Stone by Author David Alexander Robertson and Illustrator Scott B. Henderson, Book 1 of 4 in the series, 7 Generations. Stone introduces Edwin, a young man who must discover his family’s past if he is to have any future. Edwin learns of his ancestor Stone, a young Plains Cree man, who came of age in the early 18th century. Following a vision quest, Stone aspires to be like his older brother, Bear, a member of the Warrior Society. But when Bear is tragically killed during a Blackfoot raid, Stone, the best shot and rider in his encampment, must overcome his grief and avenge his brother’s death. Only then can he begin a new life with his bride, Nahoway. It is Stone’s story that drives Edwin to embark on his own quest. P&M. ISBN: 978-1-55379-227-7, $12.95. For Grades 9–12.

I Still Don’t Even Know You by Michelle Berry. You could be married for over 10 years and still not know your spouse. You might think you know everything about your dad but still he surprises you at your mother’s death bed. You think you know everyone in your small town but you’ll never know the dark secret your drinking buddy hides in his heart.
With control, wit, and brilliance, Michelle Berry explores the hidden depths between individuals, families, and communities. Dysfunctional characters create tension in situations where they teeter on the edge of life. Psychological or situational twists pop readers’ eyes wide open and force them to pay attention. Berry uses rapid-fire dialogue to build tension and emotion. Despite the underlying dark tones, the stories carry life and hope, human kindness—and strangeness. Each story is a vivid snapshot of a raw moment in the lives of people at a crossroads. A married couple in the title story, “I Still Don’t Even Know You,” question the foundation of their relationship during a winter getaway. In “The Cat,” a life of endless purgatory stretches before a newly-wed husband. The wives in “Five Old Crows,” contemplate ways to pass the time ranging from murder to writing. And the title character in “Martin” drives around a boring country town with a shotgun in his car, his dissatisfaction with his empty life mounting as townspeople talk about recent mysterious murders. TUR. ISBN: 9780888013682, $19.00. Short Stories.

This Hidden Thing by Dora Dueck is a lyrical and moving novel offering us one woman’s compelling, ordinary, and surprising life. Maria Klassen is an exemplary woman, living in Winnipeg in the early part of the twentieth century. We first encounter her at 19, meeting the many unpredictable challenges of “working out” with a prosperous Canadian family who are unaware that Maria’s own people once were prosperous. Later we meet Maria in adulthood – industrious, devout, handsome, and devoted to her extended Mennonite family. Yet Maria is reserved, intensely private, and stubborn. She has never married. What is the reason? This is the story of a life that contained passion and suffering that no one knew. CMU. ISBN: 978-0-920718-86-5. $19.50.

Aski Awasis/Children of the Earth: First Peoples Speaking on Adoption edited by Jeannine Carrière. The adoption of Aboriginal children into non-Aboriginal families has a long and contentious history in Canada. Life stories told by First Nations people reveal that the adoption experience has been far from positive for these communities and has, in fact, been an integral aspect of colonization. In an effort to decolonize adoption practices, the Yellowhead Tribal Services Agency (YTSA) in Alberta has integrated customary First Peoples’ adoption practices with provincial adoption laws and regulations. Introducing this unique agency, the authors outline the history of First Nations adoptions and, through an interview with a YTSA Elder, describe the adoption ceremonies offered at YTSA. Themes that emerged from interviews with adoptive parents and youth who have been adopted through this new integrated practice are also explored, and important recommendations for policy and practice in First Nations adoption are offered. FPC. $15.95. ISBN: 9781552663400. Non-Fiction.

Deadly Fever: Racism, Disease and a Media Panic by Charles T. Adeyanju
In February 2001, a woman from the Congo was admitted to a hospital in Hamilton, Ontario, with a serious illness of unknown origin. Very quickly, the rumour spread that she was carrying the deadly Ebola virus. Even though it was equally quickly determined that she did not carry the virus, the rumour spread like wildfire throughout the Canadian media. Through a content analysis of four major Canadian newspapers and interviews with journalists, medical practitioners and members of the Black community, Charles T. Adeyanju shows that it was the potent mixture of race, gender and immigration, not a real health problem, that lay at the heart of this public panic. FPC. $15.95 ISBN: 978-1-552663-41-7. Non-Fiction.

