Reading Is Not Spectator Sport

For grades 2-8. Describes activities aimed at involving students in reading, using activites centered around sports books, with the teacher as coach, librarian as general manager and parents as talent scouts.

Pelton shows you how to keep children from striking out in the reading game, offering hundreds of ideas and activities to promote reading. Reading centers, cooperative learning and literature, and thematic units using reading are just a few of the topics covered.

“A blueprint and a guidebook to help us all get involved.”—Senator John Kerry

For grades 2-8. Describes activities aimed at involving students in reading, using activites centered around sports books, with the teacher as coach, librarian as general manager and parents as talent scouts.

This Workbook is a collection of exercises and case studies designed to serve as a companion to Reading Argumentative Texts: Analytic Tools to Improve Understanding. The exercises and case studies track each of the chapters of Reading and provide opportunities for students to hone their skills at using the analytic tools presented in Reading, and to acquire additional analytic tools and concepts. These tools are illustrated through the analysis of complete essays from the mass media, speeches, a sermon, and passages from academic works. The approach is flexible and practical and avoids academic jargon and specific theories of argumentation. As is the case with Reading, this Workbook is grounded in two principles. First, that the meaning of an argumentative text is to be found in the statements that constitute the argument itself, in other statements that are more or less directly related to the argument, and in the structure and context of the text. Accordingly, while this book discusses the analysis of arguments, argument-types, and errors in argumentation (fallacies), it focuses equally on the other sources of meaning of a text. Second, there is no single, authoritative reading of an argumentative text. The interplay of these two premises informs the view that analyzing and understanding an argumentative text is an art and that, within certain well-defined parameters, there are “better” and “worse” readings of a text and not “right” or “wrong” readings. The principal sources of meaning discussed include: (1) the structure of the text (and so the book examines six types of introductions and teaches how to outline and summarize), (2) key sentences, phrases, and words in a text (so the book discusses ambiguity, the difference between factual and normative statements, irony, and rhetoric), (3) context (intellectual, social, political, cultural, and physical context), and (4) the logical connections between terms in an argument (including the four different types of arguments, fallacies, and the distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions). The book is designed to be used in late high school or early college critical reading, critical thinking, rhetoric, or writing courses.

This book is an introduction to acquiring and mastering tools you can use to better understand the meaning of nonfiction, argumentative texts. These texts include editorials in newspapers, magazines, and internet websites; articles, essays, and books in various academic fields (history, philosophy, political science, psychology, sociology); and printed speeches, sermons, and lectures.

An invaluable work for people who need to understand statistics and utilise their results. The book is not technical: its purpose is to teach the reader how to understand and apply statistics. Most of the examples are from education but people in all fields that involve the use of statistics will find this book indispensable. Written with great clarity this is a first-rate statistics book for the non-statistician.