Tickle Your Teacher

A bumper book bursting with jokes, anecdotes, insults, activities and silly verses about school life. Laugh your itchy, grey regulation socks off at vile canteen meals, playground mayhem, beastly bullies and terrible teachers! Pupil: There's a dead fly in my soup! Dinner lady: What do you expect in school dinners? A live one?! Q: Why did the art teacher take a pencil to bed? A: Because she wanted to draw the curtains.

From tall tales, trickster tales, and noodlehead stories to hoaxes, urban legends, riddles and songs-here are more than 70 stories from around the world and across the centuries that you can pull out of your story bag at a moment's notice-to read aloud or re-tell before, between and after daily activities; or integrate into lessons and learning opportunities. Most take just minutes to read. The country or culture of origin is noted for each story, and there is a detailed bibliography, introductory notes on humor and folklore, and a discussion of the healing power of humor.

Only 50 percent of kids growing up in poverty will earn a high school diploma. Just one in ten will graduate college. Compelled by these troubling statistics, Heather Kirn Lanier joined Teach For America (TFA), a program that thrusts eager but inexperienced college graduates into America’s most impoverished areas to teach, asking them to do whatever is necessary to catch their disadvantaged kids up to the rest of the nation. With little more than a five-week teacher boot camp and the knowledge that David Simon referred to her future school as “The Terrordome,” the altruistic and naïve Lanier devoted herself to attaining the program’s goals but met obstacles on all fronts. The building itself was in such poor condition that tiles fell from the ceiling at random. Kids from the halls barged into classes all day, disrupting even the most carefully planned educational activities. In the middle of one lesson, a wandering student lit her classroom door on fire. Some colleagues, instantly suspicious of TFA’s intentions, withheld their help and supplies. (“They think you’re trying to ‘save’ the children,” one teacher said.) And although high school students can be by definition resistant, in west Baltimore they threw eggs, slashed tires, and threatened teachers’ lives. Within weeks, Lanier realized that the task she was charged with—achieving quantifiable gains in her students’ learning—would require something close to a miracle. Superbly written and timely, Teaching in the Terrordome casts an unflinching gaze on one of America’s “dropout factory” high schools. Though Teach For America often touts its most successful teacher stories, in this powerful memoir Lanier illuminates a more common experience of “Teaching For America” with thoughtful complexity, a poet’s eye, and an engaging voice. As hard as Lanier worked to become a competent teacher, she found that in “The Terrordome,” idealism wasn’t enough. To persevere, she had to rely on grit, humility, a little comedy, and a willingness to look failure in the face. As she adjusted to a chaotic school administration, crumbling facilities, burned-out colleagues, and students who perceived their school for the failure it was, she gained perspective on the true state of the crisis TFA sets out to solve. Ultimately, she discovered that contrary to her intentions, survival in the so-called Charm City was a high expectation.

Sit up straight, pay attention, and fasten your giggle belts, class! Here come more dangerously-funny poems from one of the most hilarious and 'heartful' children's poets in the solar system! Ted Scheu perfectly captures kids' laughs and concerns about school and life in I Tickled My Teachers. And, once again, Peter Lourie's stunning photographs of kid-faces are guaranteed to put a smile on yours. Kids ages 6 to 11 will find real-life tips on how to do their best in school, or at least survive with a smile. You'll be totally tickled (and so will your teachers, whether they like it or not!) I Tickled My Teachers is a hilarious companion to Ted Scheu's other funny poetry collections, I Froze My Mother, I Threw My Brother Out, and Now I Know My ZBCs, all from Young Poets' Press. I Tickled My Teachers inspired Jean Marzollo, the author of the "I Spy" series to write, "This collection is a delightful, funny, and often poignant expression of today's school children. It will amuse and inspire kids to write, write, write!"

Making a success of your teaching placement is a vital part of achieving qualified teacher status (QTS). With a focus on practical strategies and closely referenced to OfSTED, this book provides essential guidance on how to translate the ′outstanding′ criteria into practice. The authors break down the OfSTED criteria so that you can easily identify the skills and knowledge you need to make the most of your placements. Packed with case studies, practical tasks and links to the QTS standards, the book is structured around: " developing professional knowledge " planning " how to be an outstanding teacher " classroom management " teamwork " assessment " Continuing Professional Development (CPD) This book will help trainees make the difficult jump from ′good′ to achieving a Grade 1 ′outstanding′ on their placements. Jonathan Glazzard is Course Leader BA (Hons) in Early Primary Education at the University of Huddersfield. Jane Stokoe is Foundation Stage and KS1 leader, SENCO and Assistant Headteacher at Hoyland Springwood Primary School, Barnsley.

Meet Monkey. Tickletastic Monkey. He's the best tickler in the world, ever; even his mum says so. And there's nothing he loves more than tickling ALL his friends at playtime! But what happens if some of his friends don't want to be tickled? This picture book shows children aged 3-6 what consent is and why it's so important. With parent and teacher guidance included, it is an ideal resource to use in the classroom to help young children understand issues of consent and personal boundaries, and to teach them to consider the feelings of others. The book can be used in a variety of contexts - as an entertaining story, or as part of a lesson with the included guide for parents and carers - and its fun pictures and humour are guaranteed to keep the attention of young children across multiple readings. An ideal tool to encourage early understanding of consent, Ask First, Monkey! helps to empower children to respect themselves and others, and teach them that a reason for 'no' is never needed - it just needs to be respected.

Grounded in theory and best-practices research, this practical text provides teachers with 40 strategies for using fiction and non-fiction trade books to teach in five key content areas: language arts and reading, social studies, mathematics, science, and the arts. Each strategy provides everything a teacher needs to get started: a classroom example that models the strategy, a research-based rationale, relevant content standards, suggested books, reader-response questions and prompts, assessment ideas, examples of how to adapt the strategy for different grade levels (K–2, 3–5, and 6–8), and ideas for differentiating instruction for English language learners and struggling students. Throughout the book, student work samples and classroom vignettes bring the content to life.