Islamophobia and the Question of Muslim Identity: The Politics of Difference and Solidarity by Evelyn Leslie Hamdon.This book is a critical analysis of a Muslim group in Canada that has been working to challenge Islamophobia in their community. An important part of their anti-racist work involves dealing with the internal conflicts and dilemmas created by the differences among the members of the group. The coalition has been successful in developing several educational initiatives, in part, because they have been able to negotiate internal differences in ways that do not fragment the group. Through discussions with members of the coalition the author explores the tensions that arise from these internal differences, and in doing so demonstrates the diversity of Muslim identity —and challenges the stereotypical image that has permeated the West for centuries. FPC. $15.95, ISBN:9781552663417, Non-Fiction.

Maternity Rolls: Pregnancy, Childbirth and Disability by Heather Kuttai. Heather Kuttai is a 40-year-old white, heterosexual woman. She is married and is the mother of two children. Living in a quiet, middle-class neighbourhood, her life is, in many ways, seemingly the quintessential picture of what many consider to be traditional. However, her life is not as conventional as it appears: she is a paraplegic and uses a wheelchair for mobility. Her disability dramatically changes the picture. Much of the writing about the experiences of women and mothers excludes the stories of women with disabilities. Established norms dictate that a mother’s body be “healthy” and “whole.” Because the body with disabilities is often seen for what it cannot do, taking on the role of mother can give the body a different value, status and worth. Heather’s experiences as a woman with a disability experiencing pregnancy and childbirth offers insights into what is already known about women’s bodies. The stories she tells of her life, her pregnancies and giving birth illustrate both her self-awareness and her awareness of our society’s
negative perceptions of disability. FPC.144pp $18.95 ISBN:9781552663424. Non-Fiction.

Public Service, Private Profits: The Political Economy of Public/Private Partnerships in Canada by John Loxley with Salim Loxley.PPPs/P3s have become all the rage amongst every level of government in Canada in recent years. Proponents claim P3s reduce the costs of building and operating public projects and services, that projects and services are delivered more efficiently through the P3 model, so that in the end taxpayers are better off economically and as consumers of public goods. This book tests all of these claims, and more, finding them mostly empty, ideological assertions. Through an exhaustive series of case studies of P3s in Canada — from schools, bridges and water treatment plants to social services and hospital food — this book finds that most P3s are more costly to build and finance, provide poorer quality services and are less accessible than if they were built and operated by public servants. Moreover, many essential services are less accountable to citizens when private corporations are involved. FPC. 208pp $24.95 ISBN:9781552663387. Non-Fiction.

The Global Fight for Climate Justice: Anticapitalist Responses to Global Warming and Environmental Destruction edited by Ian Angus. As capitalism continues with business as usual, climate change is fast expanding the gap between rich and poor, and between and within nations, as well imposing unparalleled suffering on those least able to protect themselves. In The Global Fight for Climate Justice, anti-capitalist activists from five continents offer radical answers to the most important questions of our time: Why is capitalism destroying the conditions that make life on Earth possible? How can we stop the destruction before it is too late? In essays on topics ranging from the food crisis and carbon trading to perspectives from Indigenous peoples, the authors make a compelling case that saving the world from climate catastrophe will require much more than tinkering with technology or taxes. Only radical social change can prevent irreversible damage to the earth and civilization. FPC. 284pp, $24.95, ISBN:9781552663448, Non-Fiction.

This is an Honour Song, edited by Leanne Simpson and Kiera L. Ladner, is a collection of narratives, poetry, and essays exploring the broad impact of the 1990 resistance at Kanehsatà:ke, otherwise known as the “Oka Crisis.” The book is written by leading Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists, scholars, activists and traditional people, and is sung as an Honour Song celebrating the commitment, sacrifices, and achievements of the Kanien’kehaka individuals and communities involved. ARP. $19.95, ISBN:1-894037-41-3, Social Science/Ethnic Studies/ Native American Studies.

