Have a sunny weekend!

...and if you are ever in Smyrna Delaware be sure to drop by.

MYTH: Teachers have summers off.

 FACT: Students have summers off. Teachers spend summers working second jobs, teaching summer school, and taking classes for certification renewal or to advance their careers.

• Most full-time employees in the private sector receive training on company time at company expense, while many teachers spend the eight weeks of summer break earning college hours, at their own expense.
• School begins in late August or early September, but teachers are back before the start of school and are busy stocking supplies, setting up their classrooms, and preparing for the year's curriculum.

From the NEA's "Facts and Myths About Teacher's Pay"

For great resources that will get you up to speed for summer school, be sure to check out www.PrestwickHouse.com.  

Maya Angelou Dies at age 86

RIP Maya Angelou. Your beautiful words will live on forever.

Prestwick House to Host Delaware Teacher Center "Teaching Shakespeare Through Performance" Workshop

All 6th - 12th grade English Language Arts & Drama Teachers are welcome this August 7th from 10:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. Linda Emerick, NBCT, Retired teacher of English Language Arts & Shakespearean Studies & Stephanie Sullivan, Teacher High School Theatre will be presenting.

Have you noticed the frequency of the mention of Shakespeare's works embedded in the Common Core State Standards? Would you like to brush up your Shakespeare before the school year begins? Then this participatory workshop may be your cup of tea. The objectives of this workshop are: to introduce participants to the Folger Shakespeare Library's method of Teaching Shakespeare through Performance with attention paid to reading comprehension strategies and the use of a Festival as a focal point and to provide direct practice in some classroom-ready activities that support his method. Participants should come prepared to learn, have fun, and enjoy a very early in-the-day tea.

Prestwick House is located at 58 Artisan Drive Smyrna, Delaware CREDIT: 3 Clock Hours

Who turned you into an English Major?

When interviewing interns, I ask them what book or author turned them into a real reader? For me it was (the lately much maligned) 'The Catcher in the Rye' that started me off, but Vonnegut really turned me into a reader.

Congratulations Jonathan Crossley, Arkansas Teacher of the Year!

Are you teaching 'The Kite Runner' ?

Over at Prestwick House.com we've recently posted a teacher's guide to Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner.  

Justification for teaching: The Kite Runner presents students in the United States with a different perspective on Afghanistan than that developed in the media over the last decade-plus. This book can be used to build empathy for people from other cultures. It's also fantastic for cross-curricular studies in history/social studies....

As in all of our teacher's guides, in addition to justification for teaching, we've delved into: Key Literary Elements & Techniques, Themes and Motifs, Key Facts, Awards, Movies, and "Your students will love..."

• The book's universal themes — Hosseini has written a very accessible story, one that resonates regardless of the reader's cultural background.

• The valuable look into Afghanistan's past

• The narrative arc of the book, which is a logical, symmetrical progression from shame and guilt to love and redemption

Click here and scroll down for a complete list of Prestwick House teaching materials available for The Kite Runner.

“Quick chat” = 48 minutes

McSweeny’s Internet Tendency  (salty language warning) has published a list of expressions people in the corporate world use to express units of time. Some of these will probably resonate with teachers...

• “Just a sec” = 5 minutes

• “Just a minute” = 10 minutes

• “Pick your brain” = 17 minutes or, in rare cases, 90 seconds

• “Quick chat” = 48 minutes

• “No more than five minutes” = 1 hour

• “Let’s revisit this later” = never shall we speak of this again

If you are up against the clock getting ready for "common core," here is a link to our very popular Reading Informational Texts series.

Literary Touchstone Classics Game

In honor of the redesign of our Literary Touchstone Classics, I'm happy to present to you 2048 Literary Touchstone Classics Edition -- a literary themed edition of the obnoxiously addictive game that is sweeping the nation.

Simply use the arrow keys to slide all of the tiles in one direction to match up book covers from titles like Frankenstein, The Scarlet Letter, and Romeo and Juliet. When two book covers match,  they'll combine and "upgrade" to a new book cover. You get an increasing number of points for the higher level book covers. Can you figure out which book covers are coming up next?


I'll start you off with the first couple of levels and I'll update this post as you unlock new levels. Just leave a reply in the comments when you figure them out.

Level 1: Frankenstein
Level 2: Romeo and Juliet
Level 3: The Scarlet Letter
Level 4: ?

Literary Touchstone Classics are complete, unabridged original text books designed exclusively for schools. Each book includes reading pointers, a glossary and vocabulary, and notes and, best of all, with school discounts of 50% or more, the prices start at $0.99 per book!

Play the game here!

Common Core State Standards Puts a Focus on Latin and Greek Roots

A great deal has been written about how the CCSS encourages “rigor” in terms of having students confront challenging texts.   But how are students to unpack the meaning of challenging texts if they haven’t acquired the tools necessary to unpack the meaning of the words that make up the text? 

In this International Reading Association Paper,    ‘Getting to the Root of Word Study:Teaching Latin and Greek Word Roots in Elementary and Middle Grades’  by Nancy Padak, Evangeline Newton, Timothy Rasinski, and Rick M. Newton the authors make a strong case for building the vocabulary of elementary students through the study of the Latin and Greek root words that students will encounter throughout their academic career.

The case is based the fact that Latin and Greek root words are overrepresented in the dense non-fiction that students will encounter, and that Latin and Greek root words give students a greater precision as they progress from communicating by speaking to communicating by writing. 

Academic texts in general have a disproportionate number of words from Latin and Greek roots because words associated with scholarly, scientific, and technical advances are most often of Greek or Latin origin.  Consequently, as students progress through school, they encounter more and more words of classical, rather than Anglo-Saxon, origin. Moreover new technologies have brought us new words that expand the presence of Greek and Latin roots in the English lexicon (e.g., Internet, megabyte). The context in which words are used provides another layer of complexity in “school” literacy.

We use oral vocabulary to listen and speak, print vocabulary to read and write. Speech is contextualized language; “precision of word choice is seldom crucial in everyday conversation” (Nagy & Scott, 2000, p. 279). Written texts, on the other hand, tend to be decontextualized, so precision of word choice “is the primary communicative tool of the writer” (p. 279). Decontextualized language contains “richer vocabulary” (p. 279) and more unfamiliar words than spoken language (Cunningham, 2005). In school, most of the new vocabulary words children meet will be in decontextualized written texts, much of it in content area textbooks” 

If you'd like to bring Latin and Greek vocabulary study to your 4th-6th graders but don't know where to start, check our Growing Your Vocabulary: Learning from Latin and Greek Roots. We developed Growing Your Vocabulary to help bring the methods, which have proved to be so popular in our high school program Vocabulary from Latin and Greek Roots, to students in upper elementary grades. Click here to learn more about Growing Your Vocabulary.