How I Spent My Summer Holidays

This wildly funny twist on the "How I spent my summer vacation" school-essay ritual details one child's imaginary adventures over the summer and is perfect for back-to-school reading! Most kids go to camp over the summer, or to Grandma's house, or maybe they're stuck at home. Not Wallace Bleff. He was supposed to visit his Aunt Fern. Instead, Wallace insists, he was carried off by cowboys and taught the ways of the West--from riding buckin' broncos to roping cattle. Lucky for Aunt Fern, he showed up at her house just in time to divert a stampede from her barbecue party! Perfect for back-to-school read-alouds, here's a western fantasy with sparkling illustrations and enough action to knock kids' boots off!

When How I Spent My Summer Holidays was first published in 1981 a Western reviewer wrote: “If Who Has Seen the Wind told the story of a young boy’s coming to terms with death, How I Spent My Summer Holidays tells of a young man’s attempt to come to terms with his own sexuality and that of the world around him.” The twelve-year-old young man is Hugh, and in small-town Saskatchewan it is the hot summer of 1924. When Hugh and his friends dig a secret cave out on the Prairie, they soon find it occupied by an escaped patient from the mental hospital. Defying the adult world, the boys become involved with a former war hero and current rum-runner, King Motherwell, in sheltering and feeding the runaway. When passions aroused by sex explode into murder, Hugh leaves his boyhood behind him for ever.

This volume discusses the autobiographical inclination in Canadian literature, exploring works by such writers as Alice Munro, W.O. Mitchell, Michael Ondaatje, John Glassco, and Susanna Moodie. Others works, including the oral memoirs of a Métis, an Inuit's account as being civil servant in Ottawa, and the autobiographical writings of pioneer women and French missionaries are examined to show the depth and breadth of this tradition in Canada. These texts act as starting points for an in depth look at the relationships between autobiography, biography and fiction in Canadian literature. Published in English.

Get back to basics with this practical look at the foundations of good essay writing. With personal and classroom anecdotes, ideas and strategies, and samples and reproducibles, this cheerful and accessible book offers real-life advice that both teachers and students can really use. Each chapter contains easy-to-incorporate lessons along with teaching tips for teaching specific concepts that range from pre-writing exercises to revising and editing to celebrating the final product. The book includes a wide range of innovative approaches to teaching essay writing -- from how to picture and "act out" an essay to a winning format for a topic sentence and using scattergrams to turn brainstorming into constructive outlines. Throughout the book, assessment tools and marking keys support simple marking techniques that are visible and relatively frequent, and consider not just the essay, but effort and time on task.

In 1924, twelve-year-old Saskatchewanian Hugh is stuck in the middle of a heat wave. To escape the sun, Hugh and his friends seek refuge in a cave and discover it is inhabited by an escapee from a nearby mental hospital. Meanwhile, they befriend King Motherwell, a war veteran and rum runner. However, when their innocence is shattered by a murder, Hugh must discover what it means to grow up.