This guide has been prepared to assist teachers at the senior elementary and early secondary levels who would like to use Bill Freeman's First Spring on the Grand Banks young adult novel in English and in Canadian history classes. Stanley Sparkes has written a comprehensive guide includes a commentary on Newfoundland literature; an historical background on the social, political and economic setting of the story; a selection of varied teaching methods by which the novel may be approached; and a list of resources relevant to the themes of the book.

In this exciting tale set in the 1870s, John and Meg Bains and their friend Canso arrive in Nova Scotia to find that Canso's father has died and his schooner seized for debts. Refused credit for a fishing trip by the merchant Hunter, they take the schooner and flee to Tower Rock, Newfoundland, intending to make enough money fishing to repay the debts. But then the law arrives and Canso is jailed. Their only hope is to persuade the women of Tower Rock to catch cod with them. And that is just what happens. The story ends with Canso's trial and the final showdown with Hunter.

The devastation of many of the greatest North Atlantic cod stocks, particularly those of Newfoundland and Labrador and the Grand Banks, has become an icon for the unsustainable relation between human exploitation and Nature. Here, George Rose tells the full story of that devastation, in scientific detail, for the first time - from the formation of the North Atlantic marine ecosystems to the massive stock declines in the last half of the 20th century. Politics and the fisheries are inextricably entwined. In Cod, Rose recounts the many political influences on the fisheries over several centuries and describes how neglect from the late 1800s onward led to insufficient scientific knowledge and little protection for the stocks when massive Euro-Russian fleets targeted the Grand Banks after World War II, destroying the most prolific fishery the world has known. Cod is no armchair account, but a controversial one that includes original information on the North Atlantic fisheries.