There is no question that strong foundational skills are essential to successful, joyful reading. In this book, Julia Lindsey focuses on strategies for decoding and chunking words--and ways to teach them efficiently to help children read more deeply during whole-class, small-group and one-on-one instruction. You'll find: 1) need-to-know essentials of how reading works and develops; 2) principles of high-quality foundational skills instruction--including connections to content learning, culturally responsive practices, and engaged reading; and 3) clear-cut, teacher-approved, research-based "instructional swaps" to improve your early reading instruction.

From Lake Chad to Iraq, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) provide relief around the globe, and their scope is growing every year. Policy makers and activists often assume that humanitarian aid is best provided by these organizations, which are generally seen as impartial and neutral. In Above the Fray, Shai M. Dromi investigates why the international community overwhelmingly trusts humanitarian NGOs by looking at the historical development of their culture. With a particular focus on the Red Cross, Dromi reveals that NGOs arose because of the efforts of orthodox Calvinists, demonstrating for the first time the origins of the unusual moral culture that has supported NGOs for the past 150 years. Drawing on archival research, Dromi traces the genesis of the Red Cross to a Calvinist movement working in mid-nineteenth-century Geneva. He shows how global humanitarian policies emerged from the Red Cross founding members’ faith that an international volunteer program not beholden to the state was the only ethical way to provide relief to victims of armed conflict. By illustrating how Calvinism shaped the humanitarian field, Dromi argues for the key role belief systems play in establishing social fields and institutions. Ultimately, Dromi shows the immeasurable social good that NGOs have achieved, but also points to their limitations and suggests that alternative models of humanitarian relief need to be considered.

In 1974, women in a feminist consciousness-raising group in Eugene, Oregon, formed a mock organization called the Ladies Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society. Emblazoning its logo onto t-shirts, the group wryly envisioned female collective textile making as a practice that could upend conventions, threaten state structures, and wreak political havoc. Elaborating on this example as a prehistory to the more recent phenomenon of “craftivism”—the politics and social practices associated with handmaking—Fray explores textiles and their role at the forefront of debates about process, materiality, gender, and race in times of economic upheaval. Closely examining how amateurs and fine artists in the United States and Chile turned to sewing, braiding, knotting, and quilting amid the rise of global manufacturing, Julia Bryan-Wilson argues that textiles unravel the high/low divide and urges us to think flexibly about what the politics of textiles might be. Her case studies from the 1970s through the 1990s—including the improvised costumes of the theater troupe the Cockettes, the braided rag rugs of US artist Harmony Hammond, the thread-based sculptures of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña, the small hand-sewn tapestries depicting Pinochet’s torture, and the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt—are often taken as evidence of the inherently progressive nature of handcrafted textiles. Fray, however, shows that such methods are recruited to often ambivalent ends, leaving textiles very much “in the fray” of debates about feminized labor, protest cultures, and queer identities; the malleability of cloth and fiber means that textiles can be activated, or stretched, in many ideological directions. The first contemporary art history book to discuss both fine art and amateur registers of handmaking at such an expansive scale, Fray unveils crucial insights into how textiles inhabit the broad space between artistic and political poles—high and low, untrained and highly skilled, conformist and disobedient, craft and art.

What is the fray? It is the point at which something becomes disheveled, or chaotic. When what we know, or what we thought we knew, is shattered. Set amid the natural beauty of Alaska’s coastal rain forest, the Fray tells a chilling tale of ancient mythical beings, harrowing adventure and the fight for survival. Committed to the work of her father after his untimely death, Dani Rhoades ventures into the Alaskan wilderness on a scientific expedition. Immersed in the heart of bear country, Dani and her Tlingit wilderness guide, Raj Breakstone, learn that deep within the forest there are older things to fear than bears ... things born from the blood of starvation and desperation. Can they make it out alive?

This volume engages the work of Walter Brueggemann, most of which has been published by Fortress Press. The volume centers on the character of God in the text of the Old Testament as a site of theological tension and even ambivalence. Biblical faith never experiences God as entirely above the fray but rather as entangled in history, astonishingly transformative, and impinged upon by the voices of the suffering. Brueggemann's monumental Theology of the Old Testament addresses this fact with great theological insight and rigor, and the internationally renowned biblical scholars writing here engage and extend his insights into the "unsettled Character . . . at the center of the text."

In modern times the relationship between the church and academy has been strained and tension-filled. Mainstream church culture has often been skeptical of Bible scholars, depicting them as self-serving intellectuals trying to out-think God by devising new and controversial interpretations. Just as well, academics have often leveled harsh critiques against church culture, painting pastors and laity as anti-intellectual pseudo-spiritualists. Entering the Fray argues that, in spite of the wide gap between the academic and ecclesiastical worlds, the modern church should be aware of the key discussions taking place among biblical scholars. To be sure, the average churchgoer has not been tuned in to scholarly conversations concerning matters such as the Messianic Secret, Q, the Historical Jesus, the pistis Christou debate, and related topics. In fact, they may have purposefully tuned out! Some, however, are simply unaware that any such dialogue has taken place, and beyond the internet, may not have the first clue as to how to explore the details. This primer seeks to function as that "first clue" by helping congregants, pastors, and students of the Bible enter into the fray of scholarly discussions that, over the last few hundred years, have shaped both the academy and church. The companion website can be found at http://michaelhalcomb.com/enteringthefray-home.html