This highly regarded work brings together prominent authorities on vocabulary teaching and learning to provide a comprehensive yet concise guide to effective instruction. The book showcases practical ways to teach specific vocabulary words and word-learning strategies and create engaging, word-rich classrooms. Instructional activities and games…

Intended for classroom teachers, parents, theater people, and the general public, this book is an account of teaching a fifth grade class to write, direct, and perform their own plays as staged readings, videotapes, radio plays, and full stage productions. It can be read as a story or it can be used as a step-by-step guide for teachers. Each…

Designed to introduce students to the world through nonfiction, this book presents easy-to-follow suggestions for class projects, activities, strategies, and learning centers. The book uses an integrated approach to promoting inquiry in the classroom through the use of quality nonfiction. Aimed at middle grade students and using vignettes which…

Intended to increase the choices available for teachers and children in the classroom, this book helps teachers deal with the ever burgeoning field of children's books. The first section of the book presents 29 themes on a variety of subjects, such as cats, folklore, money and business, Native Americans, science fiction, sports, villains, and…

Introducing students to the magic of theater and helping them develop dramatic skills, this book presents nine reproducible scripts for short plays (15 to 25 minutes) with characters and story lines that will appeal to young people. The scripts in the book encompass a variety of story types, from adaptations of well-known fairy tales to original…

Intended for teachers of grades 5 and up, this unit provides 127 documents from California's history, 38 of which come from the California State Archives in Sacramento, one of the nation's largest and most sophisticated repositories for primary sources. The unit contains three elements: (1) a list of document descriptions, which includes a…

This book explores the subject of metaphor, using the imagery of cartography to set a course. It explores the creative aspects of thinking and learning through literature, writing, and word play, drawing connections between English and other content areas. Theory and practical applications meet in the book, linking activities and resources to…

This book helps teachers and media directors to use children's literature to enrich elementary reading programs and to pursue sound educational objectives as they share the books and stories. It provides activities designed to expand and enrich the opportunities for children to become literate. It is a tool which addresses the need for children to…

This how-to-do-it book, divided into 11 chapters, provides specific help for teachers converting to the open classroom approach. Chapter 1 provides background information, defines an open classroom, and discusses some assumptions about the ways children learn and the establishment of learning centers. Chapter 2 contains a discussion on the role of…

This collection of interviews with authors of children's literature is organized so that young people can use it with or without directions from the teacher. The collection can be used in two ways: to give a reader background and insight into the writing approaches taken by an author whose book is being read, or to make known new or unfamiliar…

Intended for teachers of grades 5 and up, this unit on Florida history aims to help teachers satisfy two educational goals of the Florida State Standards for Social Studies. The first goal is to incorporate Florida history into the curricula. The second goal is to prepare students for assessment of their ability to interpret primary sources. The…

This book captures the power of young people's visual responses to literature. It recounts the experience of a teacher who encouraged her students to respond to their readings through sketched interpretations--and, like pieces of writing, the sketches became a vital part of the curriculum as vehicles for discussion and reflective tools for…

This handbook (the last in a series of six) suggests many classroom activities that are interrelated with all the other areas of the language arts, particularly reading and writing, and that encourage the use of the library media center, mass media, textbooks, and audiovisual aids. The activities are designed to help pupils gain new insights into…

Intended to be used by teachers of grades 5 and up, this unit deals with Texas. The unit is built around the seven standards of the new Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS), an outcome-based social studies curriculum guide for teaching Texas history. The guide includes the following standards: citizenship, economics, geography, history,…

This kit, for grades 5 and up, helps students master the content of Colonial American history and develops students' historiographic and upper level thinking skills. The documents and activities included in this volume allow students to become "historical detectives," peeling back the layers, deciphering archaic lettering, reassembling…