Nancy Polette S E Is For Everybody

Did you know A famous French chef created her greatest recipe BEFORE she learned to cook! The first airmail letters went by train. McDonald's opened its first restaurant as a barbecue stand. The best way to prevent a toothache is to wear a dead mole around your neck. These and many other wacky but true facts serve as springboards to research about people, places, food, animals, and historical events. Students are asked to create poems, games, quizzes and other products in lieu of traditional written reports in this new book of ideas keyed to standards in writing, reading comprehension and information literacy. Based on one of Nancy Polette's most popular workshops (Research Without Copying), this book will appeal to school librarians and teachers in grades 4-8. Extensive bibliographies of recommended resources add to the usability of this title.

Get young readers hooked on some of the best titles in juvenile literature, ranging from humor to mystery to fantasy, with unusual and effective methods like games. Getting students to want to read is one of the greatest challenges facing middle school teachers and librarians. Determining which are the "right books" that can spark a child's mental awakening is also difficult. This book from prolific author Nancy Polette furnishes interesting and fun games to pique students' interest in junior novels that are worth reading—carefully selected titles that will contribute to their educational and emotional growth. Gateway to Reading: 250+ Author Games and Booktalks to Motivate Middle Readers is a powerful tool for luring middle-school students away from the distractions of 21st-century media and introducing them to junior or 'tween novels that they won't be able to put down. By presenting children with a challenge to engage their minds—racing to decode book titles, or using their creativity to come up with titles of their own, for example—students are naturally drawn towards reading these books from well-known children's authors.

Using shaggy dog stories based on classic literature, the Polettes address common spelling and grammatical errors and the ways in which children can be taught to read critically to recognize them. Stories such as Rapunzel, Alice, The Hare and the Tortoise, and King Arthur, purposely embedded with common errors, have been pretested in teacher workshops given by Nancy Polette and in Dr. Keith Polette's classes at the University of Texas, El Paso. Teachers found them specific enough to be used directly in the writing instruction curriculum and fun for students to read and try to figure out.