Read Reflect Respond Book 2

The CCSS emphasizes nonfiction as an essential component to any successful reading program. The reading selections in Read, Reflect, Respond introduce students to the framework of content-rich nonfiction. Students connect to the text, exploring their own experiences, opinions, and prior knowledge. They will quickly become familiar with the various kinds of responses required to the comprehension questions, including thinking critically about the material. This familiarity will alert them to important clues in the text reading material. They will learn to focus on the main idea, key vocabulary, and important facts. Each book contains 54 two-page content-rich nonfiction articles and comprehension questions, plus two “super lessons.” Answer keys are in the back of each book.

*Audio Enhanced Read-Along EbookNominee for 2017 Cybils Award, Best Fiction Picture Book, Children's and Young AdultGrandmother Thorn treasures her garden, where not a leaf, twig or pebble is allowed out of place. But when a persistent plant sprouts without her permission, Grandmother begins to unravel. "Her hair became as tangled as the vines on her fence. Her garden fell into disrepair. One morning, she did not rake the path." A dear friend, the passage of seasons, and a gift only nature can offer help Grandmother Thorn discover that some things are beyond our control, and that sweetness can blossom in unexpected places.

Many of us are searching continually for that just-right book for each and every one of our students. It is my hope to help you find those books. More importantly, I hope to help you guide students to the next great book and the one after that. That is the purpose of Reading Ladders. Because it is not sufficient to find just one book for each reader. -Teri Lesesne "I finished the Twilight Series-now what?" With Reading Ladders, the answer to a question like this can become the first rung on a student's climb to greater engagement with books, to full independence, and beyond to a lifetime of passionate reading. "The goal of reading ladders," writes Teri Lesesne, "is to slowly move students from where they are to where we would like them to be." With reading ladders you start with the authors, genres, or subjects your readers like then connect them to book after book-each a little more complex or challenging than the last. Teri not only shares ready-to-go ladders, but her suggestions will help you: select books to create your own reading ladders build a classroom library that supports every student's needs use reading ladders to bolster content-area knowledge and build independence assess where students are at and how far they've climbed. "If we are about creating lifetime readers and not just readers who can utilize phonological awareness and context clues to bubble in answers on a state test," writes Teri Lesesne, "then we need to help our students form lasting relationships with books and authors and genres and formats." Use Reading Ladders, help your students start their climb, and guide them to new heights in reading.

“An intense snapshot of the chain reaction caused by pulling a trigger.” —Booklist (starred review) “Astonishing.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “A tour de force.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) A Newbery Honor Book A Coretta Scott King Honor Book A Printz Honor Book A Time Best YA Book of All Time (2021) A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner for Young Adult Literature Longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature Winner of the Walter Dean Myers Award An Edgar Award Winner for Best Young Adult Fiction Parents’ Choice Gold Award Winner An Entertainment Weekly Best YA Book of 2017 A Vulture Best YA Book of 2017 A Buzzfeed Best YA Book of 2017 An ode to Put the Damn Guns Down, this is New York Times bestselling author Jason Reynolds’s electrifying novel that takes place in sixty potent seconds—the time it takes a kid to decide whether or not he’s going to murder the guy who killed his brother. A cannon. A strap. A piece. A biscuit. A burner. A heater. A chopper. A gat. A hammer A tool for RULE Or, you can call it a gun. That’s what fifteen-year-old Will has shoved in the back waistband of his jeans. See, his brother Shawn was just murdered. And Will knows the rules. No crying. No snitching. Revenge. That’s where Will’s now heading, with that gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, the gun that was his brother’s gun. He gets on the elevator, seventh floor, stoked. He knows who he’s after. Or does he? As the elevator stops on the sixth floor, on comes Buck. Buck, Will finds out, is who gave Shawn the gun before Will took the gun. Buck tells Will to check that the gun is even loaded. And that’s when Will sees that one bullet is missing. And the only one who could have fired Shawn’s gun was Shawn. Huh. Will didn’t know that Shawn had ever actually USED his gun. Bigger huh. BUCK IS DEAD. But Buck’s in the elevator? Just as Will’s trying to think this through, the door to the next floor opens. A teenage girl gets on, waves away the smoke from Dead Buck’s cigarette. Will doesn’t know her, but she knew him. Knew. When they were eight. And stray bullets had cut through the playground, and Will had tried to cover her, but she was hit anyway, and so what she wants to know, on that fifth floor elevator stop, is, what if Will, Will with the gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, MISSES. And so it goes, the whole long way down, as the elevator stops on each floor, and at each stop someone connected to his brother gets on to give Will a piece to a bigger story than the one he thinks he knows. A story that might never know an END…if Will gets off that elevator. Told in short, fierce staccato narrative verse, Long Way Down is a fast and furious, dazzlingly brilliant look at teenage gun violence, as could only be told by Jason Reynolds.

In Crossing the Threshold, Metaphors of an Evolving Faith, Harlene Walker invites us to accompany her on a metaphorical hike through her cathedral forest while she explores her Christian faith and spirituality. In the land of "don't know," the landscape changes radically until we finally come to an open garden of compassion. Her faith-life evolves: realistically she recognizes that our society has evolved from post-Christian to post-theistic. In this new paradigm, as she laughs, cries, and feels frustrated or surprised, she sees both her spirituality and her faith strengthen. She has prepared herself, and us, to grow deeper into the wisdom of the heart and soul. As we accompany her through many personal conversions, Walker shows us that crossing thresholds is the work of body, mind, and spirit, and that there is more than one threshold to cross.