Book Description
You will be reluctant to set this book aside until you have visualized, inferred, synthesized, and questioned the immediate application to your classroom. - Kansas Journal of ReadingHow do students become thoughtful, independent readers who comprehend text at a deep level? To find the answers, authors Keene and Zimmermann embarked on a journey into the thought processes of proficient readers - a journey through poems and essays, classrooms and workshops, humor and reflection. Mosaic of Thought chronicles that journey, which ultimately led the authors to elaborate on eight cognitive processes identified in comprehension research and used by successful readers. These serve as models for the strategies offered in this book - strategies intended to help children become more flexible, adaptive, independent, and engaged readers. Mosaic proposes a new instructional paradigm focused on in-depth, explicit instruction in the strategies used by proficient readers. The authors take us beyond the traditional classroom into the literature based, workshop-oriented classrooms. Through vivid portraits of these remarkable environments (all participants in the Denver-based Reading Project of the Public Education ; Business Coalition), we see how explicit instruction looks in dynamic, literature-rich readers' workshops. As the students connect to background knowledge, create sensory images, ask questions, draw inferences, determine what's important, synthesize ideas, and solve problems at the word and text level, they are able to construct a rich mosaic of meaning. Straightforward and jargon-free, Mosaic of Thought has relevance to all literature-based classrooms, regardless of level. It offers practical tools for inservice teachers, as well as essential methods instruction for preservice teachers at both the undergraduate and graduate level. Indeed, anyone interested in literacy will benefit from the authors' challenge to rediscover the thought processes that inform our own comprehension.
Customer Reviews:
Wake up and smell the RESEARCH people! .......2007-06-26
Whole language lives on, only now it is under the guise of 'balanced literacy' or Mosaic of Thought. Does anyone out there think perhaps that one of the most prolific readers and writers of our time (Thomas Jefferson) used any of this fluff when comprehending author's such as Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, or Shakespeare? The purpose of literacy is to gain new knowledge rapidly. It is the key to our economic and political well being. Spending hours on an inane piece of text that does not increase the child's knowledge base is useless. All these 'comprehension' strategies are taught to the point of insanity. I have news for you Zimmerman, there is a difference between learning a strategy and using it. Children are not using these inane strategies when it comes time for real life application. I could go on and on about the uselessness of these so called 'new ways to teach reading', instead I will give you a list of worthwhile texts that are far more grounded in what advanced readers REALLY do while examining text. HOW TO READ A BOOK, by Mortimer J. Adler. This book is over sixty years old and well worth your time to read. It was first published well before idiots like Ken Goodman and Stephanie Harvey came on the scene with their backwards way of thinking. Second, THE KNOWLEDGE DEFICIT by E.D. Hirsch-very thought provoking look at all the stupid strategies American schools are injecting into their curriculums. Third, READING INSTRUCTION THAT WORKS by Michael Pressley. Again, if you really want some bare bones info on improving comprehension - read this. Please teachers, wake up and question your research. It must ALWAYS be questioned. Don't believe that just because someone was published, they are correct. In order for research to be valid it is first and foremost peer reviewed. That means a third party with no vested interest in the success of the program leads a well designed study on it's effectiveness. SEcond, valid research is replicated many times over. This way multiple researches are testing the same technique and for the most part producing like results. Look for references in publications such as the Journal of Educational Psychology, or another reputable journal. Just because someone had their 'research' printed in The Reading Teacher, does not make it valid. GET INFORMED PEOPLE AND REMEMBER...DON'T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ. HEH HEH.
Interesting and useful, once you get past the lengthy digressions.......2007-06-17
Although I enjoyed this book and found the strategies exciting and compelling, it was horribly frustrating to read. Here's a comprehension strategy to use when reading this book: Skip the first 5-6 pages of each chapter. The author starts each chapter with text that connects, in some abstract way, to the theme of the chapter. While the points are usually valid, they could easily be summed up in a page or so - not 6. While I think I understand her overall point that we as teachers should be aware of the strategies we use as we read, her constant modeling of this gets to be really, really, irritating.
