Marie M. Clay

When early literacy interventions work with young, low-achieving children, just why they work is often poorly understood. With Change Over Time, you can join Marie Clay as she takes a step back from the concepts of reading failure, disability, and dyslexia, and considers a new way to view literacy learning difficulties.
You begin by asking questions about the changes that occur in the cognitive processes of proficient children as they learn to read. You call what they do "constructive" and show more discover how you can interact daily with low-achieving children so that they too conduct literacy tasks constructively and independently. Then you consider some provocative alternatives: How do you describe children's progress? Do you check book levels off a list? Do you count the letters, the sounds, the correct spellings? Or is there another option? What if you give prime attention to processing - how the brain works with the text to get the message? Are the children shifting from simple processing to more complex ways of working? Are they initiating more independent problem solving on harder texts and getting better at it day after day? show less

Too bad Dr. C. isn't still with us because I have questions! However, this book is indispensable in terms of teaching hard-to-teach 6 year olds to read. This is an on-going read (& re-read, and re-read . . . ). Much tabbing, making of notes in margins, etc.

Children are taught about stories, words, letters, and sounds in many different programs in their first years of literacy instruction. In this book Marie Clay argues that underlying the progress of successful children there is another level of competencies being learned. Successful readers show a gradual control over how readers or writers can work with print even though they learn in very different programs. This inner strategic control is what failing readers do not seem to build. show more

Successful readers begin very early to learn myriad of things which support their independent processing of texts. They do this learning in interaction with parents and teachers, but they gradually come to control ways of working on print which free them to learn independently from literacy encounters.

This concept helps us to understand how teachers can bring different children by different routes to similar outcomes. It allows for different children to start literacy learning in different ways. It is widely accepted that preschool children construct a control over oral language that enables them to produce sentences which they have never heard before, and extend their own language systems through conversation. When our observations of readers and writers show that they have developed effective strategies for monitoring their own ways of working on texts, we can be confident that this control will, at a later stage, allow them to work independently as silent readers of unseen texts.

The concept that only the child can construct this inner control develops Clay's earlier description of the complex behaviors which support literacy learning. show less

Not really easier to understand than the RR Guidebook (which preceded Literacy Lessons), but one of those books you are never through reading and thinking about, esp. in light of current students