There is a certain magic that comes from falling asleep in the backseat and waking up far away. Like fairies, we were transported to a new world and when that world ended a short time later, we found another one to take its place. When we saw the familiar orange and white U-Haul trailer parked outside our house, we knew it was time to leave. Like an echo of times past, all five of us would jam into the car--our familial womb--along with our bewildered pets, awaiting the next stop. Riding in the Backseat with my Brother takes readers through a journey beginning in the 1950s, steered by a dad who had wanderlust, and a nervous mother who gave her third child away following a nervous breakdown after his birth. Ourlineage of distant relatives some called gypsies, wanderers, or Irish Travelers, had not skipped this generation altogether. As we bounced across the country, sucking up the sounds, smells, and sights of new places, the events along the way formed us, making imprints in our hearts and minds forever.
Is there too much emphasis on guided reading in primary classrooms? It's a question that many educators, like kindergarten teacher and literacy coach Cathy Mere, are starting to ask. Guided reading provides opportunities to teach students the strategies they need to learn how to read increasingly challenging texts, but Cathy found that she needed to find other ways to help students gain independence. While maintaining guided reading as an important piece of their reading program, teachers need to offer students opportunities during the day to develop as readers, to learn to choose books, to find favorite genres and authors, and to talk about their reading. In More Than Guided Reading, Cathy shares her journey as she moved from focusing on guided reading as the center of her reading program to placing children at the heart of literacy learning--not only providing more time for students to discover their reading lives, but also shaping instruction to meet the needs of the diverse learners in her classroom. By changing the structure of the day, Cathy found she was better able to adjust the support she was providing students, allowing time for whole-class focus lessons, conferences, and opportunities to share ideas, as well as reading from self-selected texts using the strategies, skills, and understandings acquired in reader's workshop. The focus lesson is the centerpiece of the workshop. It is often tied to a read-aloud and connected to learning from the previous day, helping to build skills, extend thinking, and develop independence over time. This thoroughly practical text offers numerous sample lessons, questions for conferences, and ideas for revamping guided reading groups. It will help teachers tweak the mix of instructional components in their reading workshops, and provoke school-wide conversations about the place of guided reading in a complete literacy curriculum.
Road Warriors Life Lessons is an inspiration. It is based on personal knowledge of experiences learned in driving lessons taught the author by her father. Power dominates the driver of a vehicle as he takes the vehicle out onto an open road. The sense of command and control equally affects males and females. Maneuvering a vehicle skillfully is not a childs experience to be taken lightly. There are lessons gleaned from the narrator of this book of real-life ventures. Schoolinstructed drivers education courses combined with parental supervision mold preteen and teen lessons. This book demonstrates safety and guidance through actions bent toward humor and realism. Driving is a privilege offered during teen years. That privilege comes with responsibility to be viewed seriously by all drivers. The humor illustrated in the storyline is easily adaptable to the readers everyday life involving the world of driving a vehicle. It is much easier to grin or laugh at another persons errors or mishaps than own them. Better to experience through third-party humor than actually feel the effects of any of the books scenarios. Driving defensively is an art. Safety first does not mean much until driving students think of that safety in terms of his life and the lives of others on the road. One Life Lesson -- Remember sheet metal can be replaced; body parts are not easily repaired. Vehicles roll off an assembly line, not your body. We encounter so many experiences up close and personal when learning to drive a vehicle. Let those experiences be due to safe, defensive driving techniques.
On October 20, 1992, life for one East Texas family changed forever. Following the devastating sudden death of her father, Sharon Brown Keith embarked on a journey of grief and healing, of acceptance and personal growth and transformation. In this moving memoir about love, loss, and letting go, Keith shares her recollections about growing up and coming of age under the tender and steadfast guidance of her father and hero. Weaving humor and popular culture throughout her heartfelt story, she reminds us that our pasts make us who we are in the present and that we can indeed encourage something truly positive to emerge from our darkest moments.
They say family is where you find solace, a safe haven, but what if the same people who are supposed to protect you, are the ones who abuse you? Chained: The Lives of Six Children tells the sad but bitter reality of pain and suffering that starts at home. Abuse can forever mark the abused, but some are remarkably strong. Witness the essence of survival and true strength amidst the darkest of sufferings
Explore the true life of a child named Laura, the many challenges she faces during her childhood, and the hardships she endures as a young woman. Laura finds a safe haven, a place of refuge, until she is introduced to the spiritual world and the forces of evil. Discover the spiritual battle Laura encounters; how Satan hates her, weaves a web, entangles her to be his servant, and plans to destroy her. Accompany Laura as she walks you through the dark pits of her life in a daily battle with the dark world, its cult, and her experiences with the school of hard knocks. Live the abuse, addiction, fear, and shame she endures; as she escapes an abusive home to being imprisoned in a world with no way out. Laura attempts to search for the door that will lead her to eternal freedom. Will she find it?
