Education Teaching Books

I really enjoy this book. It is very organized but unfortunately it isn't very colorful. There is a lot of helpful information in this book.

I have a 3 year old with autism. She hit a rough patch and I was hoping for ideas on visual cues to help with transitions. This book was not at all helpful to me as the cues are much better geared to school age kids, even older school age kids in my opinion.

This is an excellent resource for those teachers working with students with autism. Visual supports are the best way to help an autistic child. The techniques described really work!!! The colored pictures of the supports were helpful, too!

Experts Marlene J. Cohen and Donna L. Sloan combine their expertise in Visual Supports for People with Autism: A Guide for Parents & Professionals, an educational guide for parents and professionals responsible for instructing children with autism spectrum disorder. Packed with examples and black-and-white photographic illustrations of over 140 visual supports, Visual Supports for People with Autism is an excellent supplementary resource for working on problem learning areas such as language, attention, memory, motivation, sequential skills, or social skills. An excellent, reader-friendly guide featuring reproducible diagrams to facilitate its ideas and concepts for enhancing learning.

Sorry, I have sent this book back (feb/22/06) to you because the one I recieved was an early edition (1997), not that I have bought.
And so, I am waiting or for a correct edition or the money back in my creditcard.

Educators, are you looking for a book to stretch your mind and leave you thinking for hours, possibly days? Are you looking for a book to offer ideas on how to reform your school from within? If your answer is yes, try diving into Linda Darling Hammonds book titled The Right to Learn: A Blueprint for Creating Schools that Work. One warning though, don't try to read this book alone. You will need other educators to plow through its intense thought provoking pages to build a deeper understanding of what Hammond is saying. As you read have a highlighter or sticky tabs in hand because you will want to mark the many well articulated ideas that LDH mentions. She has a way of pointing out the deep roots of problems in education but also offers ideas on how policies can change to improve our nations schools.

One phrase that caught my eye early on in the book is this one regarding school accountability; "A vicious cycle is launched: the more paperwork teachers are asked to do, the less time they have for teaching; the less time for teaching, the less learning occurs; the less learning, the more the demand for paperwork intended to ensure that teachers are teaching as the bureaucracy insists they should."(p.43) She says here that
the demand for more paperwork which was intended to improve school accountability in reality undermines productivity because it takes time away from planning and teaching well thought out lessons.

Hammond believes that we should strive to teach for understanding more so than covering a lot of curriculum. She strongly believes in the role of professional development in creating depth of understanding in our educators. The chapter that fascinated me the most was on Staffing Schools for Teaching and Learning. She offers several ideas to create smaller class sizes, give teachers more time for planning with their colleagues, as well as taking time for teachers to observe one another. These ideas occur through restructuring the schools and having every certified person in the building teaching at some point in their day and by creating teams that are responsible for a smaller group of students. I felt this could help our site teams think creatively when trying to come up with ways to make class sizes smaller.

Research done by Hammond is included in this book as she searched out "positive deviants" to the difficulties facing public education. Positive deviants meaning schools that found ways to be successful within the same constraints as other
schools. She uses four schools in New York to give examples of schools that are working for creating learning environments that are effective in an age of schools striving to flee the grasp that the factory model of education has traditionally held for
much of the twentieth century. This research is helpful because once again it gives you ideas on how to try things differently to achieve success.

One thing that has been a continual difficulty for me with this book is my lack of ability to retain what Hammond is saying without having to refer back to the book. I am not sure if the reason is because it is so packed with heavy information or if my brain is just on overload by the craziness of the amount I am responsible for in my own classroom, and trying to complete a graduate program. I look forward to our discussions in our literature groups hoping that they will lend some clarity or direction with the book but it is such a mass of information. Perhaps if the book was read slower allowing more time to
digest what it says and then try putting some of the ideas into immediate action, I would be able to retain more of what I am reading. Perhaps this quote hits the nail on the head; "Active learning reflects the old saying, `I hear and I forget; I see and I remember; I do and I understand." (p. 107) This is a book that will stay nearby so that I can refer back to it, recommend it to others, put its ideas into action and strive toward the belief that all children have the right to learn! It is also an inspiration for educators to stretch ourselves to create a public education system that matches the needs of our time.

If you want to get angry, read this book. It's a searing indictment of the state of education in our country. We can guarantee poor and minority children the right to state-of-the-art prisons (especially in California), but we can't guarantee them the right to a qualified teacher. LDH does a great job of tracing the historical reasons for public education, and it wasn't to educate a diverse population for living in a democratic society. The have-nots from the past are the have-nots from the present, and a meaningful and useful education is at the core of the disparity. Our country must address these issues to remain globally competitive. LDH establishes how technological and globalization forces makes it imperative that we educate our youth.

This is a data-packed book and a must-read. However, if you are happy with the status-quo, you may want to avoid it.

