons that introduce the book to your class and prompt critical thinking about the book's themes. The third section suggests Cross Curricular Activities that help students make connections between the book and content areas such as language arts, social studies, visual art, math, and science. These activities include a corresponding California Standard (we use general third-grade standards, but you can easily identify appropriate standards for any grade level); the time and materials you'll need; and recommended group size. Finally, the Resources section directs you to other literature, websites, and audio-visual resources that are related to the book's themes.

You can view our Reading Communities guides online, or you can download them as PDF files. If you have trouble viewing the guides online, try opening the window as wide as possible and check that your monitor is set to 800 x 600 in the Control Panels of your computer. In order to access the PDF files, you'll need to have Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.0 or higher on your computer. To download this program for free, click here.