"Determine the main idea of a text and explain how it is supported by key details; summarize the text." Your students may recognize the words determine, explain, and summarize in this standard, but would they understand and be able to apply these concepts? Students encounter these and other academic vocabulary words throughout their school years, but too often, they don't have a firm grasp of these words' meanings or what skills they require. Enter vocabulary expert Marilee Sprenger, who has curated a list of 25 essential high-frequency words that students must know to be academically successful, especially on standardized tests, and be ready for college and career. In this indispensable guide for all educators, she provides * Pre- and post-assessments to help you evaluate your students' understanding of the essential 25. * A detailed entry for each word, including activities and strategies that will help students internalize the word's meaning and application. * Retrieval games to help students practice the words in fun, engaging ways and reinforce the networks for those words in their brains. * Downloadable blank templates for many of the strategies used throughout the book. Every student needs to know and understand these words to perform at their best. If educators get behind this effort and make the essential 25 part of the fabric of their schools, students will be equipped to thrive in school and beyond.

Today's teachers face a daunting challenge: how to ensure a positive school experience for their students, many of whom carry the burden of adverse childhood experiences, such as abuse, poverty, divorce, abandonment, and numerous other serious social issues. Spurred by her personal experience and extensive exploration of brain-based learning, author Marilee Sprenger explains how brain science-what we know about how the brain works-can be applied to social-emotional learning. Specifically, she addresses how to: Build strong, caring relationships with students to give them a sense of belonging. Teach and model empathy, so students feel understood and can better understand others. Awaken students' self-awareness, including the ability to name their own emotions, have accurate self-perceptions, and display self-confidence and self-efficacy. Help students manage their behavior through impulse control, stress management, and other positive skills. Improve students' social awareness and interaction with others. Teach students how to handle relationships, including with people whose backgrounds differ from their own. Guide students in making responsible decisions. Offering clear, easy-to-understand explanations of brain activity and dozens of specific strategies for all grade levels, Social-Emotional Learning and the Brain is an essential guide to creating supportive classroom environments and improving outcomes for all our students.nd dozens of specific strategies for all grade levels, Social-Emotional Learning and the Brain is an essential guide to creating supportive classroom environments and improving outcomes for all our students.

Veteran educator Marilee Sprenger explains how to teach the essential, high-frequency words that appear in academic contexts—and reverse the disadvantages of what she calls ""word poverty."" Drawing on research and experience, Sprenger provides a rich array of engaging strategies to help educators across all content areas and grade levels not only teach students a large quantity of words but also ensure that they know these words well. You'll find: An overview of how the brain learns and retains new words, including the three stages of building long-term memories: encoding, storage, and retrieval. Encoding strategies to introduce words in novel ways and jump-start the memory process. Rehearsal strategies to help students put words into long-term storage. Review strategies to help students strengthen their retrieval skills and gain the automaticity needed for reading comprehension. Ways to address planning and assessment as crucial, intersecting supports of a robust vocabulary program. This comprehensive resource has everything you need to help your students profoundly expand their vocabulary, enabling them to speak, read, and write with greater understanding and confidence.

Memory is inextricable from learning; there's little sense in teaching students something new if they can't recall it later. Ensuring that the knowledge teachers impart is appropriately stored in the brain and easily retrieved when necessary is a vital component of instruction. In How to Teach So Students Remember, author Marilee Sprenger provides you with a proven, research-based, easy-to-follow framework for doing just that. This second edition of Sprenger's celebrated book, updated to include recent research and developments in the fields of memory and teaching, offers seven concrete, actionable steps to help students use what they've learned when they need it. Step by step, you will discover how to: Actively engage your students with new learning. Teach students to reflect on new knowledge in a meaningful way. Train students to recode new concepts in their own words to clarify understanding. Use feedback to ensure that relevant information is binding to necessary neural pathways. Incorporate multiple rehearsal strategies to secure new knowledge in both working and long-term memory. Design lesson reviews that help students retain information beyond the test. Align instruction, review, and assessment to help students more easily retrieve information. The practical strategies and suggestions in this book, carefully followed and appropriately differentiated, will revolutionize the way you teach and immeasurably improve student achievement. Remember: By consciously crafting lessons for maximum ""stickiness,"" we can equip all students to remember what's important when it matters.

Your students may recognize words like determine, analyze, and distinguish, but do they understand these words well enough to quickly and completely answer a standardized test question? For example, can they respond to a question that says ""determine the point of view of John Adams in his 'Letter on Thomas Jefferson' and analyze how he distinguishes his position from an alternative approach articulated by Thomas Jefferson""? Students from kindergarten to 12th grade can learn to compare and contrast, to describe and explain, if they are taught these words explicitly. Marilee Sprenger has curated a list of the critical words students must know to be successful with the Common Core State Standards and any other standardized assessment they encounter. Fun strategies such as jingles, movements, and graphic organizers will engage students and make learning these critical words enjoyable and effective. Learning the critical vocabulary will help your students with testing and college and career readiness, and will equip them with confidence in reading, writing, and speaking. Marilee Sprenger is also the author of How to Teach So Students Remember, Learning and Memory, and Brain-Based Teaching in the Digital Age.

Smartphones, videogames, webcasts, wikis, blogs, texting, emoticons. What does the rapidly changing digital landscape mean for classroom teaching? How has technology affected the brain development of students? How does it relate to what we know about learning styles, memory, and multiple intelligences? How can teachers close the digital divide that separates many of them from their students? In Brain-Based Teaching in the Digital Age, Marilee Sprenger answers these and other questions with research-based information and practical advice gained from her years as a classroom teacher and a consultant on brain-based teaching. As she puts it, ""It's time to meet the 'digital brain.' We need to use the technology tools, learn the digital dialogue, and understand and relate better to our students."" At the same time, she emphasizes the importance of educating the whole child by including exercise, music, and art in the classroom and helping students develop their social-emotional intelligence. Creativity, empathy, and the ability to synthesize material are 21st century skills that can't be ignored in the digital age. Readers will find easy-to-understand information about the digital brain and how it works, ""high-tech"" and ""low-tech"" strategies for everyday teaching and learning, and inspiration for creating classroom environments that will entice and encourage students at all grade levels. With this book as a guide, educators can move confidently across the digital divide to a world of new possibilities-for themselves and their students.