Naming the World: A Year of Poems and Lessons

Harnessing the power of poetry, Nancie Atwell's Naming the World: A Year of Poems and Lessons empowers adolescents to make sense of their personal place in the world while honing their critical reading and writing skills. Naming the World's 200+ poems and accompanying five-to-ten-minute lessons are used by Nancie every day to jumpstart her reading and writing workshops. Poetry is the foundation upon which her students build excellences as writers in every genre. This is your chance to make the first few minutes of your Language Arts class really count! Naming the World: makes it easy for teachers to find great poems--Nancie has culled the best of the best from more than ninety anthologies, collections, and journals; enables even inexperienced teachers of poetry to teach poems--shows how to read them with understanding and pleasure and highlight their features for students; empowers students to read poetry, love it, take it into their lives, learn its lessons about fine writing, and apply them to poems, narratives, and exposition of their own; and provides a common text for students and teachers to discuss a piece of literature together, and develop a vocabulary for talking about literary elements, without depriving young readers of essential opportunities to read books of their own choosing. The 200+ Poems: are compiled from contemporary poets were nominated by Nancie's students as their favorites speak to adolescent interests and issues include poems by Nancie's kids to teach and inspire yours. The 150 Lessons: are used daily by Nancie to jumpstart her reading-writing workshop apply a range of interactive and independent learning strategies present the language Nancie uses with her students.

About the Author :
Nancie Atwell is one of the most respected educators in the U.S. and across the world. Winner of the Varkey Foundation's inaugural Global teacher Prize, she donated the $1 million award to the Center for Teaching and Learning, the K-8 demonstration school she founded in Edgecomb, Maine, in 1990. Nancie's classic In the Middle, now in its third edition, has inspired generations of teachers; in it she describes her teaching journey and the practices she developed that led to her nomination. Thomas Newkirk calls In the Middle "the greatest book on literacy teaching ever written in this country." Visit Heinemann.com/InTheMiddle for more about the book and Nancie. A middle school English teacher for almost forty years, Nancie is also the first classroom teacher to be awarded the NCTE David H. Russell Award and the MLA Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize, both for distinguished research in the teaching of English. She was also honored as NCTE's Outstanding Middle School English Teacher and as the River of Words Poetry Teacher of the Year. She has received honorary doctoral degrees from Middlebury College and the University of New Hampshire. Nancie's books for Heinemann include Systems to Transform Your Classroom and School, which takes teachers inside her award-winning school to learn about the innovations that make the biggest impact on achievement and community; Lessons That Change Writers, a year's worth of instruction straight from Nancie's file cabinets; and Naming the World: A Year of Poems and Lessons, which helps teachers to jumpstart their teaching of writing and literature each day by unpacking a poem with their students. Her DVDs Writing in the Middle and Reading in the Middle give teachers a seat in her workshop as she presents lessons and conducts conferences that transform her students' literacy - and their lives.