The Book that Made Me


Book Description

Essays by popular children's authors reveal the books that shaped their personal and literary lives, explaining how the stories they loved influenced them creatively, politically, and intellectually.




Learning to Enjoy Literature


Book Description

Students will not become enthusiastic readers of literature from a teacher simply assigning reading tasks and assessing the completion of the tasks, especially when the assessment takes the form of threatened quizzes. Instead, as this book shows, teachers have an obligation to reveal to learners the procedures that skilled readers follow as they work with and enjoy literature and a further obligation to help learners to recognize some value in tackling complex works of literature.




Game Changer!


Book Description

Miller and Sharp provide the game-changing tools and information teachers and administrators need to dramatically increase children's access to and engagement with books.




For the Love of Learning


Book Description

INSTANT BESTSELLER For parents, teachers, and everyone who remembers being a student, an unforgettable glimpse into the inner workings of school, from a life-long educator. Children spend most of their waking hours in school, exploring boundaries, forming important relationships, and of course, learning. But as you step into the unique vantage of the principal’s office, you experience first-hand the wide range of characters, efforts, and decisions that ensure all students thrive. Kristin Phillips takes us through a school year, from the excitement of fall, through the long days of winter, and into the renewed energy that comes with spring. Through her eyes, we experience the increasingly complex education system: students with unique learning needs, teachers bringing their practice into the 21st century, and the parent-partners who have entrusted their children to the school system. Myles, a precocious five-year-old, introduces himself by swearing a blue streak on the first day of school. He finds solace in a paper box rocket ship in Phillips’s office. Rafi, a grade 8 boy oozing with attitude, makes a very uncool choice to lunch with the principal. And Harriet, a struggling teacher, is oblivious to the fact her students are bored to tears. Throughout the story, Phillips develops caring relationships with the people who need her the most, as she works with colleagues to create an environment where everyone succeeds. But principals are people, too, and Phillips also recounts the demands on her as a single mother with three teenagers, one of whom suffers from significant mental health issues. As an educator, she tries to help students coping with similar problems and reveals a heartfelt story of dealing with the system, from both sides. With honesty and compassion, Phillips gives a human face to the joys of school, and the very real difficulties educators work to overcome, one year and one student at a time.




What We Talk About When We Talk About Books


Book Description

Reports of the death of reading are greatly exaggerated Do you worry that you've lost patience for anything longer than a tweet? If so, you're not alone. Digital-age pundits warn that as our appetite for books dwindles, so too do the virtues in which printed, bound objects once trained us: the willpower to focus on a sustained argument, the curiosity to look beyond the day's news, the willingness to be alone. The shelves of the world's great libraries, though, tell a more complicated story. Examining the wear and tear on the books that they contain, English professor Leah Price finds scant evidence that a golden age of reading ever existed. From the dawn of mass literacy to the invention of the paperback, most readers already skimmed and multitasked. Print-era doctors even forbade the very same silent absorption now recommended as a cure for electronic addictions. The evidence that books are dying proves even scarcer. In encounters with librarians, booksellers and activists who are reinventing old ways of reading, Price offers fresh hope to bibliophiles and literature lovers alike. Winner of the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award, 2020




Make Way for Ducklings


Book Description

"Robert McCloskey's unusual and stunning pictures have long been a delight for their fun as well as their spirit of place."—The Horn Book Mrs. Mallard was sure that the pond in the Boston Public Gardens would be a perfect place for her and her eight ducklings to live. The problem was how to get them there through the busy streets of Boston. But with a little help from the Boston police, Mrs. Mallard and Jack, Kack, Lack, Nack, Ouack, Pack, and Quack arive safely at their new home. This brilliantly illustrated, amusingly observed tale of Mallards on the move has won the hearts of generations of readers. Awarded the Caldecott Medal for the most distinguished American picture book for children in 1941, it has since become a favorite of millions. This classic tale of the famous Mallard ducks of Boston is available for the first time in a full-sized paperback edition. Make Way for Ducklings has been described as "one of the merriest picture books ever" (The New York Times). Ideal for reading aloud, this book deserves a place of honor on every child's bookshelf. "This delightful picture book captures the humor and beauty of one special duckling family. ... McClosky's illustrations are brilliant and filled with humor. The details of the ducklings, along with the popular sights of Boston, come across wonderfully. The image of the entire family proudly walking in line is a classic."—The Barnes & Noble Review "The quaint story of the mallard family's search for the perfect place to hatch ducklings. ... For more than fifty years kids have been entertained by this warm and wonderful story."—Children's Literature