I never realized that when I started writing my first Patio Time that it would be what brings me healing from God. All of us have a past. Not all of us have trust issues, but I did. I always said that if I couldn't trust my own father, how could I trust my Father in heaven. But not all of us grow from our childhood surroundings without some type of damage. I can honestly say that I used my upbringing as a crutch and an excuse for not growing. Everything I thought I was failing at, I blamed on my life as a child in West Virginia. That's how I began most of my Patio Time. Growing up, as a child, in West Virginia, I blamed failed relationships, lack of financial gain, and listening to the wrong people. I also spent years of trying to fix everyone who had alcoholism because my father was an alcoholic and wanting to heal everyone who had cancer because I watched my mother die of that horrible disease. When you're a child, you can't process death or addiction. I realized I was holding myself back because I could never get close to anyone. Whenever I tried, I would always push them away. Maybe because I was thinking everyone leaves. One day, I went on my patio, sat in my rocking chair, and started writing about things that went on in my home and my small community. Patio Time is a collection of my life and circumstances in that little rural area with a lot of dysfunctions. I guess it's true: what goes on behind closed doors stays behind closed doors. But with this writing, I realized that I had all I needed, just by my surroundings and the love of the community. I often found that my solace came from playing in the mountains and creeks. Patio Time is my perception of the lessons that I learned from every situation. I am hoping that this little collection will move the heart of others who need to realize they are exactly where they needed to be at that time. All the situations that happened to me, can clearly, and has, taught me a lesson of life. I never realized it at that time, but as an adult, I see it clearly now. My goal is for someone to read any page of my book and see their own life and be able to look back and see the beauty and how they were molded as an adult. What my readers don't know is that I was an Italian child who was given away to a white couple in West Virginia in the fifties. Skin color was never an issue in my family but so prevalent in that era. My parents showed nothing but love to me. But a lot of burden comes with that scenario. I grew up with molestation, alcoholism, physical and emotional abuse along with bullying. But with all of that exposure, I still could find something to be thankful for in every one of those situations. I lost both of my parents--my mother when I graduated from high school and my father shortly after. Patio Time has been a way to express the memories that I was trying to forget. Now I'm grateful for my writings. I am hoping that my journey is a light for others.
When Bonnie J. Rough receives the test results that confirm she is a carrier of the genetic condition hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia, or H.E.D., it propels her on a journey deep into her family's past in the American West. At first glance, H.E.D. seems only to be a superficial condition: a peculiar facial bone structure, sparse hair, few teeth, and an inability to sweat. But a closer look reveals the source of a lifetime of infections, breathing problems, and drug dependency for Bonnie's grandfather Earl, who suffered from the disorder. After a boyhood as a small–town oddity and an adulthood fraught with disaster, Earl died penniless and alone at the age of 49. Bonnie's mother was left with an inheritance that included not just the gene for H.E.D., but also the emotional pain that came from witnessing her father's misery. As Bonnie and her husband consider becoming parents themselves, their biological legacy haunts every decision. The availability of genetic testing gives them new choices to make, choices more excruciating than any previous generation could have imagined. Ultimately, Carrier is a story of a modern moral crisis, one that reveals the eternal tension between past and future.
Conjuring entrancing tales of Mexican American mystics and misfits, Marytza K. Rubio shatters the boundaries of reality with this fiercely imaginative debut. “The first witch of the waters was born in Destruction. The moon named her Maria.” Set against the tropics and megacities of the Americas, Maria, Maria takes inspiration from wild creatures, tarot, and the porous borders between life and death. Motivated by love and its inverse, grief, the characters who inhabit these stories negotiate boldly with nature to cast their desired ends. As the enigmatic community college professor in “Brujería for Beginners” reminds us: “There’s always a price for conjuring in darkness. You won’t always know what it is until payment is due.” This commitment drives the disturbingly faithful widow in “Tijuca,” who promises to bury her husband’s head in the rich dirt of the jungle, and the sisters in “Moksha,” who are tempted by a sleek obsidian dagger once held by a vampiric idol. But magic isn’t limited to the women who wield it. As Rubio so brilliantly elucidates, animals are powerful magicians too. Subversive pigeons and hungry jaguars are called upon in “Tunnels,” and a lonely little girl runs free with a resurrected saber-toothed tiger in “Burial.” A colorful catalog of gallery exhibits from animals in therapy is featured in “Art Show,” including the Almost Philandering Fox, who longs after the red pelt of another, and the recently rehabilitated Paranoid Peacocks. Brimming with sharp wit and ferocious female intuition, these stories bubble over into the titular novella, “Maria, Maria”—a tropigoth family drama set in a reimagined California rainforest that explores the legacies of three Marias, and possibly all Marias. Writing in prose so lush it threatens to creep off the page, Rubio emerges as an ineffable new voice in contemporary short fiction.