I am immensely impressed by Ms. Darling-Hammond's book. She has presented an incredible about of research and information and done it in an articulate defense of reform--for the student's sake, and ultimately, for everyone's sake.

She begins by setting it all in perspective, outlining different waves that have swept over public education over the last fifty years. Later, she identifies nine related components that serve to buttress her reform agenda: active in-depth learning organized around common goals; a focus on authentic performance; attention to student development; appreciation of diversity; collaborative learning; a collective perspective within the school; structures for caring; support for democratic learning; and connections to families and to the community.

It sounds obvious, but her clarion writing deserves our attention. Listen to this example: "To engender serious learning, schools must dramatically increase the intellectual opportunities they offer, becoming more focused on developing understanding and competence...becoming more learning-centered as well as learner-centered (p. 32)."

She adeptly sets the double conundrum that many teacher currently face: How can test scores be raised adequately in the while in the clasp of financial, cultural, bureaucratic, systemic chains? But she provides viable solutions.

She explains how to have learning standards without standardization; she calls for increasing students' opportunities-to-learn, making for actual democratic procedures in the classroom; she asserts how schools can re-structure to allow for identifiable learning. This is powerful stuff.

So study this book, and then re-visit it. It's worthy of close scrutiny and it's worthy of action. It needs to be placed into the hands of anyone who cares about education, works within the system, or has children attending public schools. It clearly provides the necessary blueprint for educational reform, as advertised.

Darling-Hammond not only identifies some of the problems in the education system today, but she also offers some solutions that merit consideration. She contends that the bureaucracy of education has worked against many students, resulting in their not learning. Policies, practices, and skills must be changed if education is to be reformed. Some of the changes discussed include decision-making which involves teachers, restructuring time in the schools, organizing staff into teams, creating smaller schools, using authentic assessments, providing opportunities for continuing professional development, and creating standards for student learning. Darling-Hammond describes some of the inequalities that still exist in schools today, such as a lack of funding, resources, and quality teachers. Major policy changes are necessary to improve the schools, and these policies must be considered together with the practices for change to be effective.

This book is loaded with well-designed practice exercises that will keep your child's language skills sharp and expanding. My son and I like its format of five items per day. What a relief that you know you will finish in 10 minutes. It makes the studying easy and even fun! They look so simple, but if you keep on doing them, they make a big difference over time.

Since my son started using this book, he often gets on the honor roll out of many peers in Beestar (a very nice web site at Beestar.org). I think this book had built a fairly solid foundation for him. Highly recommend.

My 7 year old loves to work on the daily problems before school. It has helped him become a better student.

This book is divided into weeks, with a 5 question review for each day of the week. I use this in my 2nd grade class. We do one a day, it takes about 10 min. for the kids to complete and for me to go over the skills and answers. It is a great way to review different skills, from correcting sentences, to matching vowel sounds in words or finding the correct spelling of a word. My students are finally getting that a complete sentence starts with a capital letter and ends in puncuation. I would recommend this book to any teacher that doesn't have time to teach a full grammar lesson each day.

My child is now in the sixth grade. She should be only entering fourth grade but because we do curriculum like this she has been advanced. This book is excellent for homeschooling. They need repetition for writing skills, capitalization and grammar. If you just do one little section a day it really adds up over the year. It's easy and fast.

This book has daily lessons in grammar and other elements of writing. The quick lessons are a great way to spark discussions with your students about the fundamentals of writing. The pages are easy to reproduce and include answer keys.

This book is a great book, because it uses Montessori's own words to explain the basic concepts of Montessori, and it covers all of the basics. However I wouldn't recomend it to parents who first want to find out about Montessori, because the language is very complex and you get tired of so many ideas in so little space. First time readers of Montessori are better of with her other book, "Montessori Today".

This is an excellent book for people who will have patience and read it little by little to be able to "Swallow" and get every idea.

This book has great, unique ideas as well as appropriate annotated booklists for various topics that fit well with curriculum AND service. I definitely recommend this book for anyone who wants to step up service learning in the classroom!!

I am an elementary school guidance counselor who wanted to create a service learning program in my school, but wasn't sure how to get it off the ground. This book not only offers service learning project ideas, but also how to tie them to curriculum. It also suggests different fiction and non-fiction literature on the subject by grade level!!!

I have been reading your "The Complete Guide to Service Learning" the last few days. I am teaching teachers tomorrow about the 40 Developmental Assets and integrating Service Learning into their curriculum. Your book is great. It is thorough. It is user friendly and it has great information that is easy to digest. I especially like the "Across the Curriculum" sheets.

This book is a very inspiring guide to implementing service learning projects in each classroom. It offers countless practical, specific, easy ways for teachers to teach their students new skills and the value of contributing to their community. I would definitely say that this book is a must-read for any teacher or parent!

