Learn how to sponsor a successful, student-led book club for grades K through 12 that is fun, easy-to-implement, and encourages reading. Book Clubbing!: Successful Book Clubs for Young People offers practical tips on creating book clubs that involve students of all ages and reading levels-including special education students, second language learners, and reluctant readers-making it easy to have fun, productive, and educational book clubs and other reading events. The book begins with a discussion of the current research on reading and practical tips from experienced sponsors and participants, followed by suggestions on customizing book clubs to fit the students' needs and how to add "sparkle" to the club with field trips, readers theatre, guest speakers, and mystery games. The book offers a wide variety of reading activities, ensuring a dynamic, lively reading group. Numerous forms, booklists, booktalks, reading lists, and resource websites offer additional help for educators and library staff. Especially unique and valuable is the reading activities chapter that includes reproducible reading games, a readers theatre script, a folktale "rap," and various booktalks and contests. Bibliographic lists of works cited after each chapter An index of authors, titles, and reading activities by age Figures are included with selected activities and reading games

This book provides an annotated bibliography of age-appropriate literature and activities, showing children the importance of environmental issues and teaching them the skills to take action. In past years, teaching children about conservation and environmental issues might have been an optional side topic to complement an earth science curriculum, but in today's educational climate, "being green" is a subject with great relevance and importance. This book combines a wide variety of techniques to help students understand environmental issues and gain the skills needed to take action. The children's literature and classroom activities suggested in Think Green, Take Action: Books and Activities for Kids are appropriate for elementary school students from grades three through seven, covering three major environmental issues: endangered species, resource depletion, and pollution. After students have a grasp of the causes of these environmental problems, the final chapter presents ways to take easy action that can create ripples of change across the world. Educators in museums and nature centers, home-schooled children, and their parents comprise an appropriate secondary audience for this instructive text. Presents detailed instructions about how to teach environmental issues, including hands-on activities and projects for classroom, library, and outdoor settings Drawings introduce each new chapter An annotated bibliography of over one hundred children's books helps teach students about environmental issues Index helps readers quickly find the information for which are looking

A volume in Critical Constructions: Studies on Education and Society Series Editor: Curry Stephenson Malott, Queens College/CUNY Students in public schools serving poor and working-class students are inundated by the effects of high-stakes examinations. Teachers are demoralized and students suffer substandard curricular and pedagogical experiences. These effects are articulated by students and teachers in the high school that provided the setting for the critical ethnography on which this text is based. Teachers resent being judged on the basis of students' performance on standardized assessments. They are deprofessionalized as their roles are oriented toward working-class norms. Students feel alienated by content that is meaningless and test-based pedagogies that are disempowering. While these findings are disturbing, critical theory provides a foundation for seeking hope. By incorporating inquiry and dialogue, this theoretical framework opens a space where resistance can be revealed and examined. In this case, the study exposed glimmers of resistance, spaces in the structure of schooling where students and teachers critique the system and suggest ways of subverting the negative effects of the neoliberal reforms through dialogic, empowering, culturally responsive pedagogies. Collective resistance, achieved through dialogic pedagogies that build on understandings of resistance and power, can cultivate theoretical and material spaces where a cycle of praxis can enhance possibilities for social justice. To that end, the conclusion is devoted to the implementation of critical, dialogic approaches to literacies, approaches intended to interrupt the hegemonic influences that perpetuate social reproduction by capitalizing on the potential for solidarity and collective agency among the students and teachers who populate and educate the working classes. This book would interest teacher educators, teachers, and school administrators.

Piano was the nineteenth-century status-symbol and the epitome of the domestic bourgeois ideology. Learning to play the piano was a necessary part in the upper-class education. Also, the piano could provide the married woman with a rare possibility for an artistic escapade from the restraints of her gendered identity. Henrik Ibsen uses the motif of piano and piano music most elaborately in three dramas: A Doll House, Hedda Gabler and John Gabriel Borkman, developing from Nora's tarantella dance to Borkman's Danse Macabre. Ibsen's Piano focuses on these three dramas, examining how the dramatist uses these motifs both as dramatic tools essential for the structure of the drama, as well as the epitome of the cultural forces and ideologies of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie and the characters' means by which they attempt to transcend those forces. Ibsen's Piano brings Ibsen into a larger context of nineteenth-century literature, music and studies of private life. Its interdisciplinary perspective addresses literary and cultural scholars as well as musicologists and feminist scholars.

