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Chopper Rescue
Stories and activities for mentoring and guided writing
edited and selected by Hazel Edwards
An anthology of 13 short stories, by both new and well-known authors, plus student activities, aimed at encouraging and mentoring the writing of students in years 5–8.
Features
- A range of adventurous subjects, formats, lengths, styles and types of humour likely to interest the potential year 5–8 readership and initiate modelling for classroom activities.
- Includes vital hints illustrating the creative process, including notes on where the ideas for the stories came from.
- Each author has provided their tips for writing, and there is a ‘behind and beyond-the-story’ section after each story.
- Writing tasks for students are inspired by the stories.
- Ideas for mentoring young writers.
- A scope and sequence grid relating each story to the National Assessment program Guidelines for writing criteria plus additional mentoring tips will be available on the Teaching Solutions website.
| Chopper Rescue | (Years 5-8) | 978-1-921454-86-8 | $24.95 | ||
| available April 2010 | |||||
Creative English Activities
by Jenny Rudd O'Neill
Two genuinely exciting teacher resource books filled with creative activities to develop and extend students’ interest and skills, and stretch their imagination.
Features
- Photocopiable pages for student work plus individual teacher pages providing background information, notes on procedure, further ideas and follow-up activities.
- Activities cover writing, vocabulary, poetry, speaking and debating, drama, reading, listening and research.
- Extensive lists of topics for writing, speaking and listening.
- Suitable for individual, group or whole-class work, and can be used at school or at home.
| Book 1 | (Years 3-4) | 978-1-921454-66-0 | $36.95 each | |
| Book 2 | (Years 5-7) | 978-1-921454-67-7 |
Dramatics
A Drama Resource for Primary Teachers
by Hazel Edwards & Goldie Alexander
A revised edition of The Primary Drama Resource Book, providing teachers with a multitude of drama activities suitable for middle and upper primary students (years 3—6/7).
Features
- Includes an interesting range of material, such as choral scripts, multi-age ‘buddy’ scripts and community festivals.
- Deals with important issues such as bullying, making it a particularly useful resource for schools.
- The activities are designed to incorporate a variety of key learning areas, using drama as a vehicle for research.
- Aims to foster creative collaboration, team-building and negotiation.
- Fosters the idea of learning by doing.
- Activities include creating catchy titles, a short play, sample texts, dramatic hints, script writing, improvisation, adaptation of story to script, video and TV show ideas, mime dance and puppet scripts, eventing on site, book and internet collaborations, and multimedia scripts.
| Dramatics | 978-1-921454-27-1 | $39.95 |
Enact
Drama for the Classroom
by Hazel Edwards
An outstanding drama resource for primary schools from one of Australia’s best known and admired children’s authors.
Features
- Allows children to explore a range of issues through drama.
- Offers a mixture of script types, including flexible casts, outside staging and choral work, with varied length and complexity of costuming from very simple to ‘dressed up’.
- Reading range from non-readers, to a narrator having the most challenging role.
- Subject matter ranges from fiction to non-fiction, and the whacky to the serious.
- Minimum/maximum cast numbers provided.
- Overlapping possibilities exist for audio with SFX, puppetry, web cams, screenplays and videos, as well as suggestions for festivals or school assemblies.
- The plays are of period length, and are simply performed with parts for all class members via elastic choruses.
- Easy to use by non-drama specialists — each play is accompanied by detailed teaching notes.
- All the plays have been successfully trialled in schools.
| Book 1 | (Years 1-2) | 978-1-921454-24-0 | $34.95 each | |
| Book 2 | (Years 3-4) | 978-1-921454-25-7 | ||
| Book 3 | (Years 5-6/7) | 978-1-921454-26-4 |
Enact: History
A companion resource to Enact Books 1-3
by Hazel Edwards
Features
- Proven classroom playscripts, enabling students to become acquainted with significant personalities from Australian history, and be inspired to evaluate their actions and historic impact.
- Covers medical, political, entrepreneurial, literary, agricultural, sporting and media role models, including enterprising females, but often with a quirky twist.
- Contains biographical information, research data and follow-up activities as well as flexible casting and easy props.
| Enact: History | (Years 4-8) | 978-1-921454-71-4 | $34.95 | |||
English Resource Books 1 & 2
by John Barwick, Jenny Barwick & Kerry Fraser
Two flexible English teaching resources for years 3 to 6/7.
