Three Cups of Tea

In 1993 Greg Mortenson was the exhausted survivor of a failed attempt to ascend K2, an American climbing bum wandering emaciated and lost through Pakistans Karakoram Himalaya. After he was taken in and nursed back to health by the people of an impoverished Pakistani village, Mortenson promised to return one day and build them a school. From that rash, earnest promise grew one of the most incredible humanitarian campaigns of our timeGreg Mortensons one-man mission to counteract extremism by building schools, especially for girls, throughout the breeding ground of the Taliban. Award-winning journalist David Oliver Relin has collaborated on this spellbinding account of Mortensons incredible accomplishments in a region where Americans are often feared and hated. In pursuit of his goal, Mortenson has survived kidnapping, fatwas issued by enraged mullahs, repeated death threats, and wrenching separations from his wife and children. But his success speaks for itself. At last count, his Central Asia Institute had built fifty-five schools. Three Cups of Tea is at once an unforgettable adventure and the inspiring true story of how one man really is changing the worldone school at a time.

The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation

The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation is filled with easy-to-understand rules,real-world examples, dozens of reproducible exercises, and pre- and post-tests. This handy workbook is ideal for teachers, students in middle school through college, ESL students, homeschoolers, and professionals. Valuable for anyone who takes tests or writes reports, letters, Web pages, e-mails, or blogs, The Blue Book offers instant answers to everyday English usage questions.

The Daily Five

Do you love teaching but feel exhausted from the energy you expend cajoling, disciplining, and directing students on a daily basis? If so, you'll want to meet ?The Sisters?, Gail Boushey and Joan Moser. Based on literacy learning and motivation research, they created a structure called The Daily Five which has been practiced and refined in their own classrooms for ten years, and shared with thousands of teachers throughout the United States. The Daily Five is a series of literacy tasks (reading to self, reading with someone, writing, word work, and listening to reading) which students complete daily while the teacher meets with small groups or confers with individuals. This book not only explains the philosophy behind the structure, but shows you how to carefully and systematically train your students to participate in each of the five components. Explicit modeling practice, reflecting and refining take place during the launching phase, preparing the foundation for a year of meaningful content instruction tailored to meet the needs of each child. The Daily Five is more than a management system or a curriculum framework; it is a structure that will help students develop the habits that lead to a lifetime of independent literacy.

Break Through Rapid Reading

A previous National Director of Education for Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics presents his do-it-yourself program for increasing reading speed and boosting comprehension. "Speed reading is one of the truly useful educational ideas of the last few years, and this book can be the least expensive and most efficient way you can learn it." --William Proxmire, United States Senator. The perfect answer to today's information explosion, Peter Kump's rapid reading method has already helped thousands of people to read up to eight times faster, with better concentration and retention. This program brings together the best of what classroom speed reading courses have to offer, and distills fundamental principles and skills that can be learned at home with the help of the drills and exercises provided. And because it lets readers choose their own material and set their own pace, it's the ideal method for busy people juggling a full schedule. Breakthrough Rapid Reading makes conquering information overload a reality. So whether it's cutting down on that backlog of business reports and technical matter or scaling that mountain of newspapers and leisure reading, getting up to speed is only a matter of time and practice.

Everyday Editing

Editing is often seen as one item on a list of steps in the writing process?usually put somewhere near the end, and often completely crowded out of writer's workshop. Too many times daily editing lessons happen in a vacuum, with no relationship to what students are writing. In Everyday Editing, Jeff Anderson asks teachers to reflect on what sort of message this approach sends to students. Does it tell them that editing and revision are meaningful parts of the writing process, or just a hunt for errors with a 50/50 chance of getting it right?comma or no comma? Instead of rehearsing errors and drilling students on what's wrong with a sentence, Jeff invites students to look carefully at their writing along with mentor texts, and to think about how punctuation, grammar, and style can be best used to hone and communicate meaning. Written in Jeff's characteristically witty style, this refreshing and practical guide offers an overview of his approach to editing within the writing workshop as well as ten detailed sets of lessons covering everything from apostrophes to serial commas. These lessons can be used throughout the year to replace Daily Oral Language or error-based editing strategies with a more effective method for improving student writing.