Written for both parents and professional caretakers, Early Communication Skills For Children With Down Syndrome by Libby Kumin (who has 23 years of experience in working with children with Down syndrome) is very highly recommended as an informational resource by parents, caretakers, teachers, and anyone else charged with the responsibility of dealing with Down Syndrome children. With a focus on speech and language development, through the stage of making 3-word phrases, Early Communication Skills For Children With Down syndrome offers in-depth insight, home communication activities, ways to help one's child learn basic rules of conduct, and much more. An excellent instructional resource, Early Communication Skills For Children With Down Syndrome is a welcome and necessary addition to institutional speech pathology and Special Education resource and reference collections.

Bought for use in a parent-infant education program for children infant to 3. Written with parents in mind so that it is not full of medical-speak, and full of suggestions, this is a good book for anyone working with or parenting a child with low tone or multiple issues that interfere with language development.

I wish I had time to read the whole thing at once, it's full of helpful info. I recommend it to anyone working with or parenting a child with down syndrome. Something that is partcularly nice about it as well as the other books like it is that they don't talk in ages but in stages. This way you can follow your child, and not some outward source that determines what they should be doing and when.

I feel like this was a much bigger A&P textbook that was cut down into an "Essentials" version. Every now and then you'll be faced with a term in passing as if you already understand it, when it hasn't been presented at all. It's almost like a paragraph is missing every few pages. This feeling gets worse when you try to use the online or CD quizzes which will ask questions you can not possibly answer with this text book. If you're taking a very generic class where the teach doesn't expect you to know more than the bare basics (and is willing to let you skip the parts not adequately explained in this book!) then it's passable. Otherwise, you might need an additional text to muddle through.

Item was in exact condition as quoted and received in a pretty reasonable time frame. Would buy from this seller again.

I think my instructor had a lot to do with it, as well as some changes in study habits since I went to college the first time (2.68). But this book definitely helped. I had a 96 average in class. It's not an easy read, nor is something to try to do without some class notes, but I thought it was clear and informative.

This book was purchased for a high-school course.
Class hasn't started yet so can't rate the book
properly. I presume that it is good because the
school chose it.

This book was necessary for my class. Its good, except I can't get the disk to work.

Bravo American Education Publishing! You've done it again! As with all your "Complete" guides (of which I have used several), you have combined interesting facts with enjoyable games and wonderful, full-color illustrations. I don't know what my highly color sensitive child would do without this wonderful series of workbooks. I hope to see additional titles out soon.

This title combines a comprehensive look at government as well as information on all presidents through the last one and workbook pages which could accompany more in-depth reading about states' histories. There is a good bibliography, including recommendations for CD ROMS, Videos and Web Sites.

All this company's workbooks are worth taking a look at.

I am homeschooling and I bought this book for my children, ages 8 & 9. It is teaching them so much about the presidents and about the states. It has made learning fun and interesting! I love the flash cards of the presidents too.

i homeschool my daughter and we love this book and use several other books in the complete book series. full of fun and accurate information that is easy to read and enjoy. great for the homeschooler or any child that loves to learn!

We've used these workbooks for several summers to help bridge the school year through the summer. It is colorful and fun for the kids. One of the best workbooks.

I like this book. My 6 year old likes this book. We love the variety, so if you have to do some 'academic' work in your plan for the day, but dont feel like doing spelling, you can flip to the reading chapter, to the maths chapter, to the comprehension chapter. Its very clearly laid out, its fun (where a lot of Grade 2 material can be made to look pretty boring)and looks fun, and seems to cover most of the basics. It is NOT a be all and end all for a Grade 2-er, but for someone not following a set curriculum, this is a great provider of material so you know you are covering your bases. It could also be a great top-up if for some reason you need to top up what is happening at your school, or for example to cover in a summer. I would really recommend this.

Although there have been some negative reviews in this series, I have personally found this book to be very through and helpful to my 6 year old. It covers the core subjects for 2nd graders such as reading, language arts, spelling, and math. They all well presented, except the math part is a bit easy for my son. Not uncommon as grade levels in different states are different.

I think the set up of a certain number of pages per day is convenient, and just the right amount to keep his interest. The colors and pictures are great, and the price is right! I especially like the teaching suggestions in the back of the book - giving you the option of doing as little or as much as YOU feel comfortable doing on any given subject with your child.

For math, I find the Beestar worksheets (a nice web site at www.beestar.org) suit my son better. But overall, this is very good workbook. I fully intend to continue using this series as long as I can.

Have purchased these books for years, some grade levels didn't meet my expectations... this one is wonderful! Great for summer prep, vacation and sick days. Highly recommend.

This is a very good learning tool. I homeschool and it's just hard enough to get the young mind going and easy enough for them to catch on. I love these books!