Education Teaching Books

This is a great product. the activities are appropiate for kindegarten and some skills that are appropiate for advaned learners. A great tool for my work stations. These shoe box activities are also great for extra activities for early finishers.

This book is great for instant independent centers during workshop time! The boxes are easy to use, and can take as much time as you need them to.

This book contains 40 great different activities that you can put together into shoe boxes and set as learning centers for elementary kids. Although it is aimed at kids between 1st and 3rd grades, some of the games can be played by kindergarteners and with some adaptations you can also use them with 4th graders. For every game, it contains reproducible labels and student directions. It gives you a detailed list of the materials that you should put inside the shoe box and it also gives tips of variations to adapt the games to different objectives.

For most of the games, you only need everyday materials, like toothpicks, beans, play dough, number cubes, domino pieces, buttons, crayons, coins, yarn, magazine cutouts, etc.

When I assembled the learning centers, I found out that most of them can be placed in smaller containers than shoe boxes. As a matter of fact, I used photo storage boxes for the most part (you just make sure to reproduce the copies in the proper size). Instead of putting the crayons or pencils inside the boxes, I placed some cans with crayons and pencils in the center of the station, and kids can use them with any activity. The rest of the materials required (except for the play dough and the marshmallows required for a couple of games) can fit into these smaller containers.

Some of the skills reviewed are skip counting, addition, subtraction, place value, making number stories, patterns, time, money, measurement.

If you like having your kids play games while learning, you will love this book!

As a teacher, I find that challenging kids to work on their own or in a small group is a great learning experience. Shoe Box Math is the answer to the teacher's dilemma of how to set up a math center. This book provides reproducibles, easy to follow instructions and meets the standards being taught. My students love the projects!

These learning centers are easy to put together and maintain. I purchased several plastic shoe boxes from one of the dollar stores in the area to use. As a 4th grade teacher, some of the games were excellent for building up basic skills. I'll be teaching 2nd grade next year, and have already gotten some of the other games ready for use.

I would pay triple for this book! It is one of the best teaching resources I own, and I promise you will use it over and over again.

Think of this: Does a coach repeatedly show his athletes how NOT to perform a play? Does he swing the bat incorrectly over and over before asking his players to show him a perfect swing? Of course not! So why do so many writing teachers (including me - before I knew better) do the same thing? Anderson believes that we cannot give our students "worksheets riddled with errors" and ask them to take out commas or to add in semicolons. Instead, we should teach editing like a sport. In this book, Anderson does just that. He invites students to notice well-written mentor texts before letting kids take a swing.

The first section of the book is Anderson's rationale (backed by research) for why kids should be taught editing skills. Part two contains actual lessons you can immediately use in your classroom - no matter what grade you teach. Each lesson is set up with a series of invitations. The first student invitation is to notice powerful writing - to truly look at master writers and learn why they used specific punctuation marks. Once the students truly understand the grammatical concept, Anderson invites them to imitate master writers by combining sentences, editing, and writing.

I don't consider myself to be the greatest teacher ever, but Anderson's book is helping me become much better. This book truly gets kids to want to learn and master grammatical concepts. His lessons are genius, creative, and down-right fun! Kids love them. The invitations are created so teachers can praise students for what they have done right, rather than nagging them for what they've done wrong. (If you were the student, wouldn't this praise make you feel better as a writer?)

As Anderson states in his first book Mechanically Inclined, we should "Teach grammar and mechanics as a creational facility rather than a correctional one." Anderson uses this same philosophy in Everyday Editing. You will find Anderson's books to be extremely valuable to both you and your students.

Jeff Anderson's book offers lots of practical ideas for tweaking your writer's workshop and making your students better writers. He devotes chapters to various skills and how to teach them (serial commas, appositives, participles, etc.). One of his basic tenets is selecting good examples of sentences from your own readings of YA books, then using them as teaching tools by asking kids what they notice (it might be how appositives are punctuated, or how the colon introduces a list). The sentences interest the kids because they are taken from high interest books, and instead of learning from BAD sentences that are riddled with mistakes for correction, students learn from models that are free of mistakes (novel thought -- "mentor" sentences instead of "mental" ones).

