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Acclaimed author Karen Hesse's Newbery Medal-winning novel-in-verse explores the life of fourteen-year-old Billie Jo growing up in the dust bowls of Oklahoma. Out of the Dust joins the Scholastic Gold line, which features award-winning and beloved novels. Includes exclusive bonus content!"Dust piles up like snow across the prairie. . . ."A terrible accident has transformed Billie Jo's life, scarring her inside and out. Her mother is gone. Her father can't talk about it. And the one thing that might make her feel better -- playing the piano -- is impossible with her wounded hands.To make matters worse, dust storms are devastating the family farm and all the farms nearby. While others flee from the dust bowl, Billie Jo is left to find peace in the bleak landscape of Oklahoma -- and in the surprising landscape of her own heart.
"As teachers today, everything we teach has to be turbo-charged with skills and the promise of advancing our students academically. Here's the cool thing: poetry can get you there. It is inherently turbo-charged. Poets distill a novel's worth of content and emotion in twenty lines. The literary elements and devices you need to teach are all there, powerful and miniature as a Bonsai tree." -Paul B. Janeczko You'd like to teach poetry with confidence and passion, but let's face it: poetry can be intimidating to both you and your students. Here is the book that takes the fear factor out of poetry and shows you how to use this powerful genre to spark student engagement and meet language arts requirements. Award-winning poet Paul B. Janeczko is the master for creating anthologies for pre-teen and adolescent readers, and here he's chosen 20 contemporary and classic selections with step-by-step, detailed lessons for investigating each poem from the inside out. Kids learn to become active readers of poetry, using graphic organizer worksheets to help them jump over their fear and dive into personal, smart, analytical responses. There's no better genre than poetry for helping students gain perspective on their own identities and their own worlds, and Paul provides a space on each reproducible poem for private thoughts, questions, feelings, and ideas. Your students will discover what each poem means to them. The 20 poems in this collection were chosen for their thought-provoking topics; compelling real-world themes that lead to conversation and collaboration in middle school classrooms. And by showing you how the poems and activities address the common core standards for English Language Arts (complete with a sample chart linking the poems to the standards), Paul provides a clear understanding of how you can "get there" using poetry. You can cultivate a passion for poetry in your classroom. Take the journey with Paul B. Janeczko and grow in confidence with your students, meeting some standards along the way.
Multigenre research projects affirm students' home cultures while developing important academic skills consistent with the Common Core State Standards in reading and writing. This book will guide teachers in assigning, scaffolding, and assessing multigenre research assignments, including how to choose a topic, pace the work, and keep writers on track to achieve specific goals. Chapters are arranged by topic with each containing a description of the educational rationale for the topic, an introductory activity that serves as an inspiration for students in selecting a topic, and field-tested minilessons with step-by-step instructions. All the traditional elements of a research paper—quotations from experts, works cited, explanation, synthesis, and analysis—are brought to life as students animate information with emotion and imagination. An additional chapter describes how teachers have adapted this project for other subjects, such as social studies, science, and literature. Book Features: Prompts focused on home culture, inclusive model texts, and support for diverse language proficiencies. Correlations between writing skills and the Common Core State Standards, including academic citation and reading historical documents and other nonfiction texts. Practical management strategies for teaching large writing projects, including prewriting, drafting, revising, proofreading, and publishing. Publication options that include everything from paper-crafting to multimodal composition. A companion website with downloadable handouts and additional teaching strategies.
Common Core State Standards for Grade 6: Language Arts Instructional Strategies and Activities is designed to help teachers address Common Core standards using effective, research-based instructional strategies in combination with ready-to-use activities. These strategies include identifying similarities and differences, writing summaries and taking notes, creating non-linguistic representations, and suggestions for homework and practice. There are a variety of suggested texts as well as identified text exemplars that can easily be used with the strategies and activities.
This is an utterly original and completely beguiling prose novel about a boy who has to write a poem, and then another, and then even more. Soon the little boy is writing about all sorts of things he has not really come to terms with, and astounding things start to happen.
Modernize grammar instruction with language lessons that inspire and engage students! Grammar and language instruction has long been, in the words of Brock Haussamen in Grammar Alive!, "the skunk at the garden party of the language arts" that turns many eager learners into disengaged participants. This type of disengagement, and resulting student struggles, have long been the norm, not the exception, when it comes to grammar and language lessons. But why? Why does grammar—something so relevant and essential that we use it in the creation of every syllable we say, write, or think—often end up as one of the dullest and most disconnected parts of the ELA classroom? Good Grammar: Joyful and Affirming Language Lessons That Work for More Students seeks to answer that question and to offer practical, on-the-ground solutions for making grammar and language instruction more accessible, practical, and connected to students’ reading, writing, and most importantly, the deep well of language knowledge they bring with them already. At the core of the book are six key practices for creating language instruction that comes across clearer, sticks better, transfers easier, and ultimately instills a love of language, all while teaching major grammatical concepts. Written by a practicing classroom teacher, this book offers Ready-to-go lessons and a recommended sequence Explanation of essential grammar and language concepts for teachers who need to refresh their own understanding of grammar and language topics and concepts Over a hundred modern, engaging, wide-ranging, and diverse mentor text examples Suggestions on how to introduce important linguistic concepts into secondary classes, including lessons about how language develops; how to define, examine, and celebrate dialects/familects/idiolects; and protocols for discussing concepts like code-meshing and "correctness" Examination of broader trends concerning what works and what doesn’t work in regards to grammar and language instruction, with a goal of giving teachers the tools they need to create their own grammar and language curriculum that engages, inspires, and transfers more easily into student writing and life beyond the classroom walls. The title—Good Grammar—seeks to remind us that grammar doesn’t have to be boring or feel punitive. Instead, it can be a force for good for more students, affirming who they are, honoring the language expertise they bring with them, and helping them to bring their unique voices to the page.
This simple-to-use scripted guide to grammar and composition makes successful teaching easy for both parents and teachers. It uses the classical techniques of memorization, copywork, dictation, and narration to develop a childs language ability in the first years of study.
