HIP offers these teacher resources without charge to support educators with their reading programs

Readers' Theater

Readers' Theater is a semi-staged play based on a small section of a book or story. Students use their voices, facial expressions and sound effects to turn a section of text into a brief drama. The script is not memorized, but the performance must be carefully rehearsed. Often the sound effects require the devoted attention of one student. The goal is dramatic reading – either live or recorded. As much research has shown, re-reading of text is terrifically important in developing reading skills, and Reader's Theater makes that re-reading interesting.

Choose Readers' Theater from the right-hand column to gain access to eleven free, downloadable scripts based on HIP novels. To download an assessment/marking rubric, click here. To download an MP3 file of students performing the Readers' Theater script for Student Narc, click here. Teachers are encouraged to use both of these in their classrooms.

Free Graphic Organizers

Ten of our favorite graphic organizers are now available free of charge. Click here for a page linking to the PDF files.

New Book Excerpt from Lori Jamison's Guiding Readers

Lori has given us permission to offer a PDF of Chapter 7 "Guiding Struggling Readers" from her new book Guiding Readers. Click here for a wonderful combination of theory with practical lesson ideas.

Struggling Readers and Common Core Standards

Many states are now adopting Common Core State Standards that set particularly difficult reading tasks. In this new article, Lori Jamison answers the question, "how can hi/lo books fulfill the Common Core criteria for complex texts?" Click here for a two-page PDF file.

Teacher Created Materials

Our HIP teacher's guides (available for $7.95 for each novel) offer a great deal of material to help students before, during and after the reading of HIP novels, but sometimes teachers create their own more extensive activities for these books. Here are some self-study guides developed by teacher Julia Masterson for her students:

Feel free to download these pages for use in your classroom. HIP pays an honorarium for the right to offer these materials on our website, and we encourage other teachers to share that they've developed for their students.

HIP Three-Minute Reading Assessment

Many teachers and parents are using this quick, one-on-one reading assessment to garner information about the reading abilities of their students. The HIP Three-Minute Reading Assessment provides a fast assessment of a student's reading ability from grade 2 to grade 6 levels - accurate within a half grade level in most cases - by using graded selections from HIP Jr. and HIP Sr. books. Click here for more information and to download the teacher and student versions of the assessment.

The follow-up chart takes information from the assessment and uses it to recommend the next steps a teacher (or parent) should take. Click here for the PDF file.  (Note: First editions of the print version of the HIP Reading Assessment have a typographical error on page 102. Click here for a revised page.)

Articles and Handouts based on talks or books by Paul Kropp and Lori Jamison

Want to Test Upcoming Books?

We are always looking for classrooms to test our novels-in-progress. If you are already using HIP novels and would like to try some forthcoming books in manuscript format, email us at hip-books@sympatico.ca. Perhaps your class can join with other schools to help us perfect the next group of HIP novels.We provide a literature circle pack of every novel you test as a thank-you for testing out books while they're in development.