You can find plenty of sentences to use in your own readings, but if you don't have time, Anderson provides examples for you in this book. He also devises sentence combining activities by "deconstructing" good mentor sentences and asking students to put them together again (where's Humpty Dumpty when you need him?). Again, great idea. Studies have proven that sentence combining is an effective teaching tool.

I just used Anderson's idea for creating an Appositive Book with separate flaps for the subject, the appositive, and the verb parts of the sentences and my students loved it. By raising different flaps in the partitioned book, they were able to create some amusing (OK, silly) sentences using appositives. It's stuff like this that makes stuff like grammar (the Teflon of our teaching chores) stick!

Recommendation: Buy. Then use. Frequently.

This Audio CD is a useful supplement to the Ordinary Parent's Guide. You may be suprised to find you actually don't know how to pronounce many of the letters of the alphabet correctly. It is very important you teach them correctly to your children, especially if they have any speech difficulties. For example, 'D' is not pronounced 'duh'. Teach your child the wrong pronunciation and they may wind up having some difficulty sounding out words. The CD will model for you the difference between the voiced and unvoiced consonants, which will be invaluable. There are also some fun song tracks, and the complete Consonant Rhyme, which is learned in the book. You can just turn this on, and Presto! It isn't meant to listened to beginning to end, however.

Parents must be part of the education of their children early on if children are going to learn to read and enjoy it.This book gives some great tips on exactly that. Also a must-have for parents are two lovely pieces of children's literature which children really enjoy. The 10-page scripted guide allows parents to start teaching reading skills early on:Life's Little Lessons: An Inch-By-Inch Tale of Success
and The Big Squeal: A Wild, True, and Twisted Tail.

So far, my kids are learning and reviewing the letter sounds and are enjoying the lessons. The rhymes are helpful. It is basic and easy to teach, and foundational for reading.

We are just beginning learning the sounds of letters, and what great focus this book gives you as the teacher. It guides you throughout the studies and combines the lessons for review. I have been pleasantly surprised about how thorough this book is.

After completing 89 lessons in this book, my daughter and I are calling it quits. We've worked on it on and off for over a year (she's 5 now), and for the sake of preserving a love of reading, have decided to shelve it. This book has been helpful in a number of ways; it is great for giving a parent the sense that they can indeed teach their own children, that reading is easy, and laying out a path for doing so. I have found it useful as a reference book, i.e. to show me what to introduce, remind me what the actual "rules" are, and give me direction for our lessons. However, there have been some significant problems.

1) The layout of the pages is daunting for a child. There are lots of words, no pictures, nothing to visually set apart the words that the child reads except that they're a bit larger. It seems overwhelming and very un-child-friendly.

2) The practice stories often make no sense, and fail to capture my daughter's interest at all. An example from today: "The black snake did wish that he had a snack of mice. The snake did scan the grass to prey on mice. The grey mice sat on the rock and ate nuts. The snake came to the rock. Hey! The mice fled. They hid in holes. The snake will have no snack this day." Awkward wording, nothing particularly interesting about that, no pictures. The optional follow-up activity is to illustrate this story and label the items.

3) The practice sentences are way too long, and overwhelm new readers. For example, the child has just been introduced to the "fl" blend (lesson 50), and reads the sentence, "Ducks in flocks flit and flap on the flat pond." This sentence is too long, has onomotopeic words with which they may not be familiar (flit), and makes them use the new rule 4 times!! Very frustrating for a child struggling to learn a new rule. This was one of 6 new blends introduced in this one lesson.

4) Exceptions are often introduced before rules. For example, today we learned that the vowel pair "ea" can sometimes make the long-a sound, as in great, break, steak. Okay, so my daughter goes to read "please", and says, "place". Of course! She's never been taught that "ea" USUALLY says the long-E sound. The old "when two vowels go walking" would have been helpful to learn first, not later. Also, today she learned that "ey" can say the long-A sound. So "smiley" is smilay until a later lesson... you get the picture. This has come up more than once.

5) Very rigid rules, introduced in a logical, but not necessarily helpful, order. Much more actual reading could be possible much sooner if they'd go ahead and introduce some of the more helpful rules out of sequence.

6) It would be helpful to introduce a number of sight words much earlier. Kids learn sight words very quickly, and a few of them up front can make many more books accessible.

