The purpose of this book is to give media specialists, teachers and/or teacher helpers and parents a guide to using beginning chapter books to encourage first and second graders to read independently. The book contains in-depth lesson plans for 35 early chapter books.

Each lesson contains bibliographic information plus setting, characters, plot, solution, and book summary. Activities for the media specialist to provide schema, prediction, fluency, and information literacy skill instruction is provided as well. Teacher activities included address phonics, phonemic awareness, decoding, fluency, and the comprehension strategies of recall, inference, and synthesis. Each book section also features a parent take-home page of extension/enrichment ideas.