INTRODUCTION 
BOOKS FOR YOUNG LEARNERS
Teacher Resource

The Books for Young Learners Teacher Resource is designed to help teachers use the Books for Young Learners Collection to full advantage. Rather than a prescriptive manual, this resource is a guide to features of the books that offers suggestions on how the collection supports good instructional practices in reading and writing. The sample questions and prompts in the Book Notes are intended to help teachers introduce and support students through some of the content or, more importantly, some of the skills and understandings necessary for full comprehension from both the reader’s and writer’s perspectives. We anticipate that teachers will extend these prompts and questions according to the competence and confidence of their students, the relevance of the content for their readers’ and writers’ experiences and interests, and the emphasis the teacher is giving to reading or writing.

Margaret Mooney’s teaching, writing, and publishing career began in New Zealand, but for the past several years she has been dividing her time between New Zealand and the United States, especially the state of Washington. She encourages teachers to view all children as worthy, not needy, emphasizing education as a process of enhancement and not one of compensation. She promotes guided reading as an instructional approach in which children practice, apply, and extend skills and strategies in order to understand text on the first reading. Margaret has written the Books for Young Learners Teacher Resource, Text Forms and Features: A Resource for Intentional Teaching, Reading To, With, and By Children, and Developing Life-long Readers. In 1998, Queen Elizabeth II appointed Margaret as an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for her services to education, particularly the teaching of reading.