Features
- Activities cover the areas of reading, writing, talking and listening, plus teacher resources.
- Activity sheets range from open design, catering for varied student responses, to more directed, to help teaching and to reinforce particular concepts.
- Includes activities suitable for remediation, self-directed extension, guided lessons, group activities, individual or group research tasks and assessment tasks.
| Book 1 | (Years 3-4) | 978-1-921454-68-4 | $29.95 each | |
| Book 2 | (Years 5-7) | 978-1-921454-69-1 |
Girlfriends
Camaraderie, Community and Connectedness
by Robyn Floyd, Phillippa Adgemis & Christine Shiel
Developed out of the needs and relationships of teenage girls in Australia, the Girlfriends program is practical, creative, versatile and challenging, providing teachers with ideas for developing a student-negotiated program that addresses the needs of girls in the middle years of schooling.
The Girlfriends program improves social competencies by building connectedness to peers, school and community. Girlfriends has been successfully trialled and operated in a diverse range of communities throughout Australia.
Features
- The pre-program focus group, introductory sessions and 30 forum suggestions are sufficiently flexible for teachers to modify and target for the needs of any school community.
- Forum topics include Healthy relationships, Friends, Safe partying, Nutrition, Speaking effectively in public, Environmental awareness, Fit and healthy, Money matters, Personal values and many others.
- The program invites participation from local community leaders and builds links for girls within their community.
- The program seeks to empower girls in their early adolescence and increases feelings of confidence and wellbeing. Evidence has shown that after the course girls feel stronger, more aware of the effects of peer pressure, have clearer goals and a greater understanding of how to achieve those goals.
- The participants play a major role in determining the direct content of the course and it exposes students to ideas that enable them to make empowering choices.
- The authors are all very experienced teachers in senior positions in Melbourne.
| Girlfriends | (Years 5-9) | 978-1-921454-99-8 | $36.95 | ||
| available May 2010 | |||||
My Horrible Cousins
and other stories
by Goldie Alexander
A collection of eleven short stories of particular interest to girl readers aged 9–13, with accompanying notes for teachers.
Features
- Particularly timely, as it balances the recent interest given to encouraging boys to read, at the risk of neglecting writing for girls.
- Features girls as the main characters — girls who are strong and resourceful, girls overcoming adversity, solving problems, being determined, being passionate about causes.
- The stories are diverse: written in first person/third person, with real characters and varied settings.
- Download the Teachers' Notes, which provide background information, activities and worksheets for making the most effective use of the stories in the classroom.
Goldie Alexander is one of Australia’s most prolific and awarded children’s authors.
| My Horrible Cousins | (Years 4-7) | 978-1-921454-72-1 | $19.95 | ||
Preparing for Secondary School English
by John Barwick & Jenny Barwick
This completely revised edition of the successful Preparing for Secondary English has been updated with contemporary material which reflects current curricula, while retaining the structured skills-based approach of the original.
Features
- Ensures that students in their final year of primary school have mastered all the skills and concepts they need before starting secondary school.
- Helps students in their first year of secondary school who may not have had adequate preparation for the secondary curriculum in their primary years.
- Provides additional exercises to challenge those students who have already mastered the minimum requirements.
- Covers the basic areas of grammar, punctuation, spelling, reading, writing, talking and listening.
- Each section contains a diagnostic test, clear explanations and examples of each skill, exercises for consolidation, revision and practice, and extension activities.
- Also includes eight proficiency tests to test understandings in reading, grammar, punctuation, and spelling.
| Preparing for Secondary English | 978-1-921454-74-5 | $29.95 | |
The Primary Speaking and Listening Resource Book
by Adrian Pauley & Kevin Ryan
An invaluable source of information, ideas, activities and photocopiable worksheets dealing with a comprehensive range of communication skills for middle and upper primary students.
Features
- Information for teachers is explicitly modelled and easy to read, and follows a logical progression with clear examples.
- Includes posters and information sheets which are ideal for classroom use and a good visual aid.
- Provides a wide variety of exercises dealing with each topic.
- An accompanying CD is linked to the relevant exercises.
- Designed to make students more confident speaking to a group or one-on-one, able to listen more effectively, become better analytical thinkers, and able to put their point of view convincingly.
| Primary Speaking & Listening Resource Book | 978-1-921454-70-7 | ||
| $49.95 | |||
Reading and Thinking
by Helen Robinson
Four blackline master books providing comprehension and inferential activities plus higher order thinking activities.