If your child is VERY motivated to learn to read, I do think that this book will work. My 3-year-old son has this drive, and the first few lessons (we skip the letter-learning part) have taught him the basics of CVC words. But he would learn that just as easily if I just stuck some magnets on a board. My daughter is very global in her thinking, and is more interested in the content of stories than in mastering reading technique, and this book sends her running for cover. Honestly, I dread it, too. Fortunately she is now at the point where she can read basic easy readers, so we're going to drop this book, use it as a reference tool only, and continue with McGuffey Readers, Bob books, and everything on the library's easy reader shelf. For my other 3 kiddos, I'll be investigating other options.

This is a useful and interesting book for advanced ESL students, and they love it. These students have learned all the grammar and now they want to be able to use and understand all the slang and idioms. Also they get enough practice with each idiom to realy let it sink in.

I first came across this book at borders and while i was looking for the slangman series, i decided to take a look at this book and i just couldn't put it down. Not only is it applicable to high school and college students, it puts the idioms in a context which makes the user understand it's usage for future purposes. I wish i'd seen this book when i first came here as an exchange student.
I think it'll be a great gift for that friend of yours who's visiting the country or here on an exchange program. It's a little pricy but i think it's worth the price. If you are learning english, try to learn the idiomatic expressions to improve your overall communication.

Haven't you ever wondered why it's so difficult to understand a conversation between native speakers or a movie in its original language version? Don't you think it has something to do with the way you were taught the language?
I'm French. I've been teaching English to high school students for over 20 years now, and yet it's the first time I've come across a textbook which emphasises on every day language in such an efficient and enjoyable way!
Edward J. Francis manages to browse a great number of idiomatic expressions through sixteen lively dialogues related to true life situations. Various exercises help us memorize the idioms which we can then use to express our own experiences and feelings. At the end of the book you can find a very useful glossary including all the idioms and vocabulary covered in the dialogues, as well as a list of websites related to the topics discussed in each of the chapters. Discover about the history of fireworks, visit America's national parks or book a room in a bed and breakfast inn for the weekend! This book urges you to travel!

I highly recommend "A Year in the Life of an ESL Student" to advanced high school students or any adult who intends to travel to an English speaking country, as well as to people who, like me, want to brush up on their conversational English!
So just kick back and have a great time reading Edward J. Francis' book! It's "two thumbs up!"

I am an English teacher in Japan and I was looking for a book that had a lot of useful, everyday English for my students that covered material not usually taught in the language schools. After searching many book stores I still had no book to use for my students. I really thought I was going to have to write my own book. Then, one of my students came to me with this book. I was amazed that she was the one who came across such a good book. I felt like one of my friends won the lottery. After flipping through a few pages I knew I had to order it. I ordered it that night and use it almost exclusively for our lessons. The students love the content. The exercises are fun, simple, yet effective in helping students retain the new material. The layout is perfect, particularly if you need to make a copy from the copy machine when you are in a pinch for material needed in an unexpected class. The choice of content in this book is excellent. My lessons with this book now give the students a lot more useful English phrases to speak like a native English speaker, and understand a lot of idioms Americans use.

Among the many difficulties faced by English as a Second Language learners is our seemingly random used of words and phrases to express ideas. Our idioms are opaque (chicken out, spare tire), slang changes before the dictionary can catch up (wimp, freak out), and many words are rarely used, except in a specific circumstance (bawling, hilarious).
What is the poor ESL learner to do?
Edward J. Francis has come to the rescue with A Year in the Life of an ESL Student - Idioms and Vocabulary You Can't Live Without. (Trafford)
Following Andre, a student from Switzerland, through 16 chapters of activities ranging from suntanning on the beach to catching a movie, the 300-page text is filled with dialogues, definitions, crosswords and cloze activities, not to mention comprehension and discussion questions. Everything is well laid out and easy to read. There are web sites listed for each chapter, answer keys and an extensive glossary with definitions and page references. All that is missing is a CD recording of the conversations.
This book would make an ideal extension resource for the Advanced ESL class.

I got this for my son who is entering 3rd grade to keep up on his math skills. He has done about 1/2 of the book. It's really great the way the math is done by way of games - he doesn't feel it is work and has had fun with it so far.