Learning How to Learn


Book Description

A surprisingly simple way for students to master any subject--based on one of the world's most popular online courses and the bestselling book A Mind for Numbers A Mind for Numbers and its wildly popular online companion course "Learning How to Learn" have empowered more than two million learners of all ages from around the world to master subjects that they once struggled with. Fans often wish they'd discovered these learning strategies earlier and ask how they can help their kids master these skills as well. Now in this new book for kids and teens, the authors reveal how to make the most of time spent studying. We all have the tools to learn what might not seem to come naturally to us at first--the secret is to understand how the brain works so we can unlock its power. This book explains: Why sometimes letting your mind wander is an important part of the learning process How to avoid "rut think" in order to think outside the box Why having a poor memory can be a good thing The value of metaphors in developing understanding A simple, yet powerful, way to stop procrastinating Filled with illustrations, application questions, and exercises, this book makes learning easy and fun.




Learn to Love


Book Description

Learn to Love: Guide to Healing Your Disappointing Love Life is a book about learning to improve your love life. After 30 years of clinical research and treatment of patients with unhealthy love lives, I now recognize that most people are not in control of their love lives. Why? Because most people don't know what they've learned about and from the love relationships in the course of their lives. Love relationships that started in their families of origin the moment they were born. If you don't know what you've learned about love relationships, then what you've learned is in control of your love life, healthy or unhealthy. If what you've learned was healthy, no problem. Chances are you'll simply replicate what you've learned about love relationships. If what you've learned was unhealthy, you could be unwittingly making the same love life mistakes over and over again because of what you've learned. Learn to Love will show you how to identify what you've learned about love relationships, how to unlearn what is unhealthy, and practice something new, healthy, and the opposite of what you've learned, now as a corrective in your adult love life. This simple learning formulate has helped many of my patients begin taking control of their own love lives, as well as helping me improve my own love life. Learn to Love will help you learn how to take control of your love life. Dr. Thomas Jordan




The Lost Art of Dress


Book Description

"A tribute to a time when style -- and maybe even life -- felt more straightforward, and however arbitrary, there were definitive answers." -- Sadie Stein, Paris Review As a glance down any street in America quickly reveals, American women have forgotten how to dress. We lack the fashion know-how we need to dress professionally and beautifully. In The Lost Art of Dress, historian and dressmaker Linda Przybyszewski reveals that this wasn't always true. In the first half of the twentieth century, a remarkable group of women -- the so-called Dress Doctors -- taught American women that knowledge, not money, was key to a beautiful wardrobe. They empowered women to design, make, and choose clothing for both the workplace and the home. Armed with the Dress Doctors' simple design principles -- harmony, proportion, balance, rhythm, emphasis -- modern American women from all classes learned to dress for all occasions in ways that made them confident, engaged members of society. A captivating and beautifully illustrated look at the world of the Dress Doctors, The Lost Art of Dress introduces a new audience to their timeless rules of fashion and beauty -- rules which, with a little help, we can certainly learn again.




Learning What Love Means


Book Description

A memoir of a friendship with Michel Foucault that changed the author's life. “I loved Michel as Michel, not as a father. Never did I feel the slightest jealousy or the slightest embitterment or exasperation when it came to him. … I was intensely close to Michel for a full six years, until his death, and I lived in his apartment for close to a year. Today I see that time as the period that changed my life, my cut-off from a fate leading to the precipice. In no specific way I'm grateful to Michel, without knowing for exactly what, for a better life." —from Learning What Love Means In 1978, Mathieu Lindon met Michel Foucault. Lindon was twenty-three years old, part of a small group of jaded but innocent, brilliant, and sexually ambivalent friends who came to know Foucault. At first the nominal caretakers of Foucault's apartment on rue de Vaugirard when he was away, these young friends eventually shared their time, drugs, ambitions, and writings with the older Foucault. Lindon's friend, the late Herve Guibert, was a key figure within this group. The son of the renowned founder of Editions de Minuit, Lindon grew up with Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Samuel Beckett as family friends. Much was expected of him. But, as he writes in this remarkable spiritual autobiography, it was through his friendship with Foucault—who was neither lover nor father but an older friend—that he found the direction that would influence the rest of his life. As Bruce Benderson writes in his introduction, “The book is a collage of free-associated episodes and interpretatons that together compose for the reader a kind of manual about how to love. … As he runs from apartment to apartment, job to job, or lover to lover, the book becomes a story of conversion testifying to an author's radical change of viewpoint, which leads to his invitation into the social world through lessons about love.” A brilliant meditation on friendship, Learning What Loves Means provides an insight into a part of Foucault's life and work that until now, remained unkown. The book won the prestigious Prix Médicis in 2011 when it was published in French.