A biography of Wilma Rudolph, an African-American who overcame crippling polio as a child to become the first woman to win three gold medals in track during a single Olympics.

A biography of the African-American woman who overcame crippling polio as a child to become the first woman to win three gold medals in track in a single Olympics.

A biography of the African-American woman who overcame crippling polio as a child to become the first woman to win three gold medals in track in a single Olympics.

Under No Child Left Behind, nearly every teacher faces a high-stakes balancing act; managing the often incompatible responsibilities of teaching students meaningfully or preparing them for standardized tests. Through their experiences teaching at a school that struggled to meet state test standards driven by NCLB, authors Amy Greene and Glennon Melton discovered a way to raise scores without compromising their strong beliefs about good teaching and learning. Their concise and easy-to-use bookTest Talk: Integrating Test Preparation Into Reading Workshop includes lesson plans and practice passages, as well as sample questions and suggested language to use during lessons. This compelling book shows that teachers don't have to choose between best practice teaching and test preparation; effective test-taking strategies can be integrated into authentic reading instruction. The authors demonstrate how to improve performance on tests without resorting to teaching to the test,- mnemonic devices, or other gimmicks. Instead, they focus on encouraging student readers to explore tests as a specific genre containing unique language, format, and cues. Throughout the book, classroom vignettes show how seamlessly one can weave the test genre into reading workshop and connect those specialized skills to more general reading strategies. It is an invaluable resource for any teacher who struggles with how to prepare kids for tests without sacrificing real teaching and learning.

A biography on the life of Wilma Rudolph, hero of the 1960 Rome Olympics. Written in graphic-novel format.

A biography of the African-American woman who overcame crippling polio as a child to become the first woman to win three gold medals in track in a single Olympics.

Wilma Rudolph was born black in Jim Crow Tennessee. The twentieth of 22 children, she spent most of her childhood in bed suffering from whooping cough, scarlet fever, and pneumonia. She lost the use of her left leg due to polio and wore leg braces. With dedication and hard work, she became a gifted runner, earning a track and field scholarship to Tennessee State. In 1960, she became the first American woman to win three gold medals in a single Olympic Games. Her underdog story made her into a media darling, and she was the subject of countless articles, a television movie, children’s books, biographies, and she even featured on a U.S. postage stamp. In this work, Smith and Liberti consider not only Rudolph’s achievements, but also the ways in which those achievements are interpreted and presented as historical fact. Theories of gender, race, class, and disability collide in the story of Wilma Rudolph, and Smith and Liberti examine this collision in an effort to more fully understand how history is shaped by the cultural concerns of the present. In doing so, the authors engage with the metanarratives which define the American experience and encourage more complex and nuanced interrogations of contemporary heroic legacy.