Literacy Speaks Volumes

Joseph Brant was a Mohawk military and political leader, based in present-day New York, who was closely associated with Great Britain during and after the American Revolution. Perhaps the Native American of his generation best known to the Americans and British, he met many of the most significant Anglo-American people of the age, including both George Washington and King George III. While not born into a hereditary leadership role within the Iroquois League, Brant rose to prominence due to his education, abilities and his connections to British Superintendent of Indian Affairs in the province of New York. During the American Revolutionary War, Brant led Mohawk and colonial Loyalists against the rebels in a bitter partisan war on the New York frontier. He was accused by the Americans of committing atrocities and given the name "Monster Brant", but the accusations were argued by later historians to have been false. After the war, he relocated with most of his people t...

The Peabody Memphis is a luxury hotel in Downtown Memphis, Tennessee. The hotel is known for the Peabody Ducks that live on the hotel rooftop and march daily into the lobby. The hotel is on the National Trust for Historic Places. The original Peabody Hotel was built in 1869 at the corner of Main and Monroe Streets by Robert Campbell Brinkley, who named it to honor his friend, the recently deceased George Peabody, for his contributions to the South. The hotel was a huge success, and Brinkley gave it to his daughter Anna as a wedding gift. The hotel had 75 rooms with private bathrooms and elegant public rooms. Among its guests were Presidents Andrew Johnson and William McKinley and Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Nathan Bedford Forrest. Jefferson Davis, the former President of the Confederacy, lived there in 1870 when he worked as president of an insurance company. The hotel closed in 1923 in preparation for a move one block away. The building was demolished and Lowenstei...

David and I just spent a night at the Peabody in Memphis. We got the Holiday rate, which made it more affordable for us. We arrived at the hotel in time to listen to Christmas carols sung by choirs from the local public schools. The lobby remained packed all afternoon and swelled unbelievably as the wait for Santa began. The bed was super comfy. The linens were soft and supple. The pillows had just the right amount of fluff. The towels and amenities were first-class. We stayed on the 8th floor and had a view of Union Avenue. We could see the Mississippi from our room. We had lunch at Dyers where the hamburgers are fried in one-hundred-year-old grease. Needless to say, they were greasy and delicious. We took a trolley ride around the riverfront. After the Duck March and Santa, we had salad and pizza at the Cappricio Grill at the hotel. Afterwards, we went for a carriage ride and had to get under blankets to stay warm. The evening was crisp and cold. After returning to the hote...

Practical Strategies for Building a Student's Background Knowledge 1. Create minilessons to build background knowledge on a topic before reading. 2. Include nonfiction texts from various cultures and ethnicities. 3. Use cognates when possible to help support content concepts.  4. Encourage students to summarize their reading.  5. Explicitly teach text features of informational text. 6. Use graphic organizers to enhance comprehension of nonfiction text.

Struggling readers need text that is cohesive. What exactly does that mean? A cohesive text is one that follows a normal or accepted structure. A cohesive text must have grammatical and lexical linking in order to make sense to struggling readers. In other words, struggling readers need text that makes sense both in the way the sentences are structured and in the way that the vocabulary is used and presented. So how does this connect to the idea or expectation that all students must be reading increasingly more complex and rigorous texts? One of the first things that teachers need to do when teaching a new piece of text is to teach domain-specific words alongside more general academic words. Yes, students need to know volcano, platelets, and constitution; but, they also need to know erupt (and all of its forms), analyze, elements, and rational. Vocabulary is an important determinate for text complexity. Sentence Structure and all of its nuances play a major role in text comp...

There are four basic types of vocabulary: Listening vocabulary Speaking vocabulary Reading vocabulary Writing vocabulary Word study and English grammar are important to students for several reasons. In the first place, disregard of the correct use and combination of words is a distinct mark of inferiority and a serious bar to business and social advancement. A man's use of words is commonly taken as a measure of his knowledge and even of his intelligence. Carelessness in this regard often causes a man to be held in much less esteem than he really deserves. In the second place, it is quite as important that the student know something about the words and sentences that he puts down on his paper. In the third place, knowledge of words and their uses is indispensable to correct proofreading. There are nine families of words in the English language: