Customer Reviews (1)

One of the best language books I've ever worked with
It's truly a shame that this book is out of print.The "Teach Yourself" series has kept some other works in print that don't come close to matching this one.By doing the exercises faithfully one can really develop very quickly the ability to think in Malay and to get comfortable with the patterns of the language.The vocabulary seemed very useful and very pertinent although parts of it (terms referring to soldiers and officials, for instance) might be a little dated now. That's nothing that a new edition couldn't fix!I hope that a revision of this book will be made available very soon- hopefully with some tapes to go with. ... Read more

Product Description
Excellent resource for teaching or directing Shakespeare. Great ideas for different teaching methodologies and plenty of across-the-curriculum activities. You, your colleagues, and your students will enjoy the clever means of incorporating math, science, art, journalism, music, social studies, physical education, and social issues into the study of Shakespeare. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

You Can Teach Shakespeare to Children
Shakespeare To Teach Or Not To Teach: A Teacher's Manual, can be used with elementary to high school students, and is suitable for use in classroom, drama club and homeschool settings. Teachers and parents need not be anxious over teaching Shakespeare anymore.

Shakespeare To Teach Or Not To Teach, can be used in conjunction with any Shakespeare play, but works very well with Shakespeare For Children: The Story of Romeo and Juliet or one of the six productions in the Sixty-Minute Shakespeare series.

Beginning with basic information of Shakespeare, the time period (both his plays and when they were performed), what took place on and backstage in The Globe theater, To Teach Or Not To Teach puts the teacher at ease with the material and builds confidence to present Shakespeare to his or her students.

To Teach Or Not To Teach provides excellent instructional ideas to make the plots and characters come alive for the students. From just reading through play, or acting it out to activities reaching past the typical Language Arts or English class assignments and crossing the core curriculum subjects.

Provides basic tools to introduce children to Shakespeare
Do you work with children to whom you'd love to introduce Shakespeare's work but are uncertain how to go about it? Shakespeare: To Teach or Not to Teach may be the answer to your dreams. According to Foster and Johnson, "These methodologies work with teachers that have had absolutely no experience with Shakespeare. Nearly every teacher we have observed began with a great deal of anxiety and doubt. In most cases both those elements were eliminated after the first session..." The authors provide simple and straightforward guidance for introducing Shakespeare to children as young as second grade all the way through high school. This book is meant to supplement Cass's other quality books, Shakespeare for Children and The Sixty-Minutes Shakespeare series, though they can be applied to any classroom introduction to Shakespeare.

Foster and Johnson clearly have put great thought and care into providing educators with all the tools they need to introduce children to the Bard. Furthermore, the authors provide the information in brief snippets highlighting the most important elements in a way that won't feel overwhelming. Background on the Middle Ages, the English Renaissance, Elizabethian England and theatre, and a biography of William Shakespeare are supplied in 1-2 page, bite-sized pieces. In the core of Shakespeare: To Teach or Not to Teach, the authors provide lesson plans for six days reading the play, including discussion questions, that include plenty of options for finding the best fit for your group. In addition, there are wonderful theatrical warm-up activities and a great variety of Shakespeare-themed activities that draw from all the strands of the curriculum, such as writing, music, art, social studies, and science. For example, there is a writing exercise in which the students pretend they are a newspaper reporter on assignment to interview a person from Shakespeare's time, such as a character from the play, a stagehand at the Old Globe in 1603, or Shakespeare himself. Or for science/health, the authors suggest that teachers can use a discussion of the death scene in "Romeo and Juliet" to segue into a lesson on CPR.

When you're feeling ready to get your production up and running, Shakespeare: To Teach or Not to Teach provides succinct suggestions about casting, rehearsing, scenery, costumes, and even how to promote your production in the local press. Foster and Johnson understand what an endeavor it can be for a teacher to begin a new area of study and especially to commit the time and energy to mounting a production. They counsel, "You are a pioneer and unfortunately all too many of us in education are much too comfortable staying with the same lesson plans, lectures, exams and expectations. Preparing for this unit will take a fair amount of time and commitment but your willingness to explore this realm will reap far-reaching and far-lasting rewards."

When you're contemplating whether to teach or not to teach Shakespeare, feel free to go ahead and teach! This book will guide the way.

Quill says: Shakespeare: To Teach or Not to Teach provides the basic tools for anybody (even you!) to introduce children to Shakespeare's great works.

..."the Five Star Shakespeare Collection an incredible resource"
As our Education Outreach department at Colorado Shakespeare Festival is dedicated to enlightening teachers and students (and the community at large) about Shakespeare's works--using a "hands-on" philosophy--I have found the Five Star Shakespeare Collection an incredible resource. Whenever teachers are looking for a truncated script, or help with "opening up Shakespeare" to their students, I refer them to you...(Five Star Publications - Arizona)

Melinda J. Scott, Education Director
Colorado Shakespeare Festival

A Good Beginner Text
I found this book rather simplistic. I bought it to teach Drama and I think it is probably more appropriate to English. It gave me one or two ideas but the rest of the activities were ones I use already or ones that weren't really appropriate.
I would recommend this book to a beginning teacher of Drama or English.

This book is an amazing introduction to the Bard ...
"The book is an amazing introduction to the Bard, his works andenvironment...a way to overcome literacy and dramatic stage fright that canopen many doors..."

R. Thad Taylor, President Shakespeare Society ofAmerica, Inc. ... Read more

Product Description
Public-Speaking Club Members: over 100 Table-Topic designs that encourage quick thinking while preparing members for their next manual speech.

Public, Charter and Home-School Teachers: Step-by-step instructions for instant lesson plans that allow students-to-teach-students basic presentation skills.

