Reading Champs

Reading is one of the most important fundamental skills that children learn. Unfortunately, many children still struggle to read proficiently, leaving parents to seek alternative educational environments and educators to seek innovative teaching methods. With that in mind, seasoned reading specialist Rita Wirtz shares a commonsense, time-tested reading guide that offers a step-by-step approach for successfully instructing the fundamentals of reading to readers of all ages. Wirtz, a language arts and reading specialist who has taught at all levels for forty years, presents mini-lessons that focus on basic phonics instruction, proven strategies, and specific skills to help students • recognize words; • increase reading speed and fluency; • build and boost vocabulary; • correct basic reading errors and difficulties; and • build confidence as readers. Reading Champs provides fundamental building blocks and success secrets for any parent, tutor, and teacher with an aspiration to transform struggling readers into reading champions.

Follows a young boy, Luka, who competes in the Skateboarding Championships. Suggested level: junior.

Motivating Teen and Preteen Readers: How Teachers and Parents Can Lead the Way contains over 1,000 diverse, original, fun, creative, absurd, challenging questions on reading that will inspire adolescent reading lives from the inside out. The four books of questions contained in this volume are designed to help kids help themselves find their ways to a desire to read.

Better grab some tissues. Stories from a Teacher’s Heart: Memories of Love, Life, and Family celebrates life’s seasons, transitions, weathering storms, and greeting every day with purpose and gratitude. Most of all, Rita Wirtz inspires us to be our most optimistic selves, with determination to make a difference. Savor heartwarming stories about life, learning, and love as Rita shares the last few years of her journey as a widow, from the mountains of California to the vibrant community of Eugene, Oregon. Along the way you meet a cast of colorful characters from her schoolhouse and home. Take your pick of stories from eight uniquely interesting themes. Rita selected fifty-two favorites from a series of blogs written as a featured blogger for BAM Radio Network, EdWords. What in the heck do lemonade stands, play, homework, cursive writing, retentions, sleepovers, and speed-reading hacks have to do with one another? Everything in Rita’s world as mother, nana, and teacher, it all blends into a glorious recipe for a life, well lived. You’ll see!

Reading is a fundamental skill children learn, but many struggle to read proficiently. The author is a reading specialist who shares her insights and provides a commonsense approach to teaching this basic skill.

“Marvelous . . . [Vonnegut] wheels out all the complaints about America and makes them seem fresh, funny, outrageous, hateful and lovable.”—The New York Times In Breakfast of Champions, one of Kurt Vonnegut’s most beloved characters, the aging writer Kilgore Trout, finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. What follows is murderously funny satire, as Vonnegut looks at war, sex, racism, success, politics, and pollution in America and reminds us how to see the truth. “Free-wheeling, wild and great . . . uniquely Vonnegut.”—Publishers Weekly

Come along on a field trip with the esteemed American naturalist May Theilgaard Watts to see how nature, history and culture have written their stories on the landscapes of Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Norway and Britain. She makes a lively guide, knowledgeable, literary, witty and opinionated, drawing on botany, ecology, and geography, as well as literature and folklore, to explain how a place came to look and feel the way it does.In this sequel to her popular book Reading the Landscape of America, Watts explored the hills of Italy, the grouse heath of Britain, the Black Forest of Germany, the limestone plateaus of France, and much more, explaining the forces that shaped these landscapes and continue to change them. Illustrated with dozens of pen and ink by the author. Includes a key to identifying the trees of Europe.