Cyber shopper

Teaching Pre K-8, May 2000

The SmartPicks technology lets parents create a 100% private, individualized learning profile for a child with learning style, learning goals and a Skills Checkup children can take online. The result: a custom ized list of items from the "store shelves" from which parents can shop online. (Or call 800-293-- 9314.)

Strategic Planning... reigns supreme in Strategies That Work. The subtitle of this book is "Teaching Comprehension to Enhance Understanding." It certainly gives one enough ideas to do just that. In 314 pages this book does a wonderful job of making us aware that thinking and understanding are part of the reading process - not just decoding, and they provide comprehension strategies to help us achieve that end.

Using picture books to teach strategies and content, sifting the topic from details...it's all here. There are more than 40 strategies for K-8 for understanding text as well as wonderful appendices that include a bibliography of contentarea text sets on the curriculum topics in history, science, the arts and literacy; a list of favorite books teachers choose for introducing and guiding students in the practice of a given strategy and more.

You'll want to read every page of this one, whether this is your first or twenty-first year in the classroom. $22.50 plus $3.50 s/h.

Visit Stenhouse Publishers website for an outstanding list of professional, practical handbooks.

www.stenhouse.com

Sunburst does it again... What would summer be without baseball? Sunburst Communications has found a way to tie this All-American sport into the rules of reading. The Dugout Collection uses an anchor story about learning baseball to emphasize comprehension and writing. Skills practice uses the baseball theme for reinforcement. In the Writing Lab, students apply grammar usage in letter writing and essays about heroes. Effective management tools let teachers monitor student work and customize preferences and word lists. $89.95.

Go online and register for My Sunburst.com, a tree startup page for teachers, and receive a 10% discount on your next order. 800-3217511 or visit

www.sunburst.com

Join the Club...

The Reading Detective Club, that is. And that's the name of the super handbook from Heinemann. "Readers are a lot like detectives. We use clues from the author's text; what's going on...." says author - and classroom teacher - Debra Goodman.

With ideas both for the teacher and the students, this 168-page, 8 1/2 x 11 gem tells us just how we can form our own club. There's also a student section that features a series of reproducible mystery cases presented by student detec tives.

Central to this book is the importance of mis- cue analysis as an assessment tool. The author believes that learning to read should be fun, and this book provides the strategies for that. $18 plus s/h. Be sure to visit the website at

www.heinemann.com

DK Interactive Learning

All new, free Special Needs Addendum for 15 of the DK CD-ROM titles! The Matrix identifies instructional strategies and correlates them to the needs of various handicapped conditions. Each product-specific Addendum outlines ways to use the product for special needs students with suggestions on how to modify program features and activity sheets.