Combining nursery rhymes and learning centers helps students develop and improve a variety of literacy skills such as oral language development, phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary.

This book contains hundreds of accessible, teacher-written learning center activities. The GIANT Encyclopedia of Learning Center Activities is the eighth book in Gryphon House's GIANT Encyclopedia series. The learning centers in this book can either be permanent year-long centers or set up and removed according to the season or children's interests and needs. Through play, young children learn to communicate, interact, and expand their cognitive thinking horizons. The GIANT Encyclopedia of Learning Center Activities provides the resources to make play meaningful and educational for young children. This book offers: Over 600 activities and 47 learning centers, including familiar, permanent centers, such as Art or Blocks, and new and exciting centers, such as Farm, Space, Safari, Shoe Store, and Ice Cream Shop. Opportunities in each center for children to work at their own developmental level. Materials lists for each activity, step-by-step instructions, and related books, songs, and poems. Fresh new ideas from teachers who have used these activities in their own classrooms!

In this adaptation of the traditional nursery rhyme, a woman swallows the alphabet.

Presents the traditional song with illustrations on die-cut pages that reveal all that the old lady swallows.

The Inclusive Learning Center Book is designed for teachers and directors who work with all young children. Offering both traditional and unique centers, the activities in each center have adaptations for children with special needs.

Former World Bank education specialist Bjorn Nordtveit argues in this groundbreaking study that a development project or policy should not be understood and analyzed as a linear system. Instead, he believes we should view it as a complex and dialectical organism. Basing his theories on post-development and complexity theories as well as New Institutional Economics, Nordtveit lays out a novel method of analyzing development – both on the ground and in the think-tank. Informed by detailed quotations from interviews with local people involved in a World Bank literacy project in Senegal, the author demonstrates how a project is entangled in the global economy, and how it constructs development through a discourse of gender equity, growth of the civil society, and promotion of the use of private provision of social services. Nordtveit’s new analytical methodology claims it is necessary for all development initiatives to first investigate whether the donors’ vision of development coincides with national – and local – notions of development. Only then can the holistic and complex interrelations between the project and all other development desires and services in the community be studied. Finally, the project’s cost effectiveness must be considered. The author also examines the strengths and weaknesses of ‘public-private partnerships’, which are being used ever more frequently by donor agencies to implement social services. Constructing Development is a tour de force. Going back and forth between the global and the local, it examines a World Bank women's literacy project in Senegal through a critical and integrated discussion of education and development, globalization, gender, civil society, and privatization. Nordtveit offers an insightful and innovative critique of development theory and practice, drawing on new authors and fields, such as Complexity Theory. His book is a must read across a number of fields including comparative and international education, adult education, gender studies, and economic development. Steven J. Klees, Former President, Comparative and International Education Society Harold R.W. Benjamin Professor of International and Comparative Education University of Maryland