When the Other Is Me: Native Resistance Discourse, 1850–1990 by Emma LaRocque. In this long-awaited book from one of the most recognized and respected scholars in Native Studies today, Emma LaRocque presents a powerful interdisciplinary study of the Native literary response to racist writing in the Canadian historical and literary record from 1850 to 1990. In When the Other is Me, LaRocque brings a metacritical approach to Native writing, situating it as resistance literature within and outside the postcolonial intellectual context. She outlines the overwhelming evidence of dehumanization in Canadian historical and literary writing, its effects on both popular culture and Canadian intellectual development, and Native and non-Native intellectual responses to it in light of the interlayered mix of romanticism, exaggeration of Native “difference,” and the continuing problem of internalization that challenges our understanding of the colonizer/colonized relationship. UMP. $27.95, ISBN: 0-88755-703-1. Non-Fiction.

Apologetic by Carla Funk. Capturing moments in time and nature, Carla Funk’s poems bring the world to a momentary standstill. Funk translates vivid descriptions and feeling into her poems, both testing and playing with traditional poetic experiences. Apologetic’s poems experiment with expressing thoughts and emotions in formal poetic traditions, confining words to metrical lines or rhyme schemes. Many deal with the natural world, moments in time spent outdoors, in gardens, and capturing fleeting impressions in the human experience. Playing with form and content, Funk evokes the idea of a flesh-and-bones body (the poetic structure) carrying a spiritual entity (the poem’s meaning).TUR. ISBN: 9780888013712, $17.00. Poetry.

Blue Wherever by Barry Dempster. “In the new world, we wake up/to a bone ark bobbing on a blue wherever,” Dempster writes in the title poem of this new collection, his twelfth book of poetry. He connects the intensity of loving someone with the visceral vividness of being alive, as though waking from a beautiful dream and finding the world still sparkling. Granted, there is still loss and loneliness, even huge awols of hope, but the particulars of the outside world remain spectacular despite their ordinariness: cedar wax-wings with their “little caramel whisks/of hairdo above Lone Ranger masks;” the one-eyed horse who “wouldn’t/blame you if you ran, muck flicking/from the soles of your shoes;” the river rocks in the front garden “pretending/the inanimate way is holy, /a stunning coldness in the place of eyes.” Blue Wherever returns us to being in the moment with an intensity and beguilement often reserved for romantic love, and from the various perspectives of observer and creator. Whether it be Pancake Tuesday, a lonely Office Party or a Sunday drive through strip-mall Wastelands, Dempster reminds us there is still much to see—myriad reasons for staying awake and alive. SIG. ISBN: 1-897109-39-9, $14.95 CDN.
Poetry.

Catchment Area by Jena Schmitt. Like a geographic catchment area, this debut collection by Jena Schmitt draws together influences from poetry, prose, biography, art, architecture and history into a perceptive study of the forces that shape our physical and emotional landscapes. In a voice that is subtle yet distinctly confident, Schmitt describes how at times these forces are quiet as “sleet that turns to rain/ that turns to snow,” and at times unyielding as a child who throws himself down in a tantrum. Catchment Area captures glimmers of that instance when, just as we are about to define the emergent terrain, just when variables such as an earring or glove could solve “any number of unknowns,” the earth shifts—whether due to memory, relationships, natural disasters or war—leaving an absence that cannot be mapped. These poems call on the reader’s own sense of this absence and how it impels us to search for meaning in a world of constant change, where each time we turn on the news we are witness to earthquakes and floods, or suburban homes turned into methamphetamine factories and bronze statues stolen from parks. And so we are brought to a place of possibility, a place to “revel in/ the parts that are/ missing: heart and mind/ like phantom limbs.” Schmitt reveals the watershed point at which each of us stands, where we can go this way or that, where the struggle for articulation and understanding forms our own personal topographies. SIG. ISBN: 1-897109-40-7, $14.95 CDN. Poetry.

