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The best tool for assessing what our students know and can do as readers is the ORAL READING RECORD, otherwise known as a Running Record or Informal Reading Inventory. It involves simply sitting [...]

“An effective teacher manages. An ineffective teacher disciplines.” So says classroom management expert Harry Wong, who attests that discipline shouldn’t be necessary in [...]

In the literacy block, there are always lots of choices of fiction to meet the various reading levels of the students. Not so much in the content areas, where there is often only one option for [...]

HIP Xtreme Teacher's Guide Pack - saves you over 15% plus no shipping charges and no waiting! Download them right away! Includes lesson plans for each novel in the

HIP SR Mega Teacher's Guide Pack - saves you over 15% plus no shipping charges and no waiting! Download them right away! Includes lesson plans for each novel in the

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 - saves you over 15% plus no shipping charges and no waiting! Download them right away! Includes lesson plans for each novel in the

HIP Hi-School Teacher's Guide Pack - saves you over 15% plus no shipping charges and no waiting! Download them right away! Includes lesson plans for each novel in the

I recently came across an article called “Your Child’s Dyslexia Diagnosis is B.S.”  by Julian Elliot, a professor of Education at Durham University in the UK.  According to Elliot, dyslexia is [...]

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 [...]

A special collection for teen readers! The HIP HI-SCHOOL Pack is a discounted collection of 12 novels geared to students in senior [...]

This special HIP QuickRead Teacher's Guide covers all four of the HIP QuickRead Series chapter books. For each title, there is [...]

My granddaughter recently informed me that she’s reading the Nancy Drew series. Seriously? Nancy Drew books are still around? Believe it or not, the original series ran from 1930 until 2003! (Who [...]

Confession: I am a recovering test developer.  But those two years I spent as the lead consultant on a large-scale reading test taught me a lot about the assessment/evaluation process. And my [...]

I always welcome the return to school in January as an opportunity for a “mid-year correction,” a time to rethink classroom practices that aren’t working as well as I’d [...]

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 [...]

Round-robin reading – every student taking turns reading aloud from a passage – has been something of a time-honored tradition in schools.  But reading experts agree that this [...]

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” [...]

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 [...]

…and other lessons learned about effective questioning. We all know about the importance of asking good questions to prompt deeper thinking. Sometimes the protocols around questioning are [...]

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 - The "gold standard" in hi-lo fiction

…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 [...]

Never end a sentence with a preposition. And never start a sentence with “AND”. These golden rules of writing were drummed into most of us in school – and many of us still teach them to our [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Whenever I open this can of worms, I get feedback saying that boys can, should and will read whatever girls read.  And I don’t disagree! But here’s one fact no one can argue with: the [...]

All four QUICKREAD chapter books at a significant discount over the individual price of the books.  These chapter books look [...]

Catching Air is more than a skateboarding story.  It's about kids who can make a difference in their community.  Adapted from