This Shakespeare reader's theater script builds fluency through oral reading. The creative script captures students' interest, so they want to practice and perform. Included is a fluency lesson and approximate reading levels for the script roles.

Thirteen scripts from Weekly Reader's Read magazine feature age-appropriate play adaptations from some of Shakespeare's greatest and best-known works.

All Hamlet Kennedy wants is to be a normal eighth grader. But with parents like hers - Shakespearean scholars who actually dress in Elizabethan regalia . . . in public! - it's not that easy. As if they weren't strange enough, her genius seven-year-old sister will be attending her middle school, and is named the new math tutor. Then, when the Shakespeare Project is announced, Hamlet reveals herself to be an amazing actress. Even though she wants to be average, Hamlet can no longer hide from the fact that she- like her family - is anything but ordinary.

Eric Carle joins the Penguin Young Readers! In this classic and heartwarming story, a very lonely firefly finally finds the friends he is seeking at the end of a tireless search for belonging. Carle's rich, collage-like art and gentle text will be comfortingly familiar to his millions of fans. An accessible Level 2 reader, The Very Lonely Firefly is one that parents and children will read over and over again.

Although the works of William Shakespeare are universally taught in high schools, many students have a similar reaction when confronted with the difficult task of reading Shakespeare for the first time. In Reading Shakespeare with Young Adults, Mary Ellen Dakin seeks to help teachers better understand not just how to teach the Bard's work, but also why. By celebrating the collaborative reading of Shakespeare's plays, Dakin explores different methods for getting students engaged--and excited--about the texts as they learn to construct meaning from Shakespeare's sixteenth-century language and connect it to their twenty-first-century lives. Filled with teacher-tested classroom activities, this book draws on often-taught plays, including Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. The ideas and strategies presented here are designed to be used with any of the Bard's plays and are intended to help all populations of students--mainstream, minority, bilingual, advanced, at-risk.

Common Core State Standards for Grade 9: Language Arts Instructional Strategies and Activities is designed to help teachers address Common Core standards using effective, research-based instructional strategies in combination with ready-to-use activities. These strategies include identifying similarities and differences, writing summaries and taking notes, creating non-linguistic representations, and suggestions for homework and practice. There are a variety of suggested texts as well as identified text exemplars that can easily be used with the strategies and activities. Some additional key features of this book include: Each instructional strategy is described in detail and includes lists of activities that would complement the strategy. A list of standards and strands is given for each grade level. Chapters are designed to focus on specific strands and contain lists of detailed activities for the standards within the strand. Many activities address multiple standards within the activity. Each activity contains focus standards and many contain suggested works. Standards citations are listed at the end of each activity. Many standards are addressed more than once throughout the strands. Sample activity formats and questions can be found in the appendix.

ÊThe Laughing Mary was a light ship, as sailors term a vessel that stands high upon the water, having discharged her cargo at Callao, from which port we were proceeding in ballast to Cape Town, South Africa, there to call for orders. Our run to within a few parallels of the latitude of the Horn had been extremely pleasant; the proverbial mildness of the Pacific Ocean was in the mellow sweetness of the wind and in the gentle undulations of the silver-laced swell; but scarce had we passed the height of forty-nine degrees when the weather grew sullen and dark, a heavy bank of clouds of a livid hue rose in the north-east, and the wind came and went in small guns, the gusts venting themselves in dreary moans, insomuch that our oldest hands confessed they had never heard blasts more portentous. The gale came on with some lightning and several claps of thunder and heavy rain. Though it was but two o'clock in the afternoon, the air was so dusky that the men had to feel for the ropes; and when the first of the tempest stormed down upon us the appearance of the sea was uncommonly terrible, being swept and mangled into boiling froth in the north-east quarter, whilst all about us and in the south-west it lay in a sort of swollen huddle of shadows, glooming into the darkness of the sky without offering the smallest glimpse of the horizon. In a few minutes the hurricane struck us. We had bared the brig down to the close-reefed main-topsail; yet, though we were dead before the outfly, its first blow rent the fragment of sail as if it were formed of smoke, and in an instant it disappeared, flashing over the bows like a scattering of torn paper, leaving nothing but the bolt-ropes behind. The bursting of the topsail was like the explosion of a large cannon. In a breath the brig was smothered with froth torn up in huge clouds, and hurled over and ahead of her in vast quivering bodies that filled the wind with a dismal twilight of their own, in which nothing was visible but their terrific speeding. Through these slinging, soft, and singing masses of spume drove the rain in horizontal steel-like lines, which gleamed in the lightning stroke as though indeed they were barbed weapons of bright metal, darted by armies of invisible spirits raving out their war cries as they chased us.

What actions are justified when the fate of a nation hangs in the balance, and who can see the best path ahead? Julius Caesar has led Rome successfully in the war against Pompey and returns celebrated and beloved by the people. Yet in the senate fears intensify that his power may become supreme and threaten the welfare of the republic. A plot for his murder is hatched by Caius Cassius who persuades Marcus Brutus to support him. Though Brutus has doubts, he joins Cassius and helps organize a group of conspirators that assassinate Caesar on the Ides of March. But, what is the cost to a nation now erupting into civil war? A fascinating study of political power, the consequences of actions, the meaning of loyalty and the false motives that guide the actions of men, Julius Caesar is action packed theater at its finest.