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 [...]
“An effective teacher manages. An ineffective teacher disciplines.” So says classroom management expert Harry Wong, who attests that discipline shouldn’t be necessary in [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 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 [...]
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 [...]
…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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
“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 [...]
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 [...]
The traditional “hamburger paragraph” – a topic sentence, supporting details and a wrap-up sentence – might work fine for a self-contained piece of writing, but it simply [...]