Building on the work accomplished in Reading Primers R0 & R1, Reading Primer R2 gets your learner in prime shape for reading the most common spellings in English. Besides the dozens of new sounds and spellings, students will also get a chance to read paragraphs and short stories for the first time.

This book tries to investigate the application of major narrative techniques used in Achebe's novels. The main objectives of the book are identifying the narrative techniques used in Achebe's novels and pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of the novels in relation to the use of narrative techniques. In accomplishing the aforementioned objectives, the writer of this study tries to review relevant literatures in relation to narrative techniques. Then an attempt is made to go through Achebe's five novels in accordance with the reviewed literatures by focusing on point of view and narrative time.This book tries to give insights about narrative techniques to the students of literature. In addition, the study may also provide some important points, which can serve as a springboard for other in depth analysis on similar literary techniques

Paratexts turn a text into a book: they are those (textual and non-textual) 'thresholds' the reader comes across when entering the literary world. The preface, dedications, quotations (or 'motti'), cover illustrations, blurbs and of course the ever-present titles are among the most well-known ones. This thesis is of particular interest to all students and admirers of 18th-century English literature: the titles, motti, dedications and prefaces employed by the authors to present their work most favourably to the public not only provide a profound insight into a highly interesting literary field of study, but also give an idea of what the literary landscape was like in a century bustling with new ideas and (literary and other) activity.

Mythology gives shape to experience and provides a framework in which to locate oneself. However, women, in classical mythology, were either denied a representation and, thus, a history and genealogy, or they were portrayed ambiguously, making it difficult for women to find their own identity. Katrin M. Fennesz focuses on the representation of women in novels by the Canadian author Aritha van Herk and analyzes how she transports women's fictional lives into our postmodern world by using and abusing classical, biblical, and indigenous mythology. Ultimately, she demonstrates that van Herk succeeds in creating a new mythology by digging deep to discover women's original strengths and powers. In the end, mythological characters are given new life, women a voice, the landscape is granted its own identity, and the city of Calgary its own face. This study is aimed at students and scholars in the field of Canadian Literary Studies.

Saying 'no' might be an ordinary thing for women nowadays, however, it did not use to be like that for women of renaissance times. The book describes female unruliness portrayed by Shakespeare through Katherina and Cordelia, two of the most prominent manifestations of rebellious women. The first two chapters deal with Cordelia's and Katherina's words and their consequences with regard to their fate. It is also examined whether and how the playwright embosses the renaissance woman through them. The final chapter contains more of the mythological background through the archetypal characters 'witch' and 'goddess'. Renaissance and medieval aspects of life are also compared. Moreover, the patriarchal system is examined as to its aspects regarding the barriers of manifestation to the playwright. The book should help shed some light on how the age restricted or freed the mind, and more precisely, how Shakespeare interwove this aspect into the dramas in question. It should also be especially useful to university students or anyone else who may be considering doing research into the field of the English literature of the Renaissance.

Many second language learners encounter challenges involved with acquiring the level of proficiency required to use the language as the medium of learning. The case studies in this volume explore the processes by which some English Language Learners (ELLs) at the university level develop literacy skills, and the strategies they use to comprehend subject matter in the mainstream curriculum. The two cases discussed are a Korean graduate student and a Panamanian undergraduate student at a southeastern university of the U.S.A. Strategies that the students use to succeed include: motivation, academic peer coaching, multi-media, and metacognitive behaviors such as self-solving, asking questions, and spending more time on task.

In this final primer book, your learner will practice all 59 sounds and 400+ spellings in the English language. Even the most rare and peculiar spellings are explored here, giving students all the tools they need to become master readers and spellers. Students will also learn about proper capitalization and punctuation on their way to becoming excellent writers.

Each of the seven worksheets in Student Workbook 2 contains 16 different exercises. Students will have the opportunity to practice their reading and comprehension skills by drawing pictures, matching sounds, writing creative sentences, and discussing pages from their Book of Stories. Student Workbook 2 takes students all the way through Reading Primer R3 and all 59 sounds and 400+ spellings in the English language.

Each of the seven worksheets consists of eight types of challenges that will have students drawing, transforming words, and writing creative sentences. Student Workbook 1 starts at the beginning of Reading Primer R1 and finishes at the end of Reading Primer R2. Your learner will hop from beginning to read, to learning the basics of grammar, to expressing themself through writing.