Maple Leaf Rag by Kaie Kellough, is a dynamic, jazz-infused riff on Canadian culture. With rhythm and edge, Kaie Kellough’s verbal soundscape explores belonging, dislocation and relocation, and national identity from a black Canadian perspective. This collection of poems is both written word and musical score — a dictated dub replete with references to African Canadian and African American culture (current and dated), Canadian history and politics, and characters ranging from dancers to piano players to boxers. ARP. $14.95, ISBN: 1-894037-42-1. Poetry/Canadian

To Speak by Michelle Elrick. In the title poem of her debut collection of poetry, To Speak, Michelle Elrick writes: My silence seems inevitable//as if I cannot afford to give anything away.//As if I have given it all already, given it to you/ It is the desire to articulate this “silence” that is the heart of “To Speak.” When the failure of a love affair renders everything irrevocably strange, unutterable, the poet begins a quest in search of the means to be able to “speak” again. It is this journey that the reader is invited to become a part of, traveling by poem on a road trip that will take them both through miles and miles of familiar and uncharted terrain. Seduced by the quiet yet forceful voice of the speaker readers will find themselves entranced by what a word can have bottled up inside of it. The beauty and strength of Michelle Elrick’s poetry is that it resonates with simplicity and moth-like grace even when it is asking for the world. So when she asks, Are you a kiln? //Are you a can of Krylon? it does seem entirely possible. JGS. ISBN: 9781897289501, $14.95, pb. Poetry.

Black Bottle Man by Craig Russell. Forced to move every twelve days, what would happen to your life? It’s 1927. Rembrandt is the only child in the tiny community of Three Farms and his two aunts grow desperate for babies of their own. Hope and Hell arrive in a mysterious black bottle, and on a moonless night a dark spell is cast. Soon after, a man wearing black top-coat, and a ‘glad-ta-meet-ya’ smile comes to visit. The devil seeks payment, and a dangerous wager is made. Until they can defeat him, Rembrandt, Pa, and Uncle Thompson must embark on the journey of their lives, for if they stay in one place for more than twelve days terrible things happen. But where and when will they find a champion capable of defeating the Black Bottle Man? GPP. ISBN: 978-1-894283-99-1, $14.95, teen fiction, printed on forest-friendly paper

Illegally Blonde by Nelsa Roberto. Sometimes discovering your roots is about a lot more than watching your real hair colour grow in…When seventeen-year-old Lucy do Amaral comes home with newly bleached blonde hair she expects a major lecture and another grounding from her strict Portuguese parents. What she doesn’t expect is the shocking news that her parents are illegal aliens who’ve just been told they’re being deported in less than a week. Lucy’s furious at her parents and has no intention of leaving her boyfriend and missing prom and grad to go live in some backwater village with no cable, no movie theatre and no life in some country she knows nothing about. But, as Lucy discovers, intentions and reality are sometimes worlds apart - or, in Lucy’s case, at least an ocean away. Lucy’s desperation to return to her ‘real’ home ensnares her in a web of illegal activity that threatens more than her journey home. But it’s when she unexpectedly falls for a guy whose connection to his home is centuries old that she finally realizes you can never run away from your roots – not even if you bleach them. GPP. ISBN: 978-1-894283-97-7, $14.95, teen fiction, printed on forest-friendly paper

Spirit Quest by Susan Rocan. In this sequel to Withershins, Michelle returns to the past to save her friends. Michelle is happy to be home after her time-travel adventure. Then, while delving into a family secret, she discovers the terrible fate that befell her friends in the distant past. Desperate to save them, she returns to 1846 to try to change history. There she struggles with hardships and racism, and learns more about her First Nations heritage. GPP. ISBN: 978-1-894283-98-4, $14.95, teen fiction, printed on forest-friendly paper.

Where the Rivers Meet by Don Sawyer is one of Pemmican’s most powerful stories for young adult readers, and is now available with a 48-page study guide written by the author. The YA novel follows a young Aboriginal woman, Nancy Antoine, who meets the challenges of racism and indifference in her B.C. community and high school by discovering her inner strength. Through thoughtful exercises, provocative questions and a wide range of approaches, the guide is designed to help students not only draw more from the story but also learn how to stake their own place in life. A fresh edition of the novel, with a foreword from artist and educator Art Napoleon, is now available. The study guide will be available in April, and is sold separately. PEM. Book: ISBN 978-0-921827-06-1, $13.95. Study Guide: ISBN 978-1-894717-56-4, $5

