It’s one of education’s greatest challenges: How do we shape our youngest students, who often are just learning how to hold a pencil, into capable writers within the span of a single school year? Text Structures from Nursery Rhymes offers the solution: a clear and actionable framework for guiding young students to write successfully in any style, from narrative to descriptive to persuasive. The key to the strategy lies in using familiar text structures to break down a story into its main components — for example, "Where I was," "Who I saw," and "What I thought" — in order to immediately thrust students into the role of the writer. This groundbreaking book provides 53 lessons, each centered around a classic nursery rhyme, and all the tools you’ll need to Capitalize on the story’s rhythm and rhyme to make an instant connection with your students Convey the story’s text structure using the lesson’s whimsical illustrations, providing a visual model that resonates with children Lead the classroom in creating new stories — in words, pictures, or both — utilizing the text structure you’ve defined Put each nursery rhyme to work as a springboard for important language-arts topics Fine-tune your approach at every step based on your preferred teaching style and students’ progress Put Text Structures from Nursery Rhymes to work in your classroom and discover how text structures, already a remarkable success in later grades, can also have a profound impact on younger students’ progress. Bonus! Includes eight downloadable paper dolls—1 man, 1 woman, 1 girl, 1 boy, and 4 animals. Your students can use the paper dolls to retell the nursery rhymes, illustrate their own stories based on a nursery rhyme, or even to act out stories from other books in your classroom library.

A collection of nursery rhymes.

Hark! hark! the dogs bark,The beggars are coming to town;Some in rags and some in tags,And some in a silken gown.Some gave them white bread,And some gave them brown,And some gave them a good horse-whip,And sent them out of the town.Little Jack Horner sat in the corner,Eating a Christmas pie;He put in his thumb, and pulled out a plum,And said, oh! what a good boy am I.

Plans to build a new bird sanctuary in a small English village are interrupted by murder most fowl in this delightful British whodunit. When Alan Tewkes decides to convert the wetlands he inherited from his father into a protected reserve for endangered migrant birds, his altruistic gesture winds up ruffling more than a few local feathers. The tiny Northern English town of Talbot has no interest in hosting the many tourists who would flock to such an attraction. Alan soldiers on despite resistance from Talbot’s self-styled “squire,” DeLacey Thornley, and even from his own brother, Jeremy. But when shooting down Alan’s plan doesn’t work, someone shoots down Alan instead. Homicide is a rarity in Talbot, and some wonder if the local police are up to the task. But Detective Inspector Hole and his wife, the local schoolmistress, are more resourceful than they might at first appear. As they dig for clues, a web of dark secrets and bitter feuding begins to emerge in this classic English village whodunit perfect for fans of Agatha Christie.

A collection of traditional nursery rhymes rewritten from a nonsexist, nonracist, and nonviolent viewpoint.

A collection of 108 illustrated Mother Goose rhymes.