Individual oral reading tests? Who has time?
The ORAL READING RECORD, otherwise known as a Running Record or Informal Reading Inventory, is the best tool for assessing what our students know and can do as readers. An Oral Reading Record [...]
Routines and Procedures
“An effective teacher manages. An ineffective teacher disciplines.” So says classroom management expert Harry Wong, who attests that discipline shouldn’t be necessary in well-managed [...]
HIP Xtreme Teacher’s Guide Pack
HIP SR Mega Teacher’s Guide Pack
Cursed by Cursive?
Did you know that messy handwriting can adversely affect academic performance? Writing expert Steve Graham suggests that bad penmanship can tank test scores from the 50th to the 16th percentile [...]
HIP JR Teacher’s Guide Pack
HIP Hi-School Teacher’s Guide Pack
Why Kids Should Read Novels During SSR Time
Part of me believes that kids should be able to read whatever they want during SSR (Sustained Silent Reading) Time, whether it’s magazines, manuals or comic books – as long as they’re reading [...]
HIP HI-SCHOOL Pack
A special collection for teen readers! The HIP HI-SCHOOL Pack is a discounted collection of 12 novels geared to students in senior [...]
HIP QuickRead Series – Teacher’s Guide
This special HIP QuickRead Teacher's Guide covers all four of the HIP QuickRead Series chapter books. For each [...]
Help! I’m losing my reading stamina!
I used to be able to sit with my nose buried in a book for hours on end. These days, I can hardly go for 15 minutes without becoming interrupted or distracted. I blame the internet. I get my news [...]
Making Teacher Workshops Work for Us
Teacher “workshops” have been getting a bad rap lately. After all, we know that sustained professional development is more effective and longer-lasting than the “one-shot” [...]
The Wonder of Wait Time: 3-second Magic
Wait Time refers to the period of silence between the time a question is asked and the time when the question is answered. Research tells us that, on average, we teachers give students less than [...]
DON’T Raise Your Hand!
…and other lessons learned about getting students to think more deeply. My grandson has just returned from his first week at Kindergarten and he tells me that one of the most important [...]
STRUGGLING BUT NOT RELUCTANT
I often tend to use the words “struggling” and “reluctant” readers in one breath. But the reality is that not all of our reluctant readers are struggling. And, as one ELL [...]
HIP SR MEGA PACK
HIP SR - The "gold standard" in hi-lo fiction
Save time and money with the HIP SR Mega Pack - a library of twenty novels [...]Crime & Punishment Pack
SPECIAL OFFER! Over 20% off the list price of the individual novels
Each of these novels features trouble with [...]How do we teach about September 11…
…to students who weren’t even born in 2001? When High Interest Publishing first received the manuscript for TERROR 9/11, we were hesitant. Some of us wondered if publishing the novel [...]
Rules of English That We Didn’t Know We Knew
In a BBC article that’s gone viral on the Internet, author Mark Forsyth describes a number of ways that fluent speakers of English instinctively apply rules of word order just because they [...]
Author’s Purpose: Why should we care?
Questions about the writer’s purpose appear on virtually every reading test and we often teach students the acronym PIE: Persuade, Inform or Entertain. But why does it matter? Several [...]
The Magic of Three
Just because HIP novels are geared to struggling readers doesn’t mean we don’t sneak in some literary devices here and there. And one of our favourites is the tricolon, or, as we like [...]
Was Rosenblatt Wrong? Countering the Critics of Reader Response
Over 80 years ago, Louise Rosenblatt postulated that the process of making meaning from print involves a transaction between the words on the page and the knowledge, beliefs and biases of the [...]
Read any good brochures lately?
Several years ago, I was part of a team developing a large-scale reading assessment. When we were field-testing different types of tasks and text forms, we were surprised to see that our high [...]
HIP QUICKREAD PACK
All four QUICKREAD chapter books at a significant discount over the individual price of the books. These chapter books look [...]
Catching Air
It Wasn’t Me
In It Wasn't Me, Tom is the new kid at school and he's getting hassled by everyone, especially one group of girls. When he gets framed for vandalism at school and even [...]
HIP GIRLS’ CHOICES PACK
GIRLS' CHOICES PACK features some of HIP’s top titles selected by girl readers. Each title features a female protagonist, usually in heroic roles. Note that this pack spans a [...]
Homophonophobia
I confess I have a phobia about homophones. You know, those tricky words that sound the same, but are spelled differently and have different meanings. Mixing homophones is one of the [...]
What really matters in Spelling instruction?
“Does spelling count?” Does this question drive anyone else crazy? Of course spelling counts! Would they spell a word differently depending on whether its spelling [...]
Good-bye, Round Robin!
Round-robin reading – every student taking turns reading aloud from a passage – has been something of a time-honoured tradition in schools. But in a rare act of unanimity, reading [...]
The Countess and Me
The Countess and Me is Paul Kropp's award-winning novel, upon which Curse [...]
HI-LO…YES OR NO?
High interest/low vocabulary books tend to get a bad rap sometimes. That’s because all too often they’re neither very interesting nor very easy to read. When looking for good hi-lo [...]
HIP Scary Stories Theme Pack
How do you start the year?
Most of us like to start with some sort of assessment of what our students know and can do. The last few HIP TIPs have been geared toward helping you do just that. The “Love it or Loathe [...]
Street Racer – Teacher’s Guide
This Street Racer Teacher's Guide includes lesson plans for each story, background [...]