Photos of ten different countries of the world, showing their unique houses, all built out of natural matierals. With information on everyday acitivties of food gathering, cooking, sleeping, working, and playing.

How can you help students find meaning in informational texts and become independent strategic readers and thinkers? Nonfiction Reading Power gives teachers a wealth of effective strategies for helping students think while they read material in all subject areas. Using the best children's books to motivate students, Adrienne Gear shows teachers how help students zoom-in, question and infer; find the main idea, make connections, and transform what's on the printed page. Key introductory concept lessons for each of the five reading powers provide valuable insight into the purpose of each strategy. The book also explores the particular features of nonfiction and offers lists of key books organized around strategies and subject areas.

The Common Core State Standards require schools to include writing in a variety of genres across the disciplines. Engaging Students in Academic Literacies provides specific information to plan and carry out genre-based writing instruction in English for K-5 students within various content areas. Informed by systemic functional linguistics—a theory of language IN USE in particular ways for particular audiences and social purposes—it guides teachers in developing students’ ability to construct texts using structural and linguistic features of the written language. This approach to teaching writing and academic language is effective in addressing the persistent achievement gap between ELLs and "mainstream" students, especially in the context of current reforms in the U.S. Transforming systemic functional linguistics and genre theory into concrete classroom tools for designing, implementing, and reflecting on instruction and providing essential scaffolding for teachers to build their own knowledge of its essential elements applied to teaching, the text includes strategies for apprenticing students to writing in all genres, features of elementary students’ writing, and examples of practice.

No child can walk through a puddle of mud without a gigantic smile, and while the stuff might be the spring-time bane of grownups, children just love mud. Muddy Boots targets kids and families who value outdoor exploration and grandparents who long for their grandchildren to have the same unfettered time in nature as they did. The book features a wide range of hands-on activities for kids, including mud play, forts, animal tracking and forest wisdom, foraging, insects and worms, bird watching and bird feeding, and many small things for kids to make. Although not primarily about mud, the activities do encourage all hands to get dirty as they explore the world around them.

Whispers from the Hills is a collection of three essays, thirty nine poems and three Haiku. The three essays vividly depict the life of a young boy growing up in Fairlea, West Virginia in late 1949 and the early1950s. The poems have something for everyone from the very young to the senior citizen. The Humorous section will have you rolling in the aisles as the author pokes fun at the ordinary things of life. The Contemplative section will make you think and perhaps see things from a different perspective. The Love section will transport you into a realm to which everyone should go at some time in their life. Once there, you might never want to leave.

They are the Season sisters, bound by blood, driven apart by a tragedy. Now they are about to embark on a bittersweet journey into the unknown—an odyssey of promise and forgiveness, of loss and rediscovery. Jillian, Beatrice and Rose have gathered for the funeral of their younger sister, Meredith. Her death, and the legacy she leaves them, will trigger a cross-country journey in search of a stranger with the power to mend their shattered lives. As the emotions of the past reverberate into the present, Jillian, Beatrice and Rose search for the girls they once were, in hopes of finding what they really lost: the women they were meant to be.

Essays that pay tribute to the wide-ranging influence of the late Herbert Simon, by friends and colleagues. Herbert Simon (1916-2001), in the course of a long and distinguished career in the social and behavioral sciences, made lasting contributions to many disciplines, including economics, psychology, computer science, and artificial intelligence. In 1978 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for his research into the decision-making process within economic organizations. His well-known book The Sciences of the Artificial addresses the implications of the decision-making and problem-solving processes for the social sciences. This book (the title is a variation on the title of Simon's autobiography, Models of My Life) is a collection of short essays, all original, by colleagues from many fields who felt Simon's influence and mourn his loss. Mixing reminiscence and analysis, the book represents "a small acknowledgment of a large debt." Each of the more than forty contributors was asked to write about the one work by Simon that he or she had found most influential. The editors then grouped the essays into four sections: "Modeling Man," "Organizations and Administration," "Modeling Systems," and "Minds and Machines." The contributors include such prominent figures as Kenneth Arrow, William Baumol, William Cooper, Gerd Gigerenzer, Daniel Kahneman, David Klahr, Franco Modigliani, Paul Samuelson, and Vernon Smith. Although they consider topics as disparate as "Is Bounded Rationality Unboundedly Rational?" and "Personal Recollections from 15 Years of Monthly Meetings," each essay is a testament to the legacy of Herbert Simon—to see the unity rather than the divergences among disciplines.