Useful Internet Links for Writers & Teachers

Aesop’s Fables
Perfect for Unit I/II note taking and rewriting; has links to lesson plans & other Aesop miscellany. Also contains a complete collection of Anderson’s Fairy Tales (127) for reading and Unit III summarizing:
http://www.aesopfables.com

Audible Audio Books
Downloadable audio books and podcasts. Great for the road! Choose from 50,000 titles:
http://www.audible.com - Try Audible Now and Get 2 Free Audiobook Downloads with a 14 Day Trial. Choose from over 60,000 Titles.

 

Bartleby’s Great Books Online
Fiction, non-fiction, and reference source texts online. You can even download Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style and Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.
http://www.bartleby.com

BookWire
A huge web site where you can research book awards, read reviews, actually download hundreds (with links to thousands) of entire books—fiction, non-fiction, children’s, public domain, classics by Hans Christian Anderson, Mark Twain, R.L. Stevenson, etc. All free!
http://www.bookwire.com

Commas!
For a quick and easy to understand guide to using commas in American English, see the The Owl at Purdue, a writing guide for students:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/607/02

Common Errors in English
A good source for keeping your students’ compositions error-free.
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/errors.html

Institute for Excellence in Writing
Our most up-to-date seminar calendar as well as product descriptions, a order form, student samples, useful links, answers to common questions and our online store.
http://www.excellenceinwriting.com
For an explanation on Narrative Stories. For teaching tips, Click here

IEW Families email loop
Sign up for an email loop of parents and teachers discussing the products and applications of the Teaching Writing: Structure & Style syllabus . This is an independently run web loop and is not administered or moderated by IEW.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/IEWfamilies/

Librivox (Acoustical Liberation of Books in the Public Domain)
LibriVox provides free audiobooks from the public domain.
http://librivox.org

Project Gutenberg
The major source of etext transcriptions on the web. Everything from Dante’s

Inferno (in Italian or English) to “The Miller’s Daughter” by Emile Zola. All free:
http://www.promo.net/pg/

Society for the Preservation of English Language & Literature (SPELL)
A fun organization with a humorous and informative newsletter as well as a Scholarship-Essay Competition for High School Students. Richard Lederer (author of Anguished English) is VP and contributor.
http://www.spellorg.com/

Writing from Pictures - Helpful Tips from Laura B. Unit 5 Helps from Laura Bettis.pdf

SOURCE: IEW -TWSS -Resources

Focus! DIVIDE AND CONQUER

I found a great resource to help us help our kids learn how to focus.  

And who can't use a tip or two in paying attention?

Here is a quote:

Some things are just better taken in bits and pieces. When kids already have trouble paying attention, being faced with pages of math, passages to memorize, or long periods of ‘boring stuff’, breaking it down is often a great solution.

1. Divide memorization into sections, and study at different times. Maybe your child has to memorize “The Road Not Taken”. Work on stanza one during the ride to school. After school, review stanza one and add verse two. While cooking dinner, add verse three to the mix. After dinner, review and add the last verse. Remember, you eat an elephant a bite at a time.

2. Learn vocabulary words in different places. Divide vocabulary lists into groups of five, and study each group in a different room. If she’s learning a foreign language that has gender or verb forms, consider having one room to learn masculine nouns and another for feminine. Learn one verb form in the kitchen, another in the car, the irregulars in the bathroom . . . .

You can order the e-book here: http://helpyourchildfocus.com/
author: Kayla Fay

Pioneer Woman to Visit Texas

The Pioneer Woman is coming to Houston!

Saturday, December 5, 2009
1:00 pm
BLUE WILLOW BOOKS
14532 Memorial Drive
Houston, TX

If you do not know who she is you just might want to check out her blog!
The cooking section is especially pertinent to her book tour!  :-) 

Hulu, O. Henry, Steinbeck & God

A couple of days ago my 4th grade son and I were poking around on hulu.com. He loves to watch Modern Marvels and I'm a vintage movie gal.

I found an old show called, O. Henry's Full House. It is a film version of the some of the best stories of O. Henry.
We watched the first vignette and both of us decided to settle in for the whole show.