Mosaic of Thought : Teaching Comprehension in a Reader's Workshop.......2006-03-02
This is an excellent reference for teaching comprehension strategies in the elementary classroom. As a teacher, I refer to this book often. The authors have presented a straight forward guide explanining the importance and logic of their teaching methods. I have used these techniques in my own classroom. I have seen definite improvement in my sudents' comprehension. These improvements have been apparent in boh informal assessments as well as formal evaluations. I would definitely recommend this book to other teachers and homeschooling parents.
Excellent book for the progressive teacher.......2006-02-19
As an educator, I try to look for teacher's literature that goes beyond the worksheets and attempts to get at the belief system and structure of what is considered "best practices" in education. This book challenges teachers to delve/question their belief systems, practices and own schema to help better understand how our students think and eventually teaching them a new and deeper way of looking at literature.
If you are looking for photocopies and cookie cutter projects, then go to your local teaching store for the newest Carson Dellosa or basal reader. This will not be the book for you. If you want to teach kids how to think, analyze, question, visualize and deeper comprehend literature then this is the book for you. Enjoy it with your colleagues. It really changed my teaching practices for the better.
Are you kidding me?.......2005-11-17
I read this during my master's program. It is alot of wasted text. I wish it had listed the strategies, attached appendices and not had so much additional mumbo jumbo. This is awesome for discussions on comprehension, but useless as a day to day guide. I will keep my Atwell and Fountas books on hand instead.
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Communicating in the Classroom (Language, Thought, and Culture)
Loise Wilkinson
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Forget the history you were taught in school; Richard Zacks's version is crueler and funnier than anything you might have learned in seventh-grade civics--and much more of a gross-out, too. Described on the book jacket as an "autodidact extraordinaire," Zacks is also the author of History Laid Bare, making him something of an expert guide through history's back alleys and side streets. There's no fact too seamy or perverse for Zacks to drag out into the light of day, from matters scatological and sexual to some of history's most truly bizarre episodes. Curious about ancient nose-blowing etiquette? What about the sexual proclivities of Catherine the Great? Throughout chapters such as "The Evolution of Underwear" and "Dentistry Before Novocaine," Zacks proves a tireless debunker of popular myths as well as a muckraker par excellence.
Book Description
The best kind of knowledge is uncommon knowledge.
Okay, so maybe you know all the stuff you're supposed to know--that there are teenier things than atoms, that Remembrance of Things Past has something to do with a perfumed cookie, that the Monroe Doctrine means we get to take over small South American countries when we feel like it. But really, is this kind of knowledge going to make you the hit of the cocktail party, or the loser spending forty-five minutes examining the host's bookshelves?
Wouldn't you rather learn things like how the invention of the bicycle affected the evolution of underwear? Or that the 1949 Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded to a doctor who performed lobotomies with a household ice pick? Or how Catherine the Great really died? Or that heroin was sold over the counter not too long ago?
For the truly well-rounded "intellectual," nothing fascinates so much as the subversive, the contrarian, the suppressed, and the bizarre. Richard Zacks, auto-didact extraordinaire, has unloosed his admittedly strange mind and astonishing research abilities upon the entire spectrum of human knowledge, ferreting out endlessly fascinating facts, stories, photos, and images guaranteed to make you laugh, gasp in wonder, and occasionally shudder at the depths of human depravity. The result of his labors is this fantastically illustrated quasi-encyclopedia that provides alternative takes on art, business, crime, science, medicine, sex (lots of that), and many other facets of human experience.
Immensely entertaining, and arguably enlightening, An Underground Education is the only book that explains the birth of motion pictures using photos of naked baseball players.
