Always a series denoting value and quality, the Illustrated Notebooks are now a good thing made better! Each page carries the soft pen and wash illustrations of the talented artist Juliette Clarke with a humorous or sensitive quotation. Refreshing new covers, along with several more high-interest subjects, will make this series sell even better than when they were first published.

The Wisdom of Wally Bear is an illustrated gift book for anyone and any occasion. It is uplifting, inspirational and positive. Wally Bear's mission in life is to find happiness and share it with his friends. The illustrations are a sample. Many of Wally Bear's slices of wisdom work well as illustrations in the gift book. They also work well as posters, greeting cards, T-shirts, mugs, and perhaps video. Our Wally Bear has tested well with children, teenagers, moms and dads and the elderly. Wally Bear grows on you and his message is all about love.

What does it mean to have high expectations for five-year-old learners? In one of the author's classrooms, children are treated as authors, as world citizens, and as confident, responsible community and family contributors. Kindergartners publish their own stories and keep them on the same shelves as books from libraries and bookstores. In addition to books, these young students also produce their own plays, thank-you cards, and math problems. Zaragoza, Dwyer, and Brownie (the class mascot) invite new teachers along as they take one class of children through a month-by-month journey of authorship, literacy development, poetry, positive interaction, and imagination. This book is appropriate for both undergraduate and graduate students of education, early childhood, and teachers of English-language learners. It can also be of value to scholars of constructivist and/or critical theory.

Bela lowers his voice so I can barely hear. Last week the Secret Police called two of my classmates in for questioning. Mama sucks in ther breath. "What did the AVO want with them?

Marian Engel emerged as a writer during that period in Canada when nationalism increased and “new feminism” dawned. Although she is recognized as a distinguished woman of letters, she has not been widely studied; consequently we know relatively little about her and her craft. The material collected in Marian Engel’s Notebooks: “Ah, mon cahier, écoute...” is a major step in redressing that neglect. Extracts carefully chosen by Christl Verduyn from Marian Engel’s forty-nine notebooks — notebooks Engel began in the late 1940s and which she maintained until her death in 1985 — track Engel’s creative development, illustrate her commitment to the craft of writing and document her growth as a major Canadian writer. The notebooks also portray Engel’s surprising leaps of logic, her fascination with the bizarre, the eclecticism of her reading and the depth and variety of her thinking. Finally, they present moving documentation of a woman facing cancer and early death. Christl Verduyn’s illuminating introductory discussions to each of the notebooks unobtrusively guide us in the reading of these sometimes difficult writings. Marian Engel’s Notebooks: “Ah, mon cahier, écoute...” leaves readers with a vivid sense of Canadian culture during the 1960s and 1970s. It provides insight into the literary life of one of Canada’s significant woman writers, including her connections with other Canadian writers, and will be of special interest to scholars working in the field of literature.

Elizabeth Jennings was one of the most popular, prolific, and widely anthologized lyric poets in the second half of the twentieth century. This first biography, based on extensive archival research and interviews with Jennings's contemporaries, integrates her life and work and explores the 'inward war' the poet experienced as a result of her gender, religion, and mental fragility. Originally associated with the Movement, Jennings was sui generis, believing poetry was 'communication' and 'communion.' She wrote of nature, friendship, childhood, religion, love, and art, endearing her to a wide audience. Yet lifelong depression, unbearable loneliness, unrelenting fears, poverty, and physical illness plagued her. These were exacerbated by her gender in a male-dominated literary world and an inherited Catholic worldview which initially inculcated guilt and shame. However, a tenacious drive to be a poet made her, 'the most unconditionally loved writer of her generation.' Although her claim was that the poem is not the poet, her life is tracked in her voluminous published and unpublished poetry and prose. The themes of mental illness, the importance of place, the problems associated with being an unmarried woman artist, her relationship with literary mentors and younger poets, her non-feminist feminism, and her marginality and sympathy for the outcast are all explored. It was poetry which saved her; it helped her push back darkness and discover order in the midst of chaos. Poetry was her raison d'etre. It was her life.

A world filled with untruths is the land where the beautiful Ertifferrah (Er-tiff-err-ah) dwells. She senses a conspiracy looming behind the kingdom walls of Lady Governess (her closest confidant and Queen of their world). She feels despair in her lonely quest for truth as an uncomfortable darkness begins to loom throughout the land.Losing hope, she secretly becomes addicted to a magical potion that gives relief from her worries. As if things could not get any worse, she runs into Octavious, the most popular high school jock around! He breaks on the scene like the crisp rising sun and heightens Ertifferrah insight. He turns her world upside down revealing to her a hidden portal to a new world (Earth).He tells her that planet Earth holds the keys to solving the upheaval of evil secrecy seeping through the land of Akasha where Ertifferrah lives. The adventure blossoms once meeting him but little does Ertifferrah know, once meeting Octavious it is literally the beginning to the end of her life!