The surprise element was that it was hosted by John Steinbeck! John Steinbeck is one of my favorite authors! I had never seen film footage of him, I had only seen pictures. The O. Henry stories were fairly well interpreted and the acting was vintage 1950s with some 1950s star to boot! I think it was waaaaay cool to find this classic but! it was the host, John Steinbeck, that had me glued to the screen.

I told my son how I loved Grapes of Wrath and Tortilla Flat. I assured him that he would love the stories when he was a little older. I think he was a bit put off because I did not want him to read the stories just yet. And, I understood his frustration. . . his Mom just raved about an author and then tells him, "Oh, but you can read the stories in a couple of years."
Well, today I was unpacking (yes, still unpacking - and we will be "still unpacking" until we get every room painted so we can then secure shelves to the walls) . . . . where was I?

Oh yes . . . .
Today while unpacking I found a Prose and Poetry anthology published in 1965.
A little side note here . . . I have a weak spot for 3 types of books:

1. Classic classroom readers - primers and anthologies
   
2. Unique Alphabet Books
3. Good Catholic publications - from picture books to Papal encyclicals and everything in between.
   

I had planned to use the 1965 Prose and Poetry anthology (and many more I have packed away) in our homeschooling. I just hadn't planned on the fire, moving and living out of a suitcase with all our things in storage for two and a half months. So, I am, very randomly, discovering things here, there and everywhere.

Where was I?
Oh yes, the anthology that I found.

I flipped it open to a random page and viola! -- a story by John Steinbeck! A story apprpriate for my 10 year old! The Red Pony.

God is so good! He is just so good! I keep smiling at the way He puts things in our paths. Puts 'em there so we sometimes stumble over them!
We started the story today . . . . I know there will be tears at the end, I am getting the tissues ready.

O. Henry's Full House

Feature Film |1:57:36

A dozen top stars (including Charles Laughton, Marilyn Monroe and Anne Baxter) and five famed directors (including Howard Hawks and Henry Koster) join forces to present filmed versions of the best stories of O. Henry, all narrated by John Steinbeck.


cross posted at A Catholic Notebook

Immune to Enjoying Food

There is book club going on over at Chrunchy Chicken. The book is, In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan. Here is a summary of chapter 7 which I found especially intriguing because it touches on the sheer abundance of food available here in the good ole U.S. of A.

Immune to enjoying food?

Or, maybe just feeling that we somehow deserve any food we want......fast, ethnic, served to us, organic, seconds, sweet, non caloric, freezable, attractive, fun.
Beware. . . . I have generously inserted my opinions in this next paragraph.


Chapter 7. Beyond the Pleasure Principle -

"The idea that Americans have become immune to enjoying food, due to the sheer abundance of it, is an interesting one. It allows people the luxury to focus on food for it's nutritional value only. Let's be quite honest here -- this is a luxury in a world where many are focused on what they can afford, find or make mud cookies out of.

I know several people whose diets revolve solely around its nutritional value and not their actual enjoyment of it. This may not be obvious when people focus on garlic, olive oil, flax, salmon, etc. purely because they offer some sort of "extra" nutrition.

In other words, "experimental science has produced rules of nutrition which will (supposedly) prevent illness and encourage longevity." Many people have subscribed to this way of thinking. They are looking for the holy grail of nutrients to keep them alive and healthy.
There is a much bigger picture here that is being overlooked. That includes activity level, genetics, stress factors and environmental toxin exposure. Food (nutrition) alone is not the end all answer."

From the In Defense of Food link:
Michael Pollan describes an American paradox: The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become.

But if real food -- the sort of food our great grandmothers would recognize as food -- stands in need of defense, from whom does it need defending? From the food industry on one side and nutritional science on the other. Both stand to gain much from widespread confusion about what to eat, a question that for most of human history people have been able to answer without expert help. Yet the professionalization of eating has failed to make Americans healthier. Thirty years of official nutritional advice has only made us sicker and fatter while ruining countless numbers of meals.

Pollan proposes a new (and very old) answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

sources:
Crunchy Chicken
cross posted at Catholic Notebook