Presents for the New Year
By Patricia Broderick and Allen Raymond

A forever present
When one is talking about a gift from Shelley Harwayne, one knows it will affect us for all of our professional – and personal – lives. And her new book is truly a gift. Novel Perspectives carries a subtitle of Writing minilessons inspired by the children in adult fiction.

An exciting recounting of Shelley's personal journey with children in adult novels, this book will have a permanent effect on our teaching – and reading.

It's a compilation of excerpts from some of Shelley's favorite novels, incorporated into minilessons to be shared with young writers. The books included are not suitable for reading by young children, but the selected passages are dynamite for integration in our curriculum.

There are five parts to this book: discovering topics, marveling at the world, revising writing, loving language, and learning from fictional characters who take their reading and writing seriously. With varying numbers of lessons in each part, there's a total of 56 lessons. Each of the truly minilessons focuses on one idea such as Using a Writer's Notebook, Keeping Lists (an absolutely great idea with a new slant), Noting "Aha" Moments, Savoring Texts, Writing for Real-World Reasons, etc. The reason for each minilesson is written as though addressed directly to the student. This is a different, but enormously effective technique.

In fact, all of the book is written in vintage Shelley: a warm, simple style, no education-ese, and an I-can't put-this-down quality. Lesson 43, "Caring About and Learning New Words" is positively poetic.

This one should be on every teacher's desk. We hate to part with it and it will be a very Lucky Subscriber who gets it. It's just $18 plus s/h.
Heinemann
www.heinemann.com

Summarization
This is a skill that's necessary to a successful career and even to life, yet is so often missing. Well, not anymore. Rick Wormeli's newest title, Summarization in Any Subject – 50 Techniques to Improve Student Learning, helps us look at summarization as a teaching technique that can make our job easier while giving our students a real boost.

There is a wonderful section in the book that cross-indexes the 50 techniques with seven types of summarization: individual, oral/interactive, written, artistic/performance, kinesthetic, short and extended. Each how-to for the 50 techniques are coded with the icon for the type of strategy, e.g., individual, short, and so on.

The how-to for these strategies is clear and well-illustrated. There are variations and applications included for each at the end of the strategy discussion. Some of the techniques are: Bloom's Taxonomy, Summary Cubes, Body Analogies, Camp Songs, Human Bingo (our personal favorite for lots of fun while learning), The Frayer Model and on and on.

Rick is a high-energy teacher who stays in the middle school classroom while pursuing a doctorate, writing professional handbooks and presenting at many professional development venues. Don't miss the chance to attend any workshop where Rick is presenting. It will be an invaluable experience in your professional life.

In the meantime, this book is just $29.95 plus s/h.
Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development
www.ascd.org

Listen!
You'll hear lots about Voices Reading, the new comprehensive reading and character development program for Grades K-2 from Zaner-Bloser. You'll love this: the center of in struction for this program is multicultural trade books. Isn't that wonderful? And actual copies of the read-aloud trade books are included with the program. Better and better!

The systematic character development integration is outstanding. The credit for this goes to the organization of the themes and the central questions for each of the themes.

The six themes that occur at each of the three grade levels are: identity awareness, perspective taking, conflict resolution, social awareness, love and friendship, and freedom and democracy.

The central questions vary by grade level, although they build on each other across the grades. For example, "What makes us special?" in kindergarten segues into "Who am I? Who are you?" in first grade and "How are we alike? How are we different?" in second grade.There is a Teacher's Edition for each theme, and leveled readers (for first grade there are 242 of them) and a book of comprehension masters for the leveled books. A CD on fluency and comprehension also accompanies them. The leveled books are on three levels: below level, on level and above level. There's also a language support book to help those kids who might need an extra boost. In addition, there are two skills practice books, 71 phonics readers with a phonics reader cd and 31 instructional trade books.

And we're not through yet! There are poster packs of six posters, classroom sets of theme assessments, an assessment handbook, 42 teaching routine cards (concise step-by-step explanations of key routines that streamline instruction and can be used by an aide, a literacy coach or a parent helper) and 48 See, Say, and Spell Cards. All of these items are integrated beautifully into the fabric of this unique program. (Components not sold separately.)

How to use this program
Each of the six themes is suggested for use over a six-week period. A community service project takes place during week six. There are character development oral vocabulary suggestions and ideas in the previous five weeks leading up to the project.

The Teacher's Guides provide helpful schedules for managing flexible groups in each of the themes. The suggestions cover whole-class instruction, teacher-led small-group instruction and independent groups and partners.

For more information
This program has it all – it provides the approach that involves the subjects that motivate kids to read, write, discuss, listen and think: why we read and write.

We really can't do justice to this terrific program in the space we have, but you can learn more about it by visiting www.zaner-bloser-voices.com/correlations and we'd encourage all K-2 teachers to do just that. This link will give you a free week of the program. Not only will you be able to sample it, but once you list your grade level, this website will automatically correlate the program with your state standards. How great is that?

The Lucky Subscriber will receive a sampler of the program.
Zaner Bloser
www.zaner-bloser.com

Weekly Reader
We saw some great titles in Weekly Reader's Early Learning Library. These small books (24 pages, 7" x 7") are ideal for making math concepts come to life for kids. There is great photography in the I Use Math… series (…At The Doctor's, …At The Game, …In The Kitchen, …At The Store, …On A Trip, …In The Workshop) and the photographs are part of the math explorations. For instance, in I Use Math At The Doctor's, the child is asked how many people are in the waiting room shown in the accompanying photo. Then, when the child is with the nurse there are questions on weight and height and so on with the different activities of the visit to the doctor.

Each page of these books carries about four lines of text on each spread, then a math concept question is asked and can be discussed in the context of the photo that faces the text. These books make really good sense as they integrate math into a child's day.

The other titles we saw in this series are Money and Banks. We reviewed four of the six titles within this category: Coins, The History of Money, Paper Money and Saving Money. The other two titles are: Spending Money and What Is a Bank? These books, although the same size as the series we reviewed earlier, have considerably more text (around 750 words) and although well-illustrated, the illustrations are generally smaller and more illustrative of specific points.

The size of these books is so user-friendly, that math, too, becomes user-friendly. And that's great. These books are priced at $5.95 each. Call for a catalog 877-445-5824.
Weekly Reader
www.earlyliteracy.cc

Teach Writing to Older Readers Using Picture Books: Every Picture Tells a Story
This terrific 143-page handbook will have you wondering how you taught without it. Chock-a-block with activities for grades five through nine, this book provides tools and strategies to improve students' writing with the help of picture books.

Written by an experienced teacher, there are no clunker activities. Author Jane Heitman really used the books and the strategies, and her voice has the ring of practice and authority.

Ms. Heitman feels that the simplicity of picture books makes isolating the story element or technique being studied more visible to the student. "Literary terms are less intimidating since they are applied to works students know and can grasp quickly. They [students] can then apply what they have learned to more complex literature and writing," says Ms. Heitman.

The activities in this handbook invite collaboration between the media specialists and language arts teachers, and that's a very good thing.

There are six chapters covering character, setting, plot, theme, style and culminating activities – all the elements of writing. There's even a great list of the picture books cited in the various activities. Lots of reproducible pages will help to make your job easier and the activities have also been cross-referenced to the NCTE standards. This book is really worth the $39.95 (plus s/h) price.
Linworth Publishing, Inc.
www.linworth.com