A Feast of Rhyme, Rhythm, and Song: Developing Phonemic Awareness Through Music by Carol W. McCormick and Nancy Lee Cecil. This book presents an interactive and engaging approach to teaching phonemic awareness – an essential foundation for later reading success. Using sound, music, and rhythm activities, young children develop the ability to hear “inside” a word – to hear specific sounds, identify the sequence of sounds in words, and understand the role sounds, or phonemes, play in word recognition. Lessons are presented sequentially, through the developmental steps involved in acquiring phonemic awareness. The process begins with the rudimentary awareness that sounds exist, and progresses in complexity to the final insight that sounds within words can be manipulated, deleted, replaced, or added.
In this resource, you will find
• easy-to-follow, step-by-step lesson plans
• variations for or extensions of the activities
• ongoing assessment for each lesson
• notations and lyrics for all the songs
• templates for a full set of picture cards on CD
• a Phonemic Awareness Assessment Tool
• an outline of music-content standards applicable to most provinces (and states)
The authors of A Feast of Rhyme, Rhythm, and Song believe that children who have experienced the joyful phonemic awareness and music activities contained in this book will be primed and ready for this next step in the remarkable journey of learning to read. PMP. ISBN: 978-1-55379-226-0, LEVEL: Grades PreK–1

Teaching Art: A Complete Guide for the Classroom by Rhian Brynjolson is an accessible and clearly written guide for integrating visual art into classroom practice. Revised and expanded from the author’s previous bestselling resource, Art & Illustration, Teaching Art incorporates new developments in art education. Throughout the book, you will find suggestions for extending and adapting art exercises to meet the needs of both your students and the curriculum. This new edition includes:
•how to set up an art-friendly classroom
•how to teach drawing skills
•how to integrate art with core curricula
•how to use art and illustration as a companion to writing
•a chapter on art and assessment
•the basic art elements and principles
•colour mixing and colour theory
•strategies to encourage creativity and problem solving
•new chapters on sculpture, photography, video, multimedia, installation, and performance art
•featured artists and art teachers who share their best practices
•updated list of picture books, including several new children’s books and illustrator
…and much more!
Teaching Art is written for classroom teachers, art education specialists, childcare workers, artists working in schools, parents who home-school their children, and school administrators. It can also be used as a university textbook for Education students. The book provides a framework for teaching art in a way that is integrated with regular classroom practice and mindful of current art curriculum outcomes. Although the book focuses on art for primary and middle-school students from pre-school to grade eight, Teaching Art is also useful to art specialists at the high-school level who are looking for new strategies or project ideas to add to their established secondary programs. PMP. ISBN: 978-1-55379-195-9, LEVEL: For grades preK–8.

New Perspectives in Believers Church Ecclesiology, edited by Abe Dueck, Helmut Harder, Karl Koop.How can the Believers Church family (made up of Baptists, Brethren, Churches of Christ, Churches of God, Mennonites, Pentecostals, and others) remain accountable to the Gospel amidst competing forces of globalization and localization? These essays engage Believers Church theology with topics such as denominationalism, the sacramental tradition, the Emerging Church movement, and Global Christianity. In a spirit of critical dialogue, this volume revisits debates over the relationship between church and world, individual and community, and practices related to the church’s mission. CMU. ISBN: 978-0-920718-84-1, $29.50. pb.

The Global Fight for Climate Justice: Anticapitalist Responses to Global Warming and Environmental Destruction, Ian Angus, editor. As capitalism continues with business as usual, climate change is fast expanding the gap between rich and poor, and between and within nations, as well imposing unparalleled suffering on those least able to protect themselves. In The Global Fight for Climate Justice, anti-capitalist activists from five continents offer radical answers to the most important questions of our time: Why is capitalism destroying the conditions that make life on Earth possible? How can we stop the destruction before it is too late? In essays on topics ranging from the food crisis and carbon trading to perspectives from Indigenous peoples, the authors make a compelling case that saving the world from climate catastrophe will require much more than tinkering with technology or taxes. Only radical social change can prevent irreversible damage to the earth and civilization. FPC. ISBN: 9781552663448, $24.95. Co-published with Resistance Books, London UK.

