education, elementary

Offers advice to parents on how to secure good educations for their children from early childhood through the eighth grade, reminding parents of their own responsibilities in educating their children, providing guidelines for determining whether a school is doing a good job, and outlining what a well-educated child knows and can do.

Presents a comprehensive guide for parents that includes three hundred sixty-five practical tips for preparing a child for school and offers advice on starting the school year, health and safety, talking with teachers, volunteering, and more.

A guide to creating and using text sets in the elementary and middle school classroom, covering choosing topics, identifying standards, assessing learning, and other topics. Includes a CD-ROM with reproducible materials and activity pages.

Offers teachers and librarians complete lesson plans and reproducible games for twenty popular children's books, with a summary of each book, a game that reinforces phonemic awarenss or alphabetic principle, review questions, and word challenges to help children build reading, spelling, and critical thinking skills.

Contains twenty weather lessons for students in grades two through five, and includes a selection of related activities and observations.

Describes innovative ways for teachers to use puppets as valuable and developmentally appropriate teaching tools, explaining how puppets can support emergent literacy skills, introduce children's literature, manage the classroom, and assist in the development of lesson plans.