In my classroom, I have found that through the support of notebook work, students can grow their writing and strengthen their ideas. With strong ideas, they can write better first drafts. The work we do in notebooks before rushing into a draft gives us time to envision our work, to find mentor texts we love, and to study those texts. In doing so, we actually are doing a lot of the revision- on our vision- before we write the draft. -; Nonfiction Notebooks Aimee Buckner has introduced writer's notebooks to hundreds of classrooms through her popular book Notebook Know-How , thereby helping students everywhere learn to improve their overallwriting by focusing on essential prewriting strategies. Now, using the same format, Aimee explains how writer's notebooks can help students improve their nonfiction writing-;reports, articles, memoirs, essays, and so forth-;which has taken on even greater importance because of the emphasis the Common Core State Standards place on informative/explanatory writing. As Aimee explains, the prewriting work a student does is particularly important when writing informational pieces. Writer's notebooks help students capture their thoughts, develop ideas, explore mentor texts, refine a research strategy, and play with multiple outcomes-;all of which lead to stronger concepts and better first drafts. Greater emphasis on the front end of the writing process also saves time and energy at the revision and editing stages. From exploring topics to gathering information to assessment, Nonfiction Notebooks takes teachers step-by-step through the process of how best to use notebooks for informational writing. Helpful reproducible forms are included both in the book and as downloads online.

The question I grappled with was how to move students from "couch-potato" readers who can answer basic questions with one word-to readers who think while reading-to readers who think beyond their reading. -Aimee Buckner In Notebook Know-How, Aimee Buckner demonstrated the power of notebooks to spark and capture students' ideas in the writing workshop. In Notebook Connections, she turns her focus to the reading workshop, showing how to transform those "couch-potato" readers into deep thinkers. Buckner's fourth-grade students use reader's notebooks as a place to document their thinking and growth, to support their thinking for group discussions, and to explore their own ideas about a text without every entry being judged as evidence of their reading progress. Buckner describes her model as flexible enough for students to respond in a variety of ways yet structured enough to provide explicit instruction. Notebook Connections leads teachers through the process of launching, developing, and fine-tuning a reader's notebook program. Teacher-guided lessons in every chapter help students create anchor texts for their notebooks using various comprehension and writing strategies. As students become more proficient, they grow more independent in their thinking and responses and will begin to select the strategies that work best for them. In the process, the notebook becomes a bridge that helps students make connections between ideas, texts, strategies, and their work as readers and writers. Notebook Connections, filled with lesson ideas and assessment tips, provides a comprehensive model for making reader's notebooks the centerpiece of your reading workshop.

Long ago we invited bears into our stories, our dreams, our nightmares, our lives. We have always sought them out where they live, for their hides, their meat, their beauty, their knowingness. Human country and bear country exist side by side. As Sherry Simpson suggests, the relationship between bears and humans is ancient and ongoing and, in Alaska, profoundly and often uncomfortably close. A huge number of North America’s bears live in Alaska: including at least 31,000 brown bears, 100,000 black bears, and 3,500 polar bears. And nearly every aspect of Alaskan society reflects their presence, from hunting to tourism marketing to wildlife management to urban planning. A long-time Alaskan, Simpson offers a series of compelling essays on Alaskan bears in both wild and urban spaces—because in Alaska, bears are found not only in their natural habitat but also in cities and towns. Combining field research, interviews, and a host of up-to-date scientific sources, her finely polished prose conveys a wealth of information and insight on ursine biology, behavior, feeding, mating, social structure, and much more. Simpson crisscrosses the Alaskan landscape in pursuit of bears as she muses, marvels, and often stands in sheer awe before these charismatic creatures. Firmly grounded in the expertise of wildlife biologists, hunters, and viewing guides, she shows bears as they actually are, not as we imagine them to be. She considers not only the occasionally aggressive behavior bears need to survive, but also the violence exacted upon them by trophy hunters, advocates of predator control, or suburbanites who view bears as land sharks that threaten the safety of their families. Shifting effortlessly between fascinating facts and poetic imagery, Simpson crafts an extended meditation on why we are so drawn to bears and why they continue to engage our imaginations, populate indigenous mythologies, and help define our essential visions of wilderness. As Simpson observes, “The slightest evidence that bears share your world—or that you share theirs—can alter not only your sense of the landscape, but your sense of yourself within that landscape.”