North Carolina PE teacher Marty Mentzer's Basketball Poets club has helped her elementary school students shoot for a new level of achievement. Combining two seemingly diametric opposites--the love of literature and the love of sharp-elbowed lunges toward a suspended hoop--her four-year-old Basketball Poets club has managed to raise kids'…

It is well known that developing a love of language helps children become successful readers and writers, and one way to teach children to love words is to introduce them to poetry. This article describes the Sallye B. Mathis Elementary School, a challenged urban school in Jacksonville, Florida, is full of children who love words because they love…

Upper-elementary students encounter a sometimes dizzying array of traditional and nontraditional texts both in and outside of the classroom. This practical handbook helps teachers in grades 4-6 harness the instructional potential of fiction, poetry, and plays; informational texts; graphic novels; digital storytelling; Web-based and multimodal…

Promoting the value of a literature-based curriculum, this curriculum guide presents selections of Caribbean literature and related learning activities designed to enhance Canadian students' awareness and knowledge of Caribbean culture. After an introductory section that discusses the history of the Caribbean region and tracing roots through…

This paper reviews the role of black experience in worldwide literature, focusing primarily on particular texts from the viewpoint of colonial whites in South Africa. Black people were represented as savages, comic buffoons, or faithful servants and slaves; all three representations dehumanized, rationalized, and justified the oppression of black…

Using poetry to enrich the lives of adult literacy students, this book provides nine complete, detailed lessons using poetry that will help teachers and tutors of new adult readers and writers. Each lesson in the book focuses on a different type of poetry and is presented in a clear, step-by-step format. The book also offers advice on dealing with…

Insights from research on young children's concepts and attitudes about poetry can assist teachers as they develop appropriate instructional poetry programs. Research reveals that teachers' choices of poems often do not correlate well with children's choices. Characteristics preferred by children include: themes important to children, humorous…

This memoir describes August Fruge's 32 years as head of the University of California Press. Early chapters describe Berkeley, where the press is located, in the 1940s, conflicts with the Printing Department, the role of the faculty-run editorial committee, and setting new directions for the press. Three chapters describe looking for titles to…

Designed to help teachers, librarians, and parents introduce books of exceptional literary and artistic merit, accuracy, and appeal to preschool through sixth grade children, this annotated bibliography presents nearly 1,800 annotations of approximately 2,000 books (2 or more books in a series appear in a single review) published between 1988 and…

Exploring the range and diversity of humorous literature for children, this book attempts to remedy the past neglect of children's humorous books by taking humor seriously. The first five chapters of the book discuss what children find funny and at what age, different kinds of humor found in children's literature, passages of humorous tone in…

This annotated bibliography of instructional media in communication skills presents annotations of 112 books and videotapes for students in grades from pre-kindergarten through grade 12, and of 38 books and videos for teachers. The material in the bibliography for students consists mostly of poetry collections published in 1990 and 1991. The…

Developed in a wide variety of classrooms for students in grades 4-6 and in collaboration with teachers who have used the material successfully, this two-volume set presents a way to get students excited about words. The set can also be used with younger and older students, even with adults. The two volumes provide: an "up-on-your-feet,…

The job of teachers of composition is to teach students how to write, and what they teach them to write is the school essay. Yet, if they stop to see the school essay for what it really is, they will discover that for all their humanistic claims of wanting to give students voices, the genre is one that actually works to exclude many of these…

A number of papers by secondary school German language teachers resulting from an institute on incorporation of literature into classroom instruction jointly sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Goethe Institute of Germany are collected here. They represent classroom methods and materials developed by institute…

Focusing on ways in which literature can be used in the integration of reading and writing, this book is meant to help teachers prepare a literature-based classroom that encourages reading and writing. The book contains specific practical ideas and activities for organizing a reading/writing classroom, bibliographies of children's books at the end…