Motivate middle school students to become more involved in literature Introducing hundreds of sophisticated and thought-provoking picture books on a variety of topics, this book shows you how to connect students to literature through picture books. Each title was carefully chosen, using as criteria the quality of the writing, the importance of its message, and how easily it could serve as a springboard to novels. Students will become familiar with the basic components of literature, understand idioms and analogies, recognize literary devices, and determine a text's main ideas. Each topic...

This step-by-step introduction to teaching thinking skills will be useful to teachers, librarians, and staff development personnel. Each thinking skill is presented in a one-page reproducible format (easily adapted to a transparency or PowerPoint slide), followed by several self-contained activities teaching that skill using fairy tales and fantasy books as the basis. Over 30 skills are included, ranging from deductive reasoning to inferential and perceptual thinking. An ideal resource for gifted education teachers, this is the first book in this format to provide such a breadth of...

A book that every children's librarian will love, this series of games and quizzes (cryptograms, word searches, scavenger hunts, plays, and much more) will encourage reading, reading competitions and games. Covering all types of children's literature from Mother Goose to the Classics to the Award winners, this is a hands-on book made up of reproducible game and quiz pages that will be easily and often used in school and public library programming.

A book that every children's librarian will love, this series of games and quizzes (cryptograms, word searches, scavenger hunts, plays, and...

The author has created reproducible anticipation guides to 300 popular junior novels ranging from classics like Ben and Me and Cricket in Times Square to the award winner, Kira, Kira. The book consists of 300 reproducible sets of open ended values questions to pique the interest of readers. Librarians and teachers will use these anticipation guides to spark interest in reading or as comprehension starters, tapping into prior knowledge and starting the process of understanding. The guides are also valuable for closure and comparative discussions with literature circles....

Another winner from prolific author, Nancy Polette, this title focuses on setting the stage for 200 popular picture book read-alouds. Similar to her LU book for the intermediate-grade audience, "300 Junior Novel Anticipation Guides," this book introduces picture books to preschool and primary grade students by encouraging them to think about how they or someone in their group can relate to what is happening in the story. Each of the 200 titles is described on a reproducible page that features a short introductory book talk and 10 questions to give to students.

Another winner from...

Using shaggy dog stories based on classic literature, the Polettes address common spelling and grammatical errors and the ways in which children can be taught to read critically to recognize them. Stories such as "Rapunzel, Alice, The Hare and the Tortoise," and "King Arthur," purposely embedded with common errors, have been pretested in teacher workshops given by Nancy Polette and in Dr. Keith Polette's classes at the University of Texas, El Paso. Teachers found them specific enough to be used directly in the writing instruction curriculum and fun for students to read and try to figure...

This step-by-step introduction to teaching thinking skills in the primary grades will be useful to teachers, librarians and staff development personnel. It will be of particular interest to teachers of the gifted. Each thinking skill is explained in a full-page reproducible format followed by a page offering booktalks to be used to introduce favorite picture books that can be used to teach that skill to young children and two pages of reproducible activities for the children to practice the newly learned skill. Over 30 skills are taught ranging from analogy to hypothesizing to inferring to...

Using the approach based on a Harvard study that found when the whole body is involved, the number of brain cells brought to the learning activity doubles, the author offers over one hundred kinesthetic activities. These are organized by content area and include number of players, objective and procedures, and nonfiction reading suggestions. Many activities are in game and/or dramatic presentation format. Students are asked to solve real life problems, create circle stories, create original excuses using science vocabulary, assume the role of eyewitness to historical events, and much, much...

This new book by Nancy Polette offers 49 short biographical readers theatre plays consisting of three performers discussing the same life, but with slightly different information. It requires students to use their critical thinking, listening, and research skills to determine which of the three tales is true. Each play is accompanied by a short reading list of coordinated children's books and a student research activity.

The plays feature women from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including minority group representatives. Molly Brown, Barbara Jordan, Rosa Parks,...