This comprehensive, spirited, and often laugh-out-loud funny handbook will help you start, maintain, or enhance a science fiction and fantasy book group. Bring fantasy and science fiction readers together for scintillating discussions with Fellowship in a Ring: A Guide for Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Groups. Providing everything you need to get started, the book offers detailed guidelines for some 50 fantasy and science fiction titles, plus guides for some 40 popular speculative fiction themes. For each of the featured titles, the book provides bibliographic information, author background, a plot summary, notes on appeal points, discussion questions, other resources to consult, and suggested read-alikes. You'll find instructions on how to get a group started, tips for helping fantasy and sci-fi readers get along, hints for understanding the genres and subgenres, and more. The book also offers materials useful to collection development, display building, and programming. Featuring books that run the gamut from literary genre novels to classic pulp stories, Fellowship in a Ring can help you avoid common pitfalls and build a flourishing community of satisfied book group adherents. Provides discussion questions for 50 specific fantasy and science fiction titles and materials and booklists for 40 different themes of fantasy and science fiction Offers 100 additional recommended books for discussion Includes a chronology of science fiction and fantasy history Presents a glossary of science fiction and fantasy discussion terms Provides a bibliography of print and online resources for further studies of book groups and the science fiction and fantasy genres

Monsters are horrifying creatures, yet they also fascinate and attract heroes and readers. How can these contradictory emotions and responses be explained and why do we like monsters although they scare us? In this book, the author Susanne Zhanial uses Julia Kristeva's theory of the abject to answer these questions. The first part of the book introduces the reader to Kristeva's theory of the abject. After defining the terms abject and monster, it will be shown that these two concepts can be successfully linked. In the second part of the book, the theoretical insights will be used for the analysis of three monster stories from the late 19th and early 20th century, namely Henry Rider Haggard's She, Bram Stoker's Dracula and Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera. By concentrating on a period of approximately 30 years it will be shown that the problems, anxieties and scientific developments of the late Victorian era influenced and determined the character of the monsters. This study is aimed at students and scholars of English literature and Gender Studies.

The book deals with the pastoral convention which emerged with many authors like Theocritus, Virgil, Shakespeare, wordsworth and last but not least Frost.This convention investigates the relationship between man and nature and the question of man's place in nature and in the universe in general.The pastoral remains a celebration of beauty and innocence of the shepherd's mode of living.The objective of this book is to identify the pastoral features in Frost's poems. The themes that Frost evokes in his text revolve around the relationship between humanity and nature, human loneliness and isolation.Equally important, Frost's poetic techniques are worth studying. Being two sides of the same coin, the pastoral tradition and the ecocritical theory are the main issues of this work. The book presents the idea of nature from an ecocritical perspective with a focus on the relationship between literature and the natural environment. This book can be classified as a reference in pastoral studies, ecocriticism and The analysis of Frost's poetry and techniques.

This book presents a study that explored the metacognitive reading strategies used by Arabic native speakers when reading in Arabic and English. The study aimed at finding out 1)the strategies that Arabic native speakers report using in English and Arabic,2)the strategies they actually use in reading the two languages, and 3)the conditions under which the use of these strategies vary across the two languages. The participants' metacognitive reading strategies was assessed by using the Survey of Reading Strategies(SORS) (Mokhtari & Sheorey, 2002) while their actual strategies use was identified through the use of a think-aloud protocol. The results revealed five major findings. First, all the participants reported using all the SORS strategies.Second, there were statistically significant differences in the strategies reported in English and Arabic. Third, some strategies were actually used more often than others. Fourth, think- aloud showed that the participants actually used more than half of the strategies when they read in English. Finally, the variations in reported use revealed that more strategies were used in English than in Arabic.

The question of dominance - and of being dominated - is of central importance for the Anglo American - Chicano cultural interaction. Based on the hypothesis that the construction of a Chicano/a cultural identity necessarily entails some kind of perpetual, never-ending resistance against Anglo- American hegemony, Mag. Iris Haslhofer analyzes the representation of resistance against Anglo American hegemony in four different literary key works by male Mexican Americans (namely, Pocho by Jos Antonio Villarreal (1959), The Revolt of the Cockroach People by Oscar Zeta Acosta (1973), Bless me, ltima by Rudolfo Anaya (1972) and The Rain God by Arturo Islas (1984). Through an investigation of the socio-political and socio-historical background of these literary key works, the author traces back Chicano resistance against Anglo American hegemony. Resistance and Social Criticism in Chicano Literature is a multifaceted piece of work that could be read by any literary scholar, any person who is interested in Cultural Studies and could be of special interest for bi-cultural people.

