Learn how to express fractions as decimals while reading all about venomous snakes! From cunning cobras to bashful Belcher's sea snakes, this math reader will engage students with high-interest content and real-world connections that make learning mathematics fun. This informational text integrates math and literacy skills, and provides students with rich tasks that promote reasoning and critical thinking as they explore math in a meaningful way. Text features such as a glossary, index, and a table of contents increase understanding and build critical literacy skills, and the practice problems and mathematical charts and diagrams help develop students' math and reading skills. The DOK-leveled Math Talk section includes questions that facilitate mathematical discourse and activities that students can respond to at home or school. Let's Explore Math sidebars and the extensive Problem Solving section provide numerous opportunities for students to practice what they have learned and develop their higher-order thinking skills. Working with fractions and decimals is fun and easy with this engaging math reader! This 6-Pack includes six copies of this Level S title and a lesson plan that specifically supports Guided Reading instruction.

A thrilling tale of encounters with nature’s masters of biochemistry From the coasts of Indonesia to the rainforests of Peru, venomous animals are everywhere—and often lurking out of sight. Humans have feared them for centuries, long considering them the assassins and pariahs of the natural world. Now, in Venomous, the biologist Christie Wilcox investigates and illuminates the animals of our nightmares, arguing that they hold the keys to a deeper understanding of evolution, adaptation, and immunity. She reveals just how venoms function and what they do to the human body. With Wilcox as our guide, we encounter a jellyfish with tentacles covered in stinging cells that can kill humans in minutes; a two-inch caterpillar with toxic bristles that trigger hemorrhaging; and a stunning blue-ringed octopus capable of inducing total paralysis. How do these animals go about their deadly work? How did they develop such intricate, potent toxins? Wilcox takes us around the world and down to the cellular level to find out. Throughout her journey, Wilcox meets the intrepid scientists who risk their lives studying these lethal beasts, as well as “self-immunizers” who deliberately expose themselves to snakebites. Along the way, she puts her own life on the line, narrowly avoiding being envenomated herself. Drawing on her own research, Wilcox explains how venom scientists are untangling the mechanisms of some of our most devastating diseases, and reports on pharmacologists who are already exploiting venoms to produce lifesaving drugs. We discover that venomous creatures are in fact keystone species that play crucial roles in their ecosystems and ours—and for this alone, they ought to be protected and appreciated. Thrilling and surprising at every turn, Venomous will change everything you thought you knew about the planet’s most dangerous animals.

Getting Ready for the 4th Grade Assessment Test: Help Improve Your Child’s Math and English Skills – Many parents are expressing a demand for books that will help their children succeed and excel on the fourth grade assessment tests in math and English –especially in areas where children have limited access to computers. This book will help students practice basic math concepts, i.e., number sense and applications as well as more difficult math, such as patterns, functions, and algebra. English skills will include practice in reading comprehension, writing, and vocabulary. Rubrics are included for self-evaluation.

Learn how to express fractions as decimals while reading all about venomous snakes! From cunning cobras to bashful Belchers sea snakes, this 6-Pack of math readers will engage students with high-interest content and real-world connections that make learning mathematics fun. This informational text integrates math and literacy skills, and provides students with rich tasks that promote reasoning and critical thinking as they explore math in a meaningful way. Text features such as a glossary, index, and a table of contents increase understanding and build critical literacy skills, and the practice problems and mathematical charts and diagrams help develop students' math and reading skills. The DOK-leveled Math Talk section includes questions that facilitate mathematical discourse and activities that students can respond to at home or school. Let's Explore Math sidebars and the extensive Problem Solving section provide numerous opportunities for students to practice what they have learned and develop their higher-order thinking skills. This 6-Pack includes six copies of this title and a lesson plan.

Too often, students who fail a grade or a course receive remediation that ends up widening rather than closing achievement gaps. According to veteran classroom teacher and educational consultant Suzy Pepper Rollins, the true answer to supporting struggling students lies in acceleration. In Learning in the Fast Lane, she lays out a plan of action that teachers can use to immediately move underperforming students in the right direction and differentiate instruction for all learners—even those who excel academically. This essential guide identifies eight high-impact, research-based instructional approaches that will help you * Make standards and learning goals explicit to students. * Increase students' vocabulary—a key to their academic success. * Build students' motivation and self-efficacy so that they become active, optimistic participants in class. * Provide rich, timely feedback that enables students to improve when it counts. * Address skill and knowledge gaps within the context of new learning. Students deserve no less than the most effective strategies available. These hands-on, ready-to-implement practices will enable you to provide all students with compelling, rigorous, and engaging learning experiences.

Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Studies of mechanisms in the brain that allow complicated things to happen in a coordinated fashion have produced some of the most spectacular discoveries in neuroscience. This book provides eloquent support for the idea that spontaneous neuron activity, far from being mere noise, is actually the source of our cognitive abilities. It takes a fresh look at the coevolution of structure and function in the mammalian brain, illustrating how self-emerged oscillatory timing is the brain's fundamental organizer of neuronal information. The small-world-like connectivity of the cerebral cortex allows for global computation on multiple spatial and temporal scales. The perpetual interactions among the multiple network oscillators keep cortical systems in a highly sensitive "metastable" state and provide energy-efficient synchronizing mechanisms via weak links. In a sequence of "cycles," György Buzsáki guides the reader from the physics of oscillations through neuronal assembly organization to complex cognitive processing and memory storage. His clear, fluid writing-accessible to any reader with some scientific knowledge-is supplemented by extensive footnotes and references that make it just as gratifying and instructive a read for the specialist. The coherent view of a single author who has been at the forefront of research in this exciting field, this volume is essential reading for anyone interested in our rapidly evolving understanding of the brain.