Richard Zacks is the author of History Laid Bare: Love, Sex and Perversity from the Ancient Etruscans to Warren G. Harding, which was excerpted in classy magazines like Harper's and earned the attention of the even classier New York Times, which noted that "Zacks specializes in the raunchy and perverse." The Georgia State Legislature voted on whether to ban the book from public libraries. He has studied Arabic, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and Hebrew, and received the Phillips Classical Greek Award at the University of Michigan. He has also told his publisher that he made a living in Cairo cheating royalty from a certain Arab country at games of chance, although the claim remains unverified. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Time, Life, Sports Illustrated, The Village Voice, TV Guide, and similarly diverse publications. Zacks is married and busy warping the minds of his two children, Georgia and Ziegfield. He resides in New York City, and can be reached via e-mail at rzacks@echonyc.com.
From the Hardcover edition.
Customer Reviews:
Enjoyed this entertaining book of Trivia .......2007-06-28
I enjoyed this entertaining book. This book is not a deep educational study of history, but a book filled with interesting bits of historical information, OR funny facts & trivia!
Some facts will make you laugh, and others will puzzle you. Nothing wrong with that. When I got this book I was looking for a "light reading" book to read on a plane trip. After the trip, I lent the book to a friend and my friend enjoyed it too.... (Therefore, we both give it 5-stars).
Juvenile, at best.......2007-06-12
This could have been titled something like "One Man's Attack on the History of the Church", or "One Man's Attempt to Disparage Western Civilization", and that would've been more descriptive. Zacks spends about half the book dredging up odd and unflattering facts about the Catholic church (which doesn't exactly require a great historian) as well as blaming many of the ills of modern civilization on various popes. It is a restful page, not to mention chapter, when Zacks isn't pounding the Catholic church about something. The chapter on religion mostly beats on the Catholic church to the point where Zacks himself starts to feel guilty and points out that they are an easy target. Then without pausing to catch his breath he proceeds to go on and take some more pot shots. He spends quite a bit of the chapter talking about the crusades in such a fashion that you'd think the Muslims were just frolicking in the woods making daisy chains. And speaking of Muslims, in the entire chapter on religion there is one paragraph on Islam, and that a complimentary one from Voltaire. That was one thing I learned, I never knew Voltaire said anything complimentary about any religion.
He then goes after the Puritans and Mormons, and although by his own research the Puritans were far more tolerant than the Anglicans, he feels compelled to disparage his own conclusions. When I say "go after" I am not saying that I am disputing his facts. I am saying that it is something like reading about the Civil War as told by Jeb Stuart. You might technically be getting the facts, but you're not getting much perspective.
Zacks also keeps calling anyone who reads the Bible or talks about morality "Bible thumpers". Hilarious. He's full of little snide and juvenile comments like this that at best are whimsical, and almost always biased. He speaks of the history of political lies from most recent to oldest- and uses Nixon's "I am not a crook" as his most recent sample. I can think of one or two more recent.
A lot of the facts were not all that outrageous, either. Nobel invented dynamite? Does anyone not know that?
This isn't to say that there weren't interesting facts, or even that it was poorly written (it was not), just that it was often insulting and condescending. Imagine if he kept saying "f**got" or something like that over and over instead of "Bible thumper" and you can get the idea. As a Bible thumper I get ridiculed from time to time, and I don't usually whine about it, but I don't usually have to pay for the privilege, either. Finally, I'd say most of the same facts I got from a book I'd read earlier, "The Know it All", written with a lot more panache and without leaving me with the feeling that I had been dragged through a sewer.
Underground Education.......2007-05-12
I already had a copy of this book; i liked it so much I got another copy as
a gift for a friend, who is also an educator. The work could do with a little
more documentation, but it's a great read overall.
