Sing Down The Rain

A narrative poem about the Tohono O'Odham Indian's Saguaro Wine Ceremony, their most important harvest celebration.

Step into a town where all the children are friends, but a drought has made the adults so grumpy they can't stop arguing! Only a miracle can heal this divided town. Folks are so hopeless, they almost don't recognize that miracle when it appears as a woman who specializes in rainsongs. Yet slowly the townspeople realize that with faith they can sustain each other during the dry times, and then sing down the rain together. Joy Cowley's lyrical text and Jan Spivey Gilchrist's impassioned paintings create a story of a community's struggle to believe, and to connect with each other.

The Winona dilemma / Lois Beardslee -- No word for goodbye / Mary TallMountain -- About the contributors.

Now you can use quality children's literature to teach traditional reading skills! Providing a balance between traditional and literature-based instruction, these books include stimulating and instructive lessons based on approximately 150 skills commonly found in basal readers. These lessons utilize a variety of strategies that can be applied to teaching myriad skills-from alphabet and alphabetization to word recognition skills. Each featured book includes a variety of activities and a list of related books. Semantic feature analysis, attribute charts, writing activities, problem-solving, genre analysis, wordplay, and phonetic analysis are just some of the strategies covered. Wonderful tools for enlivening reading instruction, these resources reconcile the need to teach basic skills with the desire to use children's literature.

Poems are about our lives and how they fleetingly unfold - a swaying rope bridge from one culture to another, one person to another. The work of manifesting the sound and feeling of what happens, often from a “place of no language”, forms the ground from which I write. How often have I sat on my doorstep, coffee cup in hand, thinking of other women doing the very same thing across the world. We live in the same universe, though most of us will never meet – except through words. Words have the power to sculpt the very deepest response to this strange, exquisite and terrible journey of life, witness what is here, give shape to what is to come, what may never come. I hope this book will find and touch your life as your unknown presence touches mine.

In the midst of a severe drought, a mysterious woman drives into town claiming she specializes in rainsongs.