Awakening Brilliance: How to Inspire Children to Become Successful Learners

The classroom teacher is by far the most important factor in a child’s schooling. Despite all efforts to marginalize them as “facilitators,” teachers retain the power to save lives, to permanently improve young minds, or ... Read More »

April 20, 2004 | Filed under: Politics & Current Affairs

Grading the Teacher: A Parent’s Guide

By Nellie Jacobs

April 20, 2004 | Filed under: Politics & Current Affairs

I Was Hitler’s Cat

By N.J. Dodic

Any book that plays Hitler for laughs has its work cut out for it. First, there are the jokes themselves, which must succeed on every page, given the very small market for Nazi comedy. Second, ... Read More »

April 20, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Critter Riddles (level 3)

By Marilyn Helmer, Eric Parker, illus.

The newly published Kids Can Read series offers stories with a controlled vocabulary and three levels of difficulty in an engaging format for beginner readers. Level 1, exemplified by Sam Finds a Monster, is designed ... Read More »

April 20, 2004 | Filed under: Children and YA Fiction

Franklin Stays up (level 2)

By Mary Labatt, Marisol Sarrazin, illus.

April 20, 2004 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction

Sam Finds a Monster (level 1)

By Mary Labatt, Marisol Sarrazin, illus.

April 20, 2004

Memory Lane: A Willows and Parker Mystery

By Laurence Gough

Series mystery writers always have to compete with themselves while trying to keep the faith with readers who just want variations on the same old theme. Laurence Gough typically responds on two tracks, first by ... Read More »

April 20, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Gaffer: A Novel of Newfoundland

By Kevin Major

Shorn of his duties to the teen set, Kevin Major, a Newfoundland writer best known for his YA fiction, neglects the elements that typically make a novel work: clarity, story, character. Instead, he indulges style ... Read More »

April 20, 2004 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Kayak Routes of the Pacific Northwest

By Peter McGee, ed.

It’s difficult to talk about beauty without simplifying or over-romanticizing. There can be beauty in ugliness, a certain sad, ironic beauty of human endeavour represented, say, by a wheelless splay-forked bicycle propped up in a ... Read More »

April 20, 2004 | Filed under: Reference