Disappointing read.......2006-12-26
It was my fault; I did not heed the warnings of some of the other evaluations of this book on-line. I thought that An Underground Education would be something akin to An Incomplete Education (4th ed), or at least Reader's Digest's Strange Stories and Amazing Facts (1976). An Incomplete Education is a terrific book full of tid bits of history, science, art, etc. which I thoroughly enjoyed. Strange Stories and Amazing Facts was also full of information ranging from Super Novas to the Loch Ness Monster, and I loved reading this book with my grandfather and still flip through today. Unlike An Incomplete Education or Strange Facts, An Underground Education was neither inciteful nor educational. It was basically a "history" of the sexual preferences and perversions of people throughout history, with some titillating pictures of hermaphrodites.
This is a book I would have enjoyed at age 14, but not as an adult.
Enthralling Arcana.......2006-12-04
An absolutely marvelous examination of those historical tid-bits that they never teach you in school, like the indecent forgotten parts of the Bible, the sexual side of slavery, and the evolution of underwear. Ah, but we're here to discuss the morbid side of life, and there's a lot of disturbing darkness scattered throughout the book, especially in the "Crime & Punishment" and "Medicine" chapters. An immensely fascinating and enlightening book - highly, highly recommended!
Book Description
Text and Thought, 2/e offers a comprehensive approach to developing and strengthening both developmental reading and developmental writing skills. Incorporating the most essential and useful topics in reading and writing, this integrated book includes a wealth of writing exercises along with high-interest professional and textbook readings. Readers are first guided through the application of skills and then given an opportunity to practice these skills independently. The second edition offers strengthened coverage of both reading and writing, providing more exercises, essays and textbook excerpts, and increased coverage of vocabulary and the Internet. Resourceful, engaging, and up-to-date, Text and Thought, 2/e combines the complementary skills of reading and writing with an interactive approach. For those interested in developing their reading and writing skills.
Book Description
Presenst strategies to improve competence in the academic skill and content areas, such as decoding, spelling, writing, science and mathematics. For elementary and middle schools.
Customer Reviews:
Speedy delivery.......2005-09-15
I received the book very soon after I had ordered it and it was in great condition.
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Turns of Thought: Teaching Composition as Reflexive Inquiry
Donna Qualley
Manufacturer: Boynton/Cook
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ASIN: 0867094184 |
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Turns of Thought is an insightful, honest, and useful resource for composition educators interested in gaining self-reflexive skills to improve their independent thought processes as well as their dialogic interactions with others.
- Teaching English in the TwoYear College
Turns of Thought is at once a classroom-based inquiry, a philosophical analysis, a practical demonstration, and a personal reflection on writing, reading, and teaching. Donna Qualley differentiates among related forms of reflective thinking to offer a deeper understanding of the nature, practice, and value of "reflexivity." She reveals how reflexivity is a necessary part of the learning process, especially when learning first requires the learner to engage in "unlearning," the gradual modification or revision of previous assumptions.
Qualley describes how she teaches writing and reading as methods for reflexive inquiry by teaching what she calls "the essayistic stance"a way of thinking about ideas that is open and dialogic. What determines whether a piece of writing is essayistic, the author suggests, is not only the form in which it appears on the page but also the stance or approach the writer and reader adopt toward the text. And Qualley demonstrates what she describes, continually turning back to reexamine how her own frames of reference influence her thinking and response to her students' work.
Turns of Thought is written in a clear and personal style that never compromises its intellectual mission but that can be, nevertheless, heard and understood by a range of readers. Its insights and detailed narratives will appeal to teachers of writing, graduate students of composition, and administrators of WAC programs, as well as anyone who is seriously interested in education and how and why students develop complex intellectual and ethical perspectives.
Book Description
Nearly 200 "quickie" classroom activities and reproducible worksheets to develop the thinking, reasoning and memory skills of elementary students and help them master both basic and advanced concepts in math, language and writing. Ideal ways to get kids involved, vary instruction, fill spare minutes, introduce or reinforce specific skills/concepts, and assign as homework.