I purchased the book for the 3rd grade daughter of a friend on of mine that was having problems with her arithmetic. The teacher looked through and was very impressed. She said that she would start using it in her class. Best of all, her daughter really took to the book and is feeling much more comfortable with her numbers.

It is easy to go through and has lots of good practice tests. There are also versions for different grade levels.

This was an interesting book that I would highly recommend to anyone NOT number-savvy. I had heard good things about it, and as someone who appreciates the importance of math, I thought it would be great to check out. It was written with the lay-person as its target audience, so being someone who already knows a great deal of mathematics, I was underwhelmed. The book is clearly written, and explains concepts slowly and carefully as it illustrates every-day math for the common person.

Honestly, this book felt a bit like "See Spot Run," but for mathematics instead of the English language. Even though it was a bit boring for the mathematically inclined, I highly recommend it for anyone suffering from "Mathematical Illiteracy." If you have ever said to yourself "I'm not a numbers person," then this book is for you.

"Innumeracy" goes beyond the expectation of a non-mathematician, user-friendly book. It wakes up your awareness of what passes as "statistics", "experts", "economics", and various numeric analysis in the popular media.

I bought the book after seeing it referenced in another science book. I was interested in a basis for how much bias, or straight ignorance, was posing in the guise of expert. I was more than satisfied with "Innumeracy" in this regard.

Read it twice. Put it down for a month, pay attention to what's in the news, etc. then read it again. You will be a much better consumer of numbers.

I have read several "mathematics for a popular audience" books as a high school math teacher who has done graduate work in mathematics. This is considered a classic, but I felt like it was no longer up to date at times. Also, I had the feeling I had read many of the better examples and such in other places - again this book is now a classic. It is good, but I have read similar books that I enjoyed more.

I felt like I knew about numbers before the book, and now I realize that I need to review and study numbers! I asked a bunch of friends about some of the simple problems in the book and found that many of them could not figure it out! Definitely read this

An otherwise interesting, thoughtful book is marred by the phrase that seems obligatory in most popular mathematical books, "the occasional difficult passage can be ignored with impunity." As the title suggests, this book addresses the general public's inability to deal with numbers and their uses. To provide another excuse for avoiding "difficult" mathematics really tends to defeat the purpose of the book and could possibly be considered as a psychological "put down." Are these passages really important to the reader or are they in some manner more important to the author and merely serve to distract the reader? Most often, as is the case in this book, such passages have reasonably comprehensible explanations. Why not use the space to provide another paragraph of explanation?
With this initial hurdle addressed, it should be pointed out that Paulos does a very good job in presenting interesting examples of the use and misuse of numbers, many of which are used in our society, and to some extent are being used to shape it. For example, consider the fact that in general female workers earn approximately 59% the salary of males, which has been used as the argument for stiff equal pay legislation. This fact alone does not take into account the additional information that a greater percentage of women work part-time and many have only recently entered the job market and so have yet to work their way up the hierarchical job ladder. Many other examples deal with the continued popularity of pseudoscience, despite the alternative "reality" that all the "evidence" for it can easily be explained by random variations in the data.
Written in the author's relaxed style and sporting an occasional pun, this book should be read by anyone concerned with the general lack of mathematical sophistication among the general public. Unfortunately, the conditional probability that a person will read it, given that they are themselves innumerate, is no doubt quite low.

I found Todd Whitaker's, "What Great Principals Do Differently: Fifteen Things that Matter Most," to be an extremely helpful book. The book's easy to follow format provides practical advice for any new administrator to use. I found Whitaker's book to be a fast read, and I believe any principal or assistant principal can apply concepts from this book to their daily work. From getting the best performance from staff and students, to creating a positive climate in the building, Whitaker gives many practical pieces of advice. Whitaker's focus on teachers being key to school improvement is an obvious solution often overlooked. I would recommend any new principal reading this book.

Great book, looking to venture into administration soon and was looking for literature to use with potential faculty and staff.

This is an amazing book that puts the world of principalship into perspective. It helps develop a positive attitude and puts principals in the best frame of mind.

If you have read "What Good Teachers Do Differently' or visa versa don't buy it. It is almost verbatim and a WASTE of money and time.

