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How do you assign reading homework? For years, student reading homework has looked like this.  Student sits with a book and a timer.  Student reads only until the timer goes off.  Student fills out reading log and gets parent signature.  Students don’t like traditional reading logs. Neither do parents. And, if we’re honest with ourselves, teachers don’t like them either. For years I assigned nightly reading as homework for my students. I knew getting my students to read more was crucial. Research has proven over and over that the more a child reads, the more successful they will be in school and in other areas of life. Like many teachers, my reading log required students to read "x" number of minutes each night...

The Vietnam War had an unprecedented impact on the development of modern filmmaking. The war itself occurred during a downward spiral for major studios, as the luster of the "Golden Age of Hollywood" had depleted throughout the 1960s.The '70s saw the rise of a new generation of filmmakers. As the old system crumbled, studios began to take risks on younger filmmakers who revitalized the industry with their original voices. Directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Brian de Palma, and Martin Scorsese had an infectious love of cinema (both Hollywood-centric and international), and spearheaded a new generation of auteur directors.Films specifically about the Vietnam War were far more nuanced and daring than the classic World War II films...

Typically teaching dialogue to your class might sound a little something like this…“Dialogue is when two or more characters in a text are talking. You will know you are reading dialogue because you will see sets of quotation marks. Now look at the text in front of you, can you point out one piece of dialogue?” Teaching students to recognize when they’re reading dialogue is an important step in comprehension, but we can’t just stop there! There’s a ton of information packed into dialogue, which we can use to help students dig deeper into texts and characters. {pin image} The Role of Dialogue First, students need to understand that dialogue serves many purposes. Conversations within a story portray characters in...

Russian writers have been at the forefront of world literature for centuries and many remain vastly celebrated throughout Russian to this day. Poetry provides a great tool to not only hone in on your Russian skills, but to also learn about and appreciate the culture of the land. No matter where you are on your language learning journey, there are many different techniques to explore that will help with improving various aspects of your Russian, and the Russian-speaking world has a great selection of poets to dive into without any fears of boredom. Why Poetry? Westerners often hear of the many Russian heavyweights in the literary world, such as Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, and learners often make one of their long-term...

We now know that South African writer Damon Galgut has taken home the 2021 Booker Prize for his latest novel, The Promise, so congratulations to him (and to everyone at Europa Editions!). While you’re still in Booker mode, why not take a journey into the recent past with us, and see what the critics wrote about every previous Booker Prize-winning novel of the 21st century? * 2020 Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain “The body—especially the body in pain—blazes on the pages of Shuggie Bain . . . This is the world of Shuggie Bain, a little boy growing up in Glasgow in the 1980s. And this is the world of Agnes Bain, his glamorous, calamitous mother, drinking herself ever so slowly to...