Powerful Understanding explores effective ways to build social-emotional skills and help students make connections, question what they read, and reflect on their learning as they develop into stronger readers and learners. Lessons based in both strategic and critical thinking revolve around core anchor books that help integrate inquiry into everything you teach — from social responsibility, to immigration, to life cycles. This highly readable book includes a wealth of classroom examples and extensive hands-on activities designed to help students to think more deeply, learn more widely, and develop a more powerful understanding of what it means to be a responsible and compassionate person.

Academic study of children's literature has explored various aspects of diversity; however, little research has examined Canadian books that portray characters with disabilities. This relevant and timely text addresses the significant dearth of research by exploring the treatment of disability in Canadian literature for young people. Engaging and highly accessible, this text will assist teachers, teacher educators, and teacher candidates in finding and using books about characters where disability is a part of their characterization, supporting the development of curricula that reflect critical literacy and social justice issues. Stories for Every Classroom explores the historical patterns and trends, theoretical frameworks, and critical literacy methods used to understand and teach children's literature and its portrayal of characters with disabilities. It provides educators with curriculum ideas and enriches the body of resources shared with children in K-12 settings for the purposes of developing imagination, empathy, and understanding of self and others. Featuring author portraits, comprehensive annotated bibliographies of contemporary Canadian children's books that depict characters with disabilities, and read-on bibliographies that provide connections with other books in the field, this unique text will be an invaluable resource for educators.

Whether used for thematic story times, program and curriculum planning, readers' advisory, or collection development, this updated edition of the well-known companion makes finding the right picture books for your library a breeze. Generations of savvy librarians and educators have relied on this detailed subject guide to children's picture books for all aspects of children's services, and this new edition does not disappoint. Covering more than 18,000 books published through 2017, it empowers users to identify current and classic titles on topics ranging from apples to zebras. Organized simply, with a subject guide that categorizes subjects by theme and topic and subject headings arranged alphabetically, this reference applies more than 1,200 intuitive (as opposed to formal catalog) subject terms to children's picture books, making it both a comprehensive and user-friendly resource that is accessible to parents and teachers as well as librarians. It can be used to identify titles to fill in gaps in library collections, to find books on particular topics for young readers, to help teachers locate titles to support lessons, or to design thematic programs and story times. Title and illustrator indexes, in addition to a bibliographic guide arranged alphabetically by author name, further extend access to titles.

Help children learn coping skills through literature! This book answers the often repeated question: Is there a children's book I can read in my classroom to give children insight into significant life events? Literature ideas and activities help students cope with real-life situations, such as bullying, that interfere with school. This book will assist educators in guiding and nurturing children's special issues and concerns with outstanding, ready-to-go reading and writing lessons. This professional resource for K-6 educators and parents uses literature with identifiable characters to help children who are facing challenges in their lives. Like bullying, peer acceptance, peer pressure, and being different, as well as family situations such as death, divorce, adoption, and sibling rivalry.

She was a good girl from Biloxi, Mississippi; he was a rockabilly singer on the verge of stardom. They fell in love in the summer of 1956, and found a timeless moment of innocence and simple pleasure. In this acclaimed, intimate portrait of the American legend, Juanico gives us the Elvis she knew and loved—the Memphis boy with aw-shucks charm, impeccable manners, and an easy and irresistible sensuality. Their lives merged quickly and completely: Elvis’s mother, Gladys, felt June was her son’s last hope against the excesses of life on the road and the corruption of fame. But Elvis was on a train that no one could stop. Self-possessed, June chose her own path; she left Elvis, determined never to look back. But in this completely disarming, fascinating memoir, she does look back, and proves she has remembered everything, every conversation, every story, and every caress. Elvis: In the Twilight of Memory gives us an intimate and unforgettable portrait of the man who would be King.

“One night when she was four and sleeping in the bottom bunk of her bunk bed, Ruth Cole woke to the sound of lovemaking—it was coming from her parents’ bedroom.” This sentence opens John Irving’s ninth novel, A Widow for One Year, a story of a family marked by tragedy. Ruth Cole is a complex, often self-contradictory character—a “difficult” woman. By no means is she conventionally “nice,” but she will never be forgotten. Ruth’s story is told in three parts, each focusing on a critical time in her life. When we first meet her—on Long Island, in the summer of 1958—Ruth is only four. The second window into Ruth’s life opens on the fall of 1990, when she is an unmarried woman whose personal life is not nearly as successful as her literary career. She distrusts her judgment in men, for good reason. A Widow for One Year closes in the autumn of 1995, when Ruth Cole is a forty-one-year-old widow and mother. She’s about to fall in love for the first time. Richly comic, as well as deeply disturbing, A Widow for One Year is a multilayered love story of astonishing emotional force. Both ribald and erotic, it is also a brilliant novel about the passage of time and the relentlessness of grief.