Kawlija’s Blueberry Promise by Audrey Guiboche, illustrated by Jim Kirby. The summer blueberry harvest is an annual expedition for young Kawlija and her family. When her father needs her to pick more berries than she eats, she promises to do her best. But can she avoid temptation? An enchanting story and also a rich portrait of rural Metis life in the ‘50s. PEM. ISBN: 978-1-894717-55-7, $10.95, K-Grade 7.

Bite the Hand by Mansel Robinson. When Peter and Steve – a theatre critic and a playwright – go on a road trip from Saskatchewan to Sudbury, you just know that they’re going to hit some bumps along the way…
The uneasy friends both live in glass houses and are carrying armloads full of stones. Steve is still nursing anger and hurt over Peter’s having panned his work, and Peter bristles at accusations he writes his reviews before even seeing the plays! Along the way the guys pick up an incredibly well-read fugitive named Sasha and her psychic friend Suki, who are as scary as they are sexy. Theatrical, hilarious, and horrifying, Bite the Hand has everything: anti-American rants, pro-American rants; a rousing song, debates of the play’s own merits, a car chase, romance, and unexpected violence. JGS. ISBN: 978-1-897289-43-X, $14.95.

Courting Johanna by Marcia Johnson. Courting Johanna is set in the claustrophobic atmosphere of Huron County, Ontario in the 1950’s. Johanna is a dignified Scottish immigrant housekeeper who works for the well-off Mr. McCauley. She looks after McCauley’s granddaughter, Sabitha, whose mother is dead and whose father, Ken, is a deadbeat looking for work out west. When silly, spoiled Sabitha and her younger, but more mature friend Edith – the sensible daughter of an immigrant shoemaker – discover a personal letter Johanna has written to Ken, they decide to play a trick on her. More out of boredom than cruelty, they begin forging letters from “Ken” to the lonely Johanna, who opens her heart and confesses that before she became his pen pal, she had “only had one friend in my life.” Based on the luminous short story “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” from the Alice Munro collection of the same name, Courting Johanna is a window into the human heart – a tale of loneliness, deception, and redemption. JGS. ISBN: 978-1-897289-46-4, $14.95.

The Morning Bird by Colleen Wagner. Beth and her husband Jake are expecting a baby. While Beth is having an ultrasound, her very expensive hand-sewn Italian-made coat disappears from the hospital waiting room. Beth is furious – the coat which was a honeymoon gift from Jake has become a symbol of the couple’s destiny together and it’s loss now takes on inordinate significance. The next time they see the coat it’s being worn by Doreen, a homeless woman who is mentally unstable. As the characters lives become more closely entwined, the line between reality and fiction blurs. We step into a shadowy world where fantasies erupt: people morph into other selves. They steal babies, prescribe hysterectomies, and kill one another. Each of them will have to confront the shadow side of themselves before being able to the song of the morning bird. JGS. ISBN: 978-1-897289-41-9, $14.95.

Books, Media & the Internet, Children’s Literature for Today’s Classrooms edited by Carol Jupiter, David Booth, Shelley S. Peterson. The editors of Books, Media, and the Internet, David Booth, Carol Jupiter, and Shelley S. Peterson present the work of colleagues from the conference “A Place for Children’s Literature in the New Literacies Classrooms,’ April 2008. Within these pages, teachers, librarians, and others concerned with literacy will find inspiration and strategies for melding technology and children’s literature from practitioners who have found effective ways to engage young people with text, both in print and on screen.

The contributors to this anthology include classroom teachers, librarians, university educators, and journalists. They speak not only to the technologically capable and media-savvy teachers but also to the curious, who seek starting points for using new technologies alongside traditional print media in their classrooms. They show how multimedia and digital technologies expand our approaches to literacy education — and how to extend and enrich our use of stories, whatever the media, with all ages. Their articles cover a vast range of subjects arranged into 5 sections. The sections include:

* Section 1: Reading Words and Images in Print and on Screen

* Section 2: Engaging with Texts in Print and on Screen

* Section 3: Writing Our Way into Literature Using Multimedia and Digital Technology

* Section 4: Critical Reading of Print and Non-Print Texts

* Section 5: Libraries: Literature and the Internet

This book provides current information, classroom examples, and anecdotes as practical tools to help teachers use digital, media, and print texts to extend students’ learning. The helpful “Teaching Tools” section at the end of the book explains how to use a variety of digital tools in the classroom LEVEL: For All Teachers. P&M. ISBN: 978-1-55379-203-1, $27.00.