I could not put this book down. Out of all the educational leadership books I've read, this was a simple read with the most applicable suggestions. It is a resource that I can read over again and get more out of it.

A fun fraction workbook. I have used it with my youngest and with my niece, (they both have their own copy, of course) with pretty positive results. Give it a try, and you will probably find it helpful.

This book is amazingly helpful for teachers in the middle grades who are reviewing the operations of fractions.

This is a workbook! I own 3 of Dan Greenberg workbooks and this is the best one. The students reads the story. There are 10 - 20 problems in the story that the student solves at the end of the story.

I'm a homeschool mom whose fifth grader was having great difficulty with word fraction problems. He loves this book! The questions are presented in fun easy-to-understand stories that make the subject of fractions a lot less intimidating. Thank you for making this book available! I highly recommend it!

This book is amazing. I used it to teach my entire unit on fractions and it went over really well!

thank you for the book, it was in great condition and will work well for my class!

This is an excellent book for anyone who is in the teaching profession, and especially those who teach beginning readers.

This book was in excellent condition and just as described. I received it in a timely manner and am very happy with my purchase.

This book arrived in excellent condition and in a timely fashion. I was able to use it before I went back to school and I need it to teach elementary and middle school aged students in the fall. Thank you very much.

Let me start by saying this book builds off of Guiding Readers and Writers, also by Fountas and Pinnell. If you haven't yet invested in that book and you teach reading or writing to grades 3-12, that's where you want to start. This book will not be nearly as helpful until you have read and engaged in the teaching strategies laid out in Guiding Readers and Writers. However, if you are currently looking to build and add to your literature circles and your reading and writing workshops, this is the book you want.

This book is loaded with resources for teachers. It comes with an interactive DVD to show teachers exactly what they are describing as mini lessons. This was truly the most helpful to me - being able to see teachers in action, working with students, using the techniques I had just read about helped to enable me to create the same learning environment and use the same techniques. The DVD also includes over 100 blackline masters/forms/worksheets ready to use! As a teacher, that in it's self is worth $100 not to have to make everything yourself!

This book uses a variety of methods to deepen comprehension that overlap into to guided reading within the classroom. Interactive read-aloud using picture books is just one way I started deepening comprehension within my classroom using this book. Just two months in, I can see the difference in how my kids are reading and understanding! This is just one of the many pieces I use within reading workshop. The more and more I do this, the more I see my kids using skills that we've pointed out in reading workshop in their writing! This book helps kids think 'about the text', 'beyond the text', and 'within the text'.

This book also helps teachers (of any reading grade) set-up running records to increase fluency. Within the blackline masters, the forms are ready to use, and the layout is easy to use! I am able to do this while my kids are writing in their reader's notebooks or doing independent reading. This is a great tool to help assess where a child is and where a child should be.

This book is a powerful tool if used in combination with Guiding Readers and Writers. Teachers of all ages can find this book filled with useful strategies and practical ideas to use within their reading class.

PS - If you have a chance, check out Heinemann's website. Fountas and Pinnell are doing conferences across the US on small sections of this book. If you have a chance to go, they are well worth it!

Had to purchase for a college class. The book states many obvious things an average person already knows. I sold it as soon as semester was over.

Well, what do you expect, it's a textbook!
I would not read it for pleasure, but as far as textbooks go, well, it's a typical textbook with basic info about special ed.
Goes through all different disabilities from emotional to ADD to hard of hearing.

This book, although it is listed as Introduction to Special Education, is actually the STUDY GUIDE FOR the textbook. It is full of forms for taking notes, as well as discussion questions. But it is a companion to the textbook, and not the textbook itself!!

I bought this for my special education class thinking that it would come with the CD-ROM that was required for my class after already purchasing the wrong textbook and when I recieved it I discovered that it does come with the MyLabSchool but not a CD-ROM. I guess that Amazon doesn't sell the CD-ROM at all so look to buy a package elsewhere if you need/want the CD-ROM.

I am training to be a California secondary teacher in Los Angeles County. It is a difficult job but a rewarding one. I am not interested, at least presently, in teaching special education but I will have to know how to deal with students with special needs. This book is well written, and includes all of the information one will need for an introduction to special education.