Self Portrait With Turtles

A renowned artist, author, and naturalist, David M. Carroll is exceptionally skilled at capturing nature on the page. In Self-Portrait with Turtles, he reflects on his own life, recounting the crucial moments that shaped his passions and abilities. Beginning with his first sighting of a wild turtle at age eight, Carroll describes his lifelong fascination with swamps and the creatures that inhabit them. He also traces his evolution as an artist, from the words of encouragement he received in high school to his college days in Boston to his life with his wife and family. Self-Portrait with Turtles is a remarkable memoir, a marvelous and exhilarating account of a life well lived.

Acclaimed naturalist David M. Carroll guides readers through the yearly cycle of the freshwater turtle. With lyrical yet factual prose observations, Carroll also includes more than 100 of his carefully executed full-color drawings.

"Mike Anderson explores incentive systems, which do not motivate achievement or a love of learning, and the six intrinsic motivators that lead to real student engagement"--

Imagine if going to school meant more than preparing kids for a test, teaching a canned curriculum, and training students for their future as workers. What if school were also about cultivating students to be caring, community-involved citizens and critical, creative thinkers who love to read? In Caring Hearts & Critical Minds, teacher-author Steven Wolk shows teachers how to help students become better readers as well as better people. I want [my students] to be thinkers and have rich conversations regarding critical issues in the text and be able to formulate opinions regarding these issues, says Leslie Rector, a sixth-grade teacher who collaborated with Wolk on some of the units featured in this book. Wolk demonstrates how to integrate inquiry learning, exciting and contemporary literature, and teaching for social responsibility across the curriculum. He takes teachers step-by-step through the process of designing an inquiry-based literature unit and then provides five full units used in real middle-grade classrooms. Featuring a remarkable range of recommended resources and hundreds of novels from across the literary genres, Caring Hearts & Critical Minds gives teachers a blueprint for creating dynamic units with rigorous lessons about topics kids care about'sfrom media and the environment to personal happiness and global poverty. Wolk shows teachers how to find stimulating, real-world complex texts called for in the Common Core State Standards and integrate them into literature units. I know from experience that a great book changes the reader, says Karen Tellez, an eighth-grade teacher featured in the book. For me, books have helped me escape, fall in love, recover from heartbreak, and have broken open my mind from the age of twelve. . . . I hope [my students] gain better reading comprehension, confidence as readers, connections to the characters and events, a curiosity for the world, and tolerance for others. Caring Hearts & Critical Minds shows teachers how to turn these hopes and goals into reality.

With a naturalist’s eye and a poet’s instinct, acclaimed nature writer Jim Crumley traces the place of our first and most famous National Park in the evolution of global conservation and pleads the case for a far-reaching reappraisal of its wildness. Books of the Year, Mark Avery The Lake District is one of England’s busiest national parks. Many people believe that wildness is long gone from the fells, lakes, tarns and becks, yet, within its boundaries, Jim Crumley sets out to prove them wrong—to find “a new way of seeing and writing about this most seen and written about of landscapes." With a naturalist’s eye and a poet’s instinct, he is drawn to Lakeland’s turned-aside places where nature still thrives, from low-lying shores to a high mountain oakwood that is not even on the map. Through backwaters and backwoods, Crumley traces this captivating land’s place in the evolution of global conservation and pleads the case for a far-reaching reappraisal of all of Lakeland’s wildness.

This is a powerful story of hope and friendship, perfect for fans of Wonder and The Goldfish Boy. Exploring self-image, family and grief, this book will make you laugh and cry. Twelve-year-old Will likes two things: turtles and the local nature reserve. Everything else is a nightmare, because Will has a facial difference that has earned him an unfortunate nickname. But when Will’s Bar Mitzvah community service project introduces him to RJ, a boy who is confined to a hospital room, Will discovers they both have strength to lend the other and that life is too short to live in a shell.

"A genius, a madman, a national treasure" (Annie Dillard) takes readers on a miraculous year-long journey through the wetlands, revealing why they are so important to his life, to ours, to all life on Earth. 50 drawings.

Presents a collection of pen-and-ink-illustrated reflections on the ecology of wetland creatures, in a volume that traces the life cycles of such subjects as hawks, tree frogs, and rare wood and spotted turtles.