Reading for Our Lives


Book Description

An award-winning journalist and literacy advocate provides a clear, step-by-step guide to helping your child thrive as a reader and a learner. When her child went off to school, Maya Smart was shocked to discover that a good education in America is a long shot, in ways that few parents fully appreciate. Our current approach to literacy offers too little, too late, and attempting to play catch-up when our kids get to kindergarten can no longer be our default strategy. We have to start at the top. The brain architecture for reading develops rapidly during infancy, and early language experiences are critical to building it. That means parents’ work as children’s first teachers begins from day one too—and we need deeper knowledge to play our positions. Reading for Our Lives challenges the bath-book-bed mantra and the idea that reading aloud to our kids is enough to ensure school readiness. Instead, it gives parents easy, immediate, and accessible ways to nurture language and literacy development from the start. Through personal stories, historical accounts, scholarly research, and practical tips, this book presents the life-and-death urgency of literacy, investigates inequity in reading achievement, and illuminates a path to a true, transformative education for all.




Beginning Reading and Writing


Book Description

In this essay collection, scholars in the area of early literacy provide concrete strategies for achieving excellence in literacy instruction. The collection presents current, research-based information on the advances and refinements in the area of emerging literacy and the early stages of formal instruction in reading and writing. Following a foreword (Alan Farstrup) and an introduction (Dorothy S. Strickland and Lesley Mandel Morrow), chapters in the collection are: (1) "Beginning Reading and Writing: Perspectives on Instruction" (William H. Teale and Junko Yokota); (2) "Becoming a Reader: A Developmentally Appropriate Approach" (Susan B. Neuman and Sue Bredekamp); (3) "Literacy Instruction for Young Children of Diverse Backgrounds" (Kathryn H. Au); (4) "Enhancing Literacy Growth through Home-School Connections" (Diana H. Tracey); (5) "Children's Pretend Play and Literacy" (Anthony D. Pellegrini and Lee Galda); (6) "Talking Their Way into Print: English Language Learners in a Prekindergarten Classroom" (Celia Genishi, Donna Yung-Chan, and Susan Stires); (7) "Organizing and Managing a Language Arts Block" (Lesley Mandel Morrow); (8) "Classroom Intervention Strategies: Supporting the Literacy Development of Young Learners at Risk" (Dorothy S. Strickland); (9) "Teaching Young Children to Be Writers" (Karen Bromley); (10) "Phonics Instruction" (Margaret Moustafa); (11) "Reading Aloud from Culturally Diverse Literature" (Lee Galda and Bernice E. Cullinan); (12) "Fostering Reading Comprehension" (Linda B. Gambrell and Ann Dromsky); (13) "Assessing Reading and Writing in the Early Years" (Bill Harp and Jo Ann Brewer); (14) "Sign of the Times: Technology and Early Literacy Learning" (Shelley B. Wepner and Lucinda C. Ray); and (15) "Still Standing: Timeless Strategies for Teaching the Language Arts" (Diane Lapp, James Flood, and Nancy Roser). (NKA)







For the Love of Literature


Book Description

This brief children's literature text for pre-service teachers emphasizes the love of literature in the belief that literature is not just something children read or study; it is something that becomes part of them and stays with them for a lifetime. It contains up-to-the-minute treatments of all genres of children's literature. To help readers discover the joy of children's literature and how to help others share that joy is a major goal of the book. The emphasis is on the affective dimensions of literature, geared toward children's aesthetic responses to the stories and poems that they read. Author profiles, a multicultural focus, topical book lists, and a chapter on technology are elements that help students. Each chapter has an essay written by a scholar, a classroom teacher, or other expert (e.g., a middle school student or book editor) who has special knowledge, a particular perspective, or point of view on the chapter topic. Three four-color inserts illustrate the children's books discussed in the text.