Hands-On English Language Learning: Early Years, by project editor Jennifer Lawson is a resource for classroom teachers, specialist teachers working with English-language learners, and other educational professionals who support these students. To assist your students in developing language skills, this resource includes:

* specific curricular connections for each lesson to identify links to subject-area themes in language arts, mathematics, science, social studies, health, physical education, and the arts

* integrated class activities to promote learning in context for all students in the classroom

* suggested activities focus on curricular topics in all subject areas, while supporting English language learners

* relevant topics such as the classroom and school, clothing, food, hobbies and interests, plants and animals of Canada, the world, and the environment

* age-appropriate, high-interest learning activities that foster the development of essential English language vocabulary and skills in listening, speaking, reading, writing, viewing, and representing

* activities (in keeping with the philosophy of all Portage & Main Press Hands-On programs) that are student-centred and focus on real-life, hands-on experiences. P&M. ISBN: 978-1-55379-196-6. $129.00. BINDING: Coil. $129.00. LEVEL: Early Years.

It’s All About Thinking: Collaborating to Support All Learners by Faye Brownlie and Leyton Schnellert. How can we help students develop the thinking skills they need to be successful learners? How does this relate to deep learning of important concepts? How can we engage and support diverse learners in inclusive classrooms where they develop understanding and thinking skills? In this book Faye and Leyton explore these questions and offer classroom examples to help the busy classroom teachers develop classroom communities where all students learn. This book is written by two experienced educators who offer a welcoming and “can do” approach to the big ideas in education today. In this book you will find:

* insightful ways to teach diverse learners, i.e., literature and information circles, open-ended strategies, cooperative learning, inquiry

* curriculum design frameworks, i.e., universal design for learning (UDL) and backward design

* assessment for, of, and as learning

* lessons to help students develop deep learning and thinking skills in English, Social Studies, and Humanities

* excellent examples of theory and practice made accessible

* real school examples of collaboration — teachers working together to create better learning opportunities for their students LEVEL: For All Teachers. P&M. ISBN: 978-1-55379-221-5, $28.00.

The Language Experience Approach to Literacy For Children Learning English by Pamela J. Winsor. The instructional framework presented in this book is intended to help teachers provide all young children, but especially English-language learners, with rich, meaningful, and interactive literacy instruction. Referred to as LEALE, the instruction is grounded in the traditional Language Experience Approach (LEA). It has been expanded to encompass principles and practices of research-based early literacy instruction as understood and presented in current professional literature. The approach is presented in an attractive, easily understood style that invites both beginning and experienced teachers to engage their students in literacy.

The LEALE instructional framework presented here grew out of the many happy hours that the author spent working with children and their teachers over the years. Included are pictures and examples of classroom materials (chart stories and journals) from children in Belize, Central America, and children in urban centres in Alberta, Canada.

This title also features:

* a brief history of LEA and its enduring merits

* an overview of the research that supports the enhancements of LEA included in LEALE

* a full description of LEALE, with examples

* a guide for planning instruction, including examples of unit topics and related resources

* descriptions of supplementary learning activities designed to enhance children’s learnin

* recommended assessment procedures

* reproducible materials to aid teacher planning and record-keeping

P&M. ISBN: 978-1-55379-218-5. $26.00.

The Ultimate Music Theory by Glory St. Germain. Author Glory St. Germain is dedicated to providing the best quality educational materials related to the study of music theory. The Ultimate Music Theory series brings music theory education to students, teachers, and schools. The series covers both core theory concepts outlined in the syllabi of recognized examination boards and provincial music curricula. It blends the pleasure of learning with sound instruction that raises the awareness and understanding of the role music plays in overall education and quality of life. The Ultimate Music Theory series includes 5 workbooks and 5 Answer Books. Each book in the series is clearly written and organized, so classroom teachers with very little (or no) training in music are able to teach the program. For Grades 5-12. P&M. All 5 workbooks and answer books $159.50.