A collection of hands on learning activities with creative ideas that fit in nicely with alternative assessments.

Books Come Alive: Reading Aloud and Reading Along with Young Children is about using read alouds to promote empathy and the ability to think deeply in response to literature. Grounded in research and theory, the book explores how to ensure that read alouds have maximum instructional value to promote literacy and spark children’s lifelong love of literature. This book offers teachers information about book selection, how to plan for and conduct read alouds, and extend children’s experiences. The book also includes a vetted and extensive compendium of high-quality books for read alouds, accompanied by a framework for teaching with those books.

Prepares readers to become high-quality humanities and social sciences educators for early childhood and primary contexts.

After conducting research at a rigorous medical school, your students arrive for their first day of hospital duty only to be confronted with four sick patients, each with a different mystery ailment. How can your teams of student-physicians come up with the correct diagnoses? This attention-grabbing narrative and the corresponding role-plays are the basis of Diagnosis for Classroom Success: Making Anatomy and Physiology Come Alive. This high school curriculum gets your students deeply involved in inquiry-based science as it acquaints them with major body systems, sickle cell anemia, HIV, pregnancy, and diabetes. This Teacher Edition (which includes the Student Edition) spells out the book' s relevance to the Framework for K- 12 Science Education and provides rubrics, answer keys, and prep tips to use before, during, and after the lessons. By blending the power of story with engaging investigations, Diagnosis for Classroom Success will cure what ails your lecture-weary biology classes.

Do you like vigorous, quick-moving lessons with lots of classroom interaction? If so, you'll like English Comes Alive! Dr. Witherspoon opens with 60 favorite, wake-them-up activities. Then he writes about role playing, creative speaking, correcting bloopers, acting out words and sentences, outdoor activities, and much more. Drama, variety, student-teacher interaction: it's all here. And that's what it takes to ignite learning. Witherspoon has extensively tested these lessons during 20 summers of teaching overseas. His students have varied from teenagers to middle-aged professors, from clerks to physicians to non-native teachers of English. Whatever the age or profession of his students, he stresses conversation. "The act of talking," he says, "removes the fear of talking." And by removing that fear, students become fluent.