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• Pouring activities
• Threading and sewing activities
• Peg activities
• Cutting with scissors
• Sorting activities by touch
• A color matching game
• Making musical scales with bottles and water
• Using alphabet tiles to make words
• Growing things in a window box
• Making finger puppets

Harvey Daniels' Literature Circles introduced tens of thousands of teachers to the power of student-led book discussions. Nancy Steineke's Reading and Writing Together showed how a teacher can nurture friendship and collaboration among young readers. Now, Daniels and Steineke team up to focus on one crucial element of the Literature Circle model; the short, teacher-directed lessons that begin, guide and follow-up every successful book club meeting.

Mini-lessons are the secret to book clubs that click. Each of these forty-five short, focused, and practical lessons includes Nancy and Harvey's actual classroom language and is formatted to help busy teachers with point-by-point answers to the questions they most frequently ask.

• steer my students toward deeper comprehension?
• get kids interested in each others' ideas?
• make sure kids choose just-right books?
• help students schedule their reading and meeting time?
• deal with kids who don't do the reading?
• get kids to pay more attention to literary style and structure?
• help special education and ELL students to participate actively in book clubs?
• get kids to expand their repertoire of reading strategies?
• make sure groups are on-task when I'm not looking over their shoulder?
• introduce writing tools (including role sheets) that support student discussion?.
• help shy or dominating members get the right amount of "airtime?"
• give grades for book clubs without ruining the fun?
• use scientific research to justify the classroom time I spend on literature circles?

Each mini-lesson spells out everything from the time and materials needed to word-by-word instructions for students. The authors even warn "what could go wrong," helping teachers to avoid predictable management problems. With abundant student examples, reproducible forms, photographs of kids in action, and recommended reading lists, Mini-lessons for Literature Circles helps you deepen student book discussions, create lifelong readers, and build a respectful classroom community.

The product of many years of work with classroom teachers, Guiding Readers and Writers (Grades 3-6) is one of the most comprehensive, authoritative guides available today. It explores all the essential components of a quality literacy program in six separate sections:

• Breakthrough to Literacy: Fountas and Pinnell present the basic structure of the language/literacy program within a breakthrough framework that encompasses the building of community through language, word study, reading, writing, and the visual arts. The framework plays out as three "blocks," which can be interpreted as conceptual units as well as segments of time within the school day. Specific information on how to structure a reading and writing workshop is provided. A practical chapter on organizing and managing the classroom will help you implement the principles in your own classroom.
• Independent Reading: It is essential for students to develop interests and tastes as readers, selecting books for themselves every day. Fountas and Pinnell devote four chapters to independent reading, exploring how to structure teaching, minilessons, conferences, groupshare, and ways to use response journals as part of a reading workshop.
• Guided Reading: The chapters in this section provide detailed information on planning for guided reading, dynamic grouping for effective teaching, and selecting, introducing, and using leveled texts. Fountas and Pinnell describe characteristics of texts related to difficulty and ways to organize texts in your classroom and school.
• Literature Study: This section of the book discusses how to make students' experiences with literature as rich as possible. The authors offer specific suggestions for forming groups, guiding student choices, and establishing and teaching routines for literature discussion. A full chapter explores reader response and ways to help readers dig deep to uncover the meaning of texts.
• Teaching for Comprehension and Word Analysis: This detailed look at the reading process explores both oral and silent reading, processes and behaviors related to comprehension, and ways to help students construct meaning. Included are twelve systems for sustaining the reading process and expanding meaning, plus discussions of the important areas of phonics, spelling, and vocabulary.
• The Reading and Writing Connection: These chapters showcase the instructional contexts - poetry, writer's notebooks, writer's talks, genre, content literacy, and student research - that support students in connected reading and writing. An informative overview of the characteristics of fiction and nonfiction will help you teach students to read and write a variety of genre. What's more, the authors suggest ways to help students learn the "genre" of testing and perform the kinds of reading and writing tasks that tests require. They also detail the continuous thoughtful assessment that guides all aspects of effective teaching.

Science Is Simple encourages children to experience our world fully, and gives teachers learning objectives, items for discovery, related books and follow-up activities. This comprehensive resource will help you teach simple science concepts-simply!

Practical solutions to a problem that may affect 80% of school children.

Drawing on her decades of work with troubled youth and her wide experience with conflict resolution and reconciliatory justice, bestselling parenting educator Barbara Coloroso offers a practical and compassionate book destined to become a groundbreaking guide to this escalating problem.

Coloroso helps readers recognize the characteristic triad of bullying: the bully who perpetrates the harm; the bullied who is the target (and who may become a bully); and the bystander––peers, siblings, or adults who don't act to defuse the situation. Readers learn:

o What bullying is and what it isn't; the three kinds of bullying; and the differences and similarities between boy and girl bullies

o How to read the subtle clues that a child is being bullied

o Seven steps to take if your child is a bully

o Four abilities that protect your child from succumbing to a bully

o Why zero tolerance policies can equal zero thinking

o Why contempt, not anger, drives bullying, and how to confront this in bullies.

o o Bullying is a widespread problem. In a 2001 study by the Kaiser Foundation in conjunction with Nickelodeon TV network and Children Now, 86% of children ages 12–15 interviewed said they get teased or bullied at school––making bullying more prevalent than smoking, alcohol, drugs, or sex among the same age group. Barbara Coloroso is an award wining author. Parenting Through Crisis and Kids Are Worth It! each won a Parent's Guide Award 2001 from Parent's Guide to Children's Media.