Ready-to-use, high interest stories with mini-lessons and activities that help students understand literary elements and use them effectively in their writing.

Ready-to-use, high interest stories with mini-lessons and activities that help students understand literary elements and use them effectively in their writing.

In this text for teachers, the authors explain how to teach what really matters about character, setting, point of view, and theme.

Teaching must-know literary elements is easy with this unique boxed set. It includes 48 books (6 copies of 8 48-page anthologies) for students plus a 96-page teaching guide. Literary elements covered: Character, Figurative Language, Foreshadowing & Flashback, Plot, Point of View, Setting, Theme, Tone & Mood. Each student anthology includes 4-6 engaging stories, poems, or plays that are perfect for teaching specific literary elements. The teaching guide includes mini-lessons, graphic organizers, student reproducibles, and great activity ideas. A storage box keeps everything organized. An easy way to meet the language arts standards! For use with Grades 4-8.

Winner of the 2003 Trillium Book Award "Stories are wondrous things," award-winning author and scholar Thomas King declares in his 2003 CBC Massey Lectures. "And they are dangerous." Beginning with a traditional Native oral story, King weaves his way through literature and history, religion and politics, popular culture and social protest, gracefully elucidating North America's relationship with its Native peoples. Native culture has deep ties to storytelling, and yet no other North American culture has been the subject of more erroneous stories. The Indian of fact, as King says, bears little resemblance to the literary Indian, the dying Indian, the construct so powerfully and often destructively projected by White North America. With keen perception and wit, King illustrates that stories are the key to, and only hope for, human understanding. He compels us to listen well.

Eleanor Estes's The Hundred Dresses won a Newbery Honor in 1945 and has never been out of print since. At the heart of the story is Wanda Petronski, a Polish girl in a Connecticut school who is ridiculed by her classmates for wearing the same faded blue dress every day. Wanda claims she has one hundred dresses at home, but everyone knows she doesn't and bullies her mercilessly. The class feels terrible when Wanda is pulled out of the school, but by that time it's too late for apologies. Maddie, one of Wanda's classmates, ultimately decides that she is "never going to stand by and say nothing again." This powerful, timeless story has been reissued with a new letter from the author's daughter Helena Estes, and with the Caldecott artist Louis Slobodkin's original artwork in beautifully restored color.