Space 1999 and Critical Theory


Book Description

The television series SPACE: 1999 was in its first series shaped by the late sixties and early seventies counterculture movements, making SPACE: 1999 into an example of how certain SF scholars see a natural alignment between science fiction and critical theory. However, due to changes in the political climate, SPACE: 1999 went through an ideological reversal in its second series. As a result, the schizophrenic nature of the series has ever since caused debate. This book is written on an idealistic basis. It is sold at the lowest price the publisher was willing to accept. A free e-book version can be downloaded at www.lulu.com.




Space and Place in Children’s Literature, 1789 to the Present


Book Description

Focusing on questions of space and locale in children’s literature, this collection explores how metaphorical and physical space can create landscapes of power, knowledge, and identity in texts from the early nineteenth century to the present. The collection is comprised of four sections that take up the space between children and adults, the representation of 'real world' places, fantasy travel and locales, and the physical space of the children’s book-as-object. In their essays, the contributors analyze works from a range of sources and traditions by authors such as Sylvia Plath, Maria Edgeworth, Gloria Anzaldúa, Jenny Robson, C.S. Lewis, Elizabeth Knox, and Claude Ponti. While maintaining a focus on how location and spatiality aid in defining the child’s relationship to the world, the essays also address themes of borders, displacement, diaspora, exile, fantasy, gender, history, home-leaving and homecoming, hybridity, mapping, and metatextuality. With an epilogue by Philip Pullman in which he discusses his own relationship to image and locale, this collection is also a valuable resource for understanding the work of this celebrated author of children’s literature.




PhotoGraphic Encounters


Book Description

Literacy is broadly understood to refer to the ability to read and write. But the term is heavily value-laden and is often used to elevate print at the expense of other forms of communication. In PhotoGraphic Encounters, the authors challenge this reductive notion of literacy and propose instead an integrated span of literacies: reaching across disciplinary boundaries to discover a text that draws upon both the visual and the verbal. PhotoGraphic Encounters discusses Canadian writers like Margaret Atwood, George Bowering, Robert Kroetsch, and Daphne Marlatt, and Canadian artists like Fred Douglas, Ernie Kroeger, Brenda Pelkey, and Michael Snow, then looks at the cross-fertilization of visual and verbal processes in their works. The authors present a new narrative practice, one that fully engages lived experience. The vernacular, they argue, is vital to our participation as readers and viewers of high art. Making the connection between the vernacular and high culture creates an enabling moment in artistic production and reception and in teaching, learning, and talking about art and literature. PhotoGraphic Encounters offers a compelling perspective on questions of literacy in a postmodern culture. Artists, writers, scholars, and critics alike will want this volume in their libraries. Includes more than 120 B&W photographs, 20 colour plates, index, bibliography.




Who Did It First? 50 Icons, Luminaries, and Legends Who Revolutionized the World


Book Description

A vibrantly illustrated and compelling collection of profiles about women and men—and one dog!—who made indelible marks in entertainment, science, politics, and sports. You may know that Beyoncé was the first Black woman to headline Coachella. And maybe you know that Pelé was the first soccer player to score 1,000 professional goals. You might not know that RuPaul Charles was the first drag queen to get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Or that Selena Quintanilla-Pérez was the first Latinx artist to have an album hit the top of the Billboard 200. Written by Megan Reid and illustrated by Jess Cruickshank, Who Did It First? 50 Icons, Luminaries, and Legends Who Revolutionized the World celebrates fifty trailblazers who made the world a better place. Filled with profiles highlighting what each subject accomplished first alongside vibrant illustrations, this book is a celebration of the iconic figures who have paved the way for future generations. Perfect for fans of Little Leaders, Women in Science, and Rad Women Worldwide, Who Did It First? makes a wonderful gift for any occasion and is a must-have for every young reader’s library. Featuring those mentioned above along with Shirley Chisholm, Janet Jackson, Rita Moreno, Harvey Milk, Stephen Hawking, Michael Jordan, and more.




Unity


Book Description