A collection of teacher-tested ideas compiled from the primary, intermediate and pre-K editions of The mailbox magazine.

Until the late 1970s, W. D. Snodgrass was known primarily as a confessional poet and a key player in the emergence of that mode of poetry in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Snodgrass makes poetry out of the daily neuroses and everyday failures of a man—a husband, father, and teacher. This domestic suffering occurs against a backdrop of more universal suffering which Snodgrass believes is inherent in the human experience. Not for Specialists includes 35 new poems complemented by the superb work he wrote in the Pulitzer Prize winning collection, Heart’s Needle, along with poetry from seven other distinguished collections. from “Nocturnes” Seen from higher up, it makes its first move in the low creekbed, the marshlands down the valley, spreading across the open hayfields, the hedgerows with their tops still lit, laps the roadbed, flows over lawns and gardens, past the house and up the wooded hillside back behind us till only some few rays still scythe between the treetrunks from the far horizon and are gone. W. D. Snodgrass, born in Pennsylvania in 1926, is the author of more than 20 books of poetry, including The Fuehrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle (BOA, 1995); Each in His Season (BOA, 1993); and Heart's Needle (1959), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His other books include To Sound Like Yourself: Essays on Poetry (BOA, 2002), After-Images: Autobiographical Sketches (BOA, 1999) and six volumes of translation, including Selected Translations (BOA Editions, 1998), which won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award.

In this volume Cleanth Brooks pays tribute to the language and literature of the American South. He writes of the language's unique syntax and its celebrated languorous rhythms; of the classical allusions and Addisonian locutions once favored by the gentry; and of the more earthbound eloquence, rooted in the dialect of England's southern lowlands, that is still heard in the speech of the region's plain folk. It is this rich spoken language, Brooks suggests, that has always been the life blood of southern writing. The strong tradition of storytelling in the South is reflected in the tales told by Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus and in the obsessive retellings that structure William Faulkner's novels and stories. But even more crucially, the language of the South--firmly rooted in the land but with a tendency to reach for the heavens above--has shaped the literary concerns and molded the complex visions to be found in the poetry of Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom; the stories of Flannery O'Connor, Peter Taylor, and Eudora Welty; and the novels of Warren, Allen Tate, and Walker Percy.

Joel Chandler Harris was an American journalist, fiction writer, and folklorist best known for his collection of Uncle Remus stories. Harris wrote novels, narrative histories, translations of French folklore, children's literature, and collections of stories depicting rural life in Georgia. As fiction writer and folklorist, he wrote many 'Brer Rabbit' stories from the African-American oral tradition. He realized the literary value of the stories he had heard from the slaves of Turnwold Plantation. Harris set out to record the stories and insisted that they be verified by two independent sources before he would publish them. The stories, mostly collected directly from the African-American oral storytelling tradition, were revolutionary in their use of dialect, animal personages, and serialized landscapes. 1. The Uncle Remus Books — Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1881) — Nights with Uncle Remus (1883) — Uncle Remus and His Friends (1892) — The Tar-Baby and Other Rhymes of Uncle Remus (1904) — Told by Uncle Remus (1905) — Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit (1907) — Uncle Remus and the Little Boy (1910) — Uncle Remus Returns (1918) — Seven Tales of Uncle Remus (1948) 2. Mr. Thimblefinger Series — Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country (1894) — Mr. Rabbit at Home (1895) — The Story of Aaron (So Named), the Son of Ben Ali (1896) — Aaron in the Wildwoods (1897) 3. The Novels — The Romance of Rockville (1878) — On the Plantation (1892) — Sister Jane (1896) — Gabriel Tolliver (1902) — A Little Union Scout (1904) — Shadow between His Shoulder Blades (1909) — The Bishop and the Boogerman (1909) 4. The Shorter Fiction — Mingo and Other Sketches in Black and White (1884) — Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches (1887) — Daddy Jake, The Runaway: And Short Stories Told After Dark (1889) — Balaam and His Master and Other Sketches and Stories (1891) — Evening Tales (1893) — Stories of Georgia (1896) — Tales of the Home Folks in Peace and War (1898) — The Chronicles of Aunt Minervy Ann (1899) — Plantation Pageants (1899) — On the Wing of Occasions (1900) — The Making of a Statesman and Other Stories (1902) — Wally Wanderoon and His Story-Telling Machine (1903)

To strengthen students' math skills with reproducibles from Teacher's helper magazine with background information for teachers, class projects, literature links, awards, patterns, and ideas for math manipulatives and games.

Seventy lighthearted, much-loved poems cover everything from books and imagination to friendship and the beauty of the natural world. Includes such notable poets as Lewis Carroll, Ogden Nash, and Marianne Moore.