Features
- Graded to meet curriculum requirements in all states and territories.
- The activities use high-interest topical reading matter, and are based around Bloom’s revised taxonomy and Gardner’s eight Intelligences.
- Each book covers 9 text types: procedure, exposition, discussion, narrative, review, explanation, factual and literary description, factual and literary recount, and information report.
- 27 units of work in each book—three units per text type.
- A set of 8 matrixes enables teachers to address individual learning preferences, open-ended questioning techniques, discovery learning, freedom of choice, group interaction and variation in pacing.
| Book 1 | (Year 3) | 978-1-921454-87-5 | $36.95 each | |
| Book 2 | (Year 4) | 978-1-921454-88-2 | ||
| Book 3 | (Year 5) | 978-1-921454-89-9 | ||
| Book 4 | (Year 6/7) | 978-1-921085-16-1 |
Thinking Through Themes:
Air, Water, Earth, Fire
Learning Centre Activities for Years 3–6
by Ron Thomas & Shirley Sydenham
A series of four books providing learning centre activities on the themes of Air, Water, Earth and Fire.
Features
- Each book contains student activity task cards, plus teacher resource materials.
- Information necessary for completion of the tasks is provided as resource material, or references are given to where information can be found, including online sources.
- The activities are based on Gardner’s theory of multiple Intelligences, plus the six sequential levels of thinking in Bloom’s taxonomy.
- The task cards are printed 2 per page for teachers to photocopy onto cards, which can be laminated to provide a reusable resource.
- There are checklists for teacher organisation, student self-assessment and record keeping.
| Air | 978-1-921454-38-7 | ||||||
| Water | 978-1-921454-40-0 | ||||||
| Earth | 978-1-921454-41-7 | $39.95 each | |||||
| Fire | 978-1-921454-39-4 | ||||||
Using the Library
by Ron Thomas & Shirley Sydenham
Three books written specially for classroom teachers who are required to take their classes into the library to undertake a library program using the resources housed there.
Features
- Provides a structured, sequential and balanced program for the complete primary school years aimed at developing students as independent library users.
- Units include photocopiable activities and worksheets, full directions for teachers on how to conduct each activity, and extension activities for fast finishers.
- Activities can be used individually, in small groups or the whole class, and encourage a ‘hands on’ use of resources.
| Book 1 | Lower primary | 978-1-921085-25-3 | $36.95 each | |
| Book 2 | Middle primary | 978-1-921085-26-0 | ||
| Book 3 | Upper primary | 978-1-921085-27-7 |
What Will I Write?
Writing Assessment Tasks Made Easy
by Helen Robinson
A series of 4 books, providing teachers with an easy-to-use resource to help them teach and assess their students’ writing.
Features
- Each writing task is fully self-contained, with students and teachers working from the same sheet — ensuring that it is the student’s writing skills that are being assessed, rather than their general or specific knowledge.
- The ‘copy-and-go’ format is very simple to use, with no explanation required, making the books ideal for beginning teachers and casuals, as well as the normal busy teacher.
- Each book covers nine text types: narrative, recount, review, description, information report, discussion, procedure, exposition and explanation.
- Each text type is provided with a proforma to address individual class needs, plus three stimulus sheets for the writer.
- Space is provided on each sheet for student self-evaluation and for specific comments from the teacher.
- These writing activities provide ideal practice for the writing tasks in the NAPLAN tests.
| Book 1 | (Year 3) | 978-1-921454-20-2 | $29.95 each | |
| Book 2 | (Year 4) | 978-1-921454-21-9 | ||
| Book 3 | (Year 5) | 978-1-921454-22-6 | ||
| Book 4 | (Year 6) | 978-1-921454-23-3 |
The White Elephant
Drama based on Asian Folk Tales
by Edel Wignell
A collection of plays for children aged 8–12 years, adapted from traditional Asian folk tales.
Asian folk tales are rich in fantasy, adventure and humour, and are splendid for telling, reading and acting.
Features
- Photocopiable play scripts are respectful and true to the cultures from which they come.
- Provides a drama context for multicultural issues.
- Detailed notes for teachers which:
- locate the folk tales in their geographical settings
- give background information to enhance understanding of the folk tales and the cultures from which they have evolved
- offer suggestions for classroom activities covering a variety of KLAs
- provide literature and folklore links.
| The White Elephant | (Years 3-7) | 978-1-921454-28-8 | $34.95 |
