Getting Beyond "I Like the Book": Creating Space for Critical Literacy in K-6 Classrooms

Are you tired of hearing the same old responses from your students after reading a new book? Ready to move your students to responses more meaningful than "I like the book" and "It was OK"? Let author Vivian Vasquez and her colleagues show you how to get your students talking, and you'll see the difference that critical literacy makes in your classroom-and in students' lives!

With examples from kindergarten through sixth-grade classroom, Vivian and her colleagues will inspire you to develop your own classrooms of critical thinkers. In these pages you'll learn how to use books in different contexts and in combination with other texts-such as posters and advertisements-and you will learn about the kinds of perspectives students bring to talks about books. Each chapter delves into how critical conversations were introduced in classrooms and the social action Projects that resulted from these conversations. Central to each of these stories are the issues that the children raise about the world and the difference critical literacy discourse makes in each context.

This expanded second edition includes the following features:

Two additional content area chapters-science and social studies-to emphasize that critical literacy is not just a part of the literacy curriculum

A new chapter on new technologies such as websites, videos, and podcasts and their impact on critical literacy

A fresh focus interspersed throughout the book on multimedia literacy and using multimedia text sets

In addition, reflection questions at the end of each chapter can help you connect the ideas in this book with your experiences-and can help you to imagine ways to crate spaces for using children's books and other texts from a critical literacy perspective.