Millions of descendants of the former colonized and enslaved peoples around the world are now classified as poor readers, bad writers, and slow learners. Are they illiterate or silenced people? Are they global citizens or global outcasts? Drawing from case studies of flesh and blood individuals in Mexico and the U.S., this book questions the colonizing images of the "illiterate", and explores the ways in which the long social history of conquest and colonization, plunder and globalization, is inscribed in the personal histories of today's subjugated people. It argues that rather than "limited literacy skills" they face systematic lack of freedom to speak, act, and make decisions about their own lives. Literacy, thus, is understood as a key practice of voice and citizenship.

Award-winning storyteller Dianne de Las Casas offers a primer on how to tell a spooky story, with 25 tales organized by age appropriateness and tips on how to effectively tell each tale. In Scared Silly: 25 Tales to Tickle and Thrill, Diane de Las Casas shares the methods and processes she uses in her own performances, workshops, and artist residencies, including how to effectively encourage audience participation. A brief section explains the benefits of sharing scary stories and offers expert opinions on the subject. The 25 stories included here, many of them storytellers' classics, can be used by elementary teachers, librarians, storytellers, and camp counselors. The tales are adapted from around the world and range from suspenseful to comical to thrilling. Each story is annotated with suggestions on how to tell the tale, and each is rated by a "Spook-O-Meter" that illustrates how scary the story is for what audience it's intended. Grades 1-5. Includes 25 stories appropriate for children in grades 1-5 A "Spook-O-Meter" illustrates how scary each story is for what audience it's intended

'The Heavenly Twins,' written by Sarah Grand, was a novel that shocked its late-Victorian audience, but which still remains largely unheard of today. Grand's novel, quite polemical in its time, addressed ideas of female sexuality and education, among other topics. Grand herself meant the work to be predominantly didactic, always stressing that it is most often what a woman does not know that can most hurt her. Throughout the work, Grand makes constant references to items of her period, some literary, some political, some even scientific. It is these allusions that give the novel an additional richness and depth; needless to say, readers unfamiliar with the many references may overlook any wit or wisdom Grand has intended to impart with their use. Until now, no critical edition of 'The Heavenly Twins' has existed. The annotations within are not only meant to serve as a reading companion to Grand's work but, it may be hoped, will lend to a further understanding of the world from which the author is writing from.

This book presents findings from the Reading First Impact Study, a congressionally mandated evaluation of the federal government's $1.0 billion-per-year initiative to help all children read at or above grade level by the end of third grade. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (P.L. 107-110) established Reading First (Title I, Part B, Subpart 1) and mandated its evaluation. This evaluation is being conducted by Abt Associates and MDRC with RMC Research, Rosenblum-Brigham Associates, Westat, Computer Technology Services, DataStar, Field Marketing Incorporated, and Westover Consulting under the oversight of the U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences (IES). The present book is the first of two; it examines the impact of Reading First funding in 2004-05 and 2005-06 in 17 school districts across 12 states and one state-wide program (18 sites). The book examines program impacts on students' reading comprehension and teachers' use of scientifically based reading instruction.

The postmodern force resembles a violent gushing torrent that washes away almost every man-made artifact of modernity. Literacy education and research, without exception, have been profoundly influenced by this force. The project of critical literacy seems revolutionary and ambitious. It claims to be critical, empowering, and emancipatory. Hence, the central concern of this book is: can critical literacy within the postmodern framework justify its claim? Are there any criticisms of postmodernism? What is lacking in it? Is there an alternative? How does this alternative paradigm address and overcome the limitations of postmodernism? How can critical literacy be critical, empowering, and emancipatory within the alternative paradigm? And what does this alternative paradigm imply in relation to literacy pedagogy? These and other questions are explored in this book. The analysis should be accessible and helpful to those who are interested in the theoretical grounding for critical literacy. Literacy educators will also find the discussion of pedagogical implications useful in informing their practices.

This book provides an analysis of issues of gender in beur (French-born people of North African descent) literary texts and films, its basic contention being that gender is a crucial element in the construction of beur identity. Focusing on the literary and cinematic devices adopted in order to describe and define beur female identity, this study shows how the texts under examination provide effective reinterpretations of Western texts and canons that would be impossible without a deep knowledge of the originals. The use and reinterpretation of autobiographical narration, fictional narration in the third person, multivocal and polyphonic narration, prove that beur literary texts can be inscribed plein titre within the Western literary tradition. A similar approach is adopted for cinema, stressing the elements of continuity that tie beur films to the colonial production as well as to the postcolonial non-mainstream production of the second half of 20th century.