This text uniquely offers preservice and inservice teachers templates for using quality children's literature to implement six themes across grades K-8. The themes are based on national curriculum standards and text sets are carefully selected to facilitate discussion, analysis, and problem solving across the grades. 

Using Children’s Literature Across the Curriculum, 1/e  provides teachers with a guide to using multilayered texts to facilitate students’ attainment of critical literacy. It is designed to be a supplemental text to guide teachers in designing literacy instruction.

The instructional sequence includes collaborative inquiry activities across the curriculum to extend each theme to math, science, technology and social studies. Teachers are shown how to incorporate family literacy with a component entitled ‘Home School Connections’ and to differentiate instruction for individual learners with a section entitled ‘On Your Own Activities’. The theme concludes with a critical literacy activity that applies the content knowledge of the theme with collaborative inquiry.

A unique feature of the handbook is the emphasis on performance based assessment with each instructional sequence containing two rubrics for the teacher to implement.  The instructional sequences are meant as models for teachers to use in developing their own themes in order to facilitate critical literacy. These ‘models’ can be adjusted to fit the reading level of the students as teachers become more familiar with the text’s structure and their students’ needs.