Business: Build your own customized, in-house presentation courses that will increase sales and enhance internal team effort. ... Read more

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"Hexagonie" is an innovative way of introducing French at key stage 2. Part 1 is designed for use with pupils in their first two years of French and provides comprehensive coverage of all the Oracy and Literacy Objectives of the KS2 Framework for Languages, and many of those for Intercultural Understanding. "Hexagonie" is suitable for both non-specialists and specialists. The language elements are introduced in a logical, easy-to-understand way, so that children quickly communicate with confidence. The lessons break language down into manageable chunks and present them in a methodical manner, enabling pupils to feel they can converse in French. By bringing French language to life, pupils imaginations will be engaged, and their understanding of French language structures enhanced. Pupils will also develop effective learning strategies that can be applied to other languages and across the curriculum. ... Read more

Product Description
This accessible and practical guide to teaching young children to read focuses on: the process of learning to read and its implications for teaching; issues about learning to read which all teachers need to understand; and a programme of teaching children to read.

The author deals with the learning that is necessary, and the teaching which enables it to be achieved. Now fully updated to include the most recent thinking on phonics, handwriting and literacy practices in the early years classroom, the book proposes a theoretical teaching model which will help teachers to make optimum use of the Literacy Hour. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

good explaination of grammer
a found that teach yourself cantonese teaches by example rather than by the chalk and talk method i feel this method is much better because people can easily see the grammer points rather than having it explained to him/her which can lead to alot of confusion some grammer should be explained but it should be kept a minimum people should practice as this it how the human brain learns language so as a final note i would like to say that teach yourself cantonese by R.Bruce is the best language book i have perchased. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

This book is how I found my wife.
Years ago I bought this book to learn Danish.Its texts and exercises tell the story of a Danish farm family, with a son named Ole.Not long after I started reading the book I was having lunch in a restaurant and three young women sat at the table right next to me.They spoke what I was sure was Danish.So I decided to try out what I learned from the book:"Er du dansk?"Which means, "Are you Danish?"They had no idea what I was saying, but one thing led to another and one of them became my wife.She comes from a Danish farm, just like the family in the book, and even has a brother named Ole.Over the years, from listening to what she says to me, I've picked up a few other Danish terms (for example, "idiot"), but this is the book that got me going.

The text starts simple but, even early on, gives a real feel for what Danish culture is like.The typical chapter has a short dialogue, glossary, grammatical notes, and exercises, as well as "ordsprog" and "talemaader," proverbs and sayings which give you a great introduction to the sly and ironic Danish sense of humor.The book provides an especially clear grasp of the "Jysk folkekarakter," the character of the people of Jutland, which is pretty impressive for an introductory language-learning text.If you work at it, after a while you even come to bits and pieces of the Ugly Duckling in Danish, the language of Hans Christian Andersen.This book may be a Special Order, but in my view it's well worth waiting for. ... Read more

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Part of the "Teach Yourself" selection of books that look at a wide variety of subjects in a style designed to appeal to the general reader. This book introduces Sanskrit - the ancient and sacred language of Hindus in India. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Ancient and sublime
I got this text by Michael Coulson, then head of the Department of Sanskrit at Edinburgh University, Scotland, about twenty five years ago.I was studying religious studies, and wanted to be able to understand the primary scriptures of the primary religions of the world in their original languages as much as possible; I've had a reasonable facility with languages in terms of reading, and found that Coulson's book fit my style of learning rather well.

There is a useful, pull-out sandhi grid early in the book, that shows consonants and vowels.This does not show all possible combinations, but most of the basic ones.This is a hard thing to remember (rather like learning the difference between written English and spoken English, where the pronunciations colloquially vary depending upon accent as well as position in the sentence or the speed of talking).Sanskrit is a langauge where it isn't necessary to learn the entire alphabetic structure for writing at the outset -- Coulson recommends this as a gradual process, and I agree with this idea.The primary Sanskrit font described and used here (a common Sanskrit font throughout India, although far from the only one) is the nagari script.

Sanskrit is a part of the Indo-European family of languages, but that being said, it is vastly different from English, and the student of this book would be well-advised to make sure she or he has a good command of English grammar ideas, and the willingness to not attempt to apply them to the Sanskrit sentences and passages presented.

Coulson in his introduction makes the distinction between a learned language and a natural one, as well as a dead language and a living one.Sanskrit to a Western student is both a learned and a dead language; to the late Sanskrit writers, it was both learned and living -- very roughly parallel to the Latin used in academic circles in the Middle Ages, a language still living in a sense, but not a natural language for anyone.Sanskrit has much greater fluidity and variation over its incredibly long history; Coulson introduces bits and pieces of these strands, but stays fairly close to a classical Sanskrit represented by the most common and widespread of religious texts.

There would be only one item where I really feel I must take marks off, and that would be the constant use of transliteration into Latinate script rather than using the Sanskrit throughout the models.While almost all of the reading passages are in the Sanskrit basic font style, the various grammar points (conjugation and declension charts, etc.) are presented in transliteration, which made things a bit more difficult for me, as I'd sometimes have to struggle not only to remember the Sanskrit but also the code for the transliteration (which, of course, never coincides with the transliteration paradigms in other langauge texts I've studied).

This book is designed both for classroom use and for self-study.Based on my readings and comparisons of my translations on texts such as the Rig Veda with other, published translation, this book has helped me gain a working knowledge of Sanskrit, and provides a useful text for review on a periodic basis.

Itincludes an answer key to all the major exercises, a guide for further study, an introduction to prose/poetry constructions, and a useful vocabulary glossary.

... Read more

Product Description
No publication date stated, looks ca. early 2000s. 25+ pages, workbook. ... Read more