Customer Reviews:
Good resource for parents, too.......2007-04-23
My son has really responded to the activities in this book. We've used activities from the "Thinking and Reasoning" and "Listening and Remembering" sections as warm-ups for more challenging work, and the math and language activities look like they'd be good "bridge" activities for the summer months. Although this book is intended for use in the classroom and contains some partner activities, it appears that most of the group activities can be used with a single child. And, of course, you can always be your child's partner for the partner activities.
a must have.......2007-01-16
I've looked at various teaching resources that claim to make kids think and several of them actually do. This one was impressive to me because of the diversity of the activities- it has math, language and general reasoning. It would be appropriate for children as young as first grade. (But perfectly suitable for my 4th graders.) I would recommend this book to any teacher for extension activities.
GREAT extra work.......2000-03-25
I copied different pages with 9th graders, and they REALLY enjoyed doing the problems. They did this after a test or when they had finished their assignment. I am a substitute teacher and this is a GREAT fill in when all the work is finished. May be used in other grades also.
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The Art of Learning: A Self-Help Manual for Students
Katherine M. Ramsland
Manufacturer: State University of New York Press
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ASIN: 0791409228 |
Book Description
A psychologist and holistic educator shares her proven techniques for teaching the art of concentration and centering to children. Adds balance and self-esteem, improves decision making, and puts children in touch with their deeper core values. Children love these simple, fun techniques that develop concentration, stimulate creativity, balance the mental, emotional, and physical natures, and build self-security. Used by educators nationwide.
Customer Reviews:
a little too new age-y for today's reader.......2006-10-22
I had been looking forward to reading this book for years, as it seems to be one of the only publications that deals with teaching children to meditate. The book is well-organized, with adequate introduction before launching into meditation and visualization exercises which are followed by worksheets and question/answer sessions.
The book does not seem to have made the jump from 1975 (1st ed.) through 1994 (2nd ed.) and now into its third edition in 2002. It retains countless new age artifacts, such as terms like "the Source within" and "the Higher Self" which I do not understand. The language that the author uses will likely not make sense to most readers from either a Christian or Buddhist perspective, and those readers may struggle to pull something useful out of her writings. In an attempt to present a teaching that is free of religious dogma, the author may have created a book that promotes some sort of new age spiritualism that currently finds few followers in the world.
The book is interesting and ambitious, but I would hesitate to use any of these meditation exercises (spaceship meditation, temple of light meditation, gravity and radiation meditation especially) with my own children. Better to teach a few simple meditation approaches that are grounded on thousand-year-old traditions (Zen or Tong Len for example), rather than a large number of exercises that may be interesting to kids but have no proven value.
As seen in Deepak Chopra's Infinite Possibilities newsletter.......1997-11-26
Rozman teaches children to center in the heart, which puts them in touch with the depth of their own being. By using the heart as the primary focus for centerning and concentration, children balance their mental, physical, and emotional natures, self-esteem expands, decision-making skills improve, and the ability to concentrate increases. Guided imagery, yoga, creative fantasy, movement, psychology, and love are used to give form to the inner spiritual qualities inherent in youth, resulting in happier, more caring children who may communicate the truth of their hearts.
Book Description
"Teachers are like flowers: they spread their beauty throughout the world." - Deanna Beisser
"Education is not a preparation for life; education is life itself." - John Dewey
This outstanding Blue Mountain Arts collection pays tribute to the art of teaching and the meaning of education. The greatest writers, educators, philosophers, poets, and creative minds -- from yesterday and today -- offer insights into the monumental importance of education, learning, and teaching.
With over 1/2 million copies sold, this inspiring book is treasured by teachers, counselors, parents, students, and all those who place a high value on education.
"The teachers of this country, one may say, have its future in their hands." - William James
Customer Reviews:
Inspiration.......2000-10-17
I think that any educator should read this book and keep it close by. I absolutely loved the poems 'What is a Teacher,' 'Teaching is a Lifelong Journey,' and 'God Bless the Teacher.' I think that any teacher who is on the verge of burnout could benefit from this book. The book really states what it means to be a teacher.
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