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Informationen zum Autor E. D. Hirsch, Jr., is an emeritus professor at the University of Virginia and the author of The Knowledge Deficit, The Schools We Need, and the bestselling Cultural Literacy and the Dictionary of Cultural Literacy . He and his wife, Polly, live in Charlottesville, Virginia, where they raised their three children. Klappentext The invaluable grade-by-grade guide (kindergarten-sixth) is designed to help parents and teachers select some of the best books for children. Books to Build On recommends: • for kindergartners, lively collections of poetry and stories, such as The Children's Aesop, and imaginative alphabet books such as Bill Martin, Jr.'s Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and Lucy Micklewait's I Spy: An Alphabet in Art • for first graders, fine books on the fine arts, such as Ann Hayes's Meet the Orchestra, the hands-on guide My First Music Book, and the thought-provoking Come Look with Me series of art books for children • for second graders, books that open doors to world cultures and history, such as Leonard Everett Fisher's The Great Wall of China and Marcia Willaims's humorous Greek Myths for Young Children • for third graders, books that bring to life the wonders of ancient Rome, such as Living in Ancient Rome, and fascinating books about astronomy, such as Seymour Simon's Our Solar System • for fourth graders, engaging books on history, including Jean Fritz's Shh! We're Writing the Constitution, and many books on Africa, including the stunningly illustrated story of Sundiata: Lion King of Mali • for fifth graders, a version of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream that retains much of the original language but condenses the play for reading or performance by young students, and Michael McCurdy's Escape from Slavery: The Boyhood of Frederick Douglass • for sixth graders, an eloquent retelling of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the well-written American history series, A History of US . . . and many, many more!LANGUAGE ARTS Introduction Language Arts is a term used by schools to refer to reading and writing, spelling, grammar, vocabulary, creative writing, expository writing, library and research skills, literature, drama, public speaking, and more. While all of these should be taught at some point, the emphasis varies according to grade level. In the primary grades—kindergarten through third grade—the emphasis of schools must be, first and foremost, on the crucial mission of early education: teaching children to read. As Elizabeth McPike of the American Federation of Teachers has put it, in no uncertain terms, If a child in a modern society like ours does not learn to read, he doesn’t make it in life. If he doesn’t learn to read well enough to comprehend what he is reading, if he doesn’t learn to read effortlessly enough to render reading pleasurable, if he doesn’t learn to read fluently enough to read broadly and reflectively across all content areas, his chances for a fulfilling life, by whatever measure—academic success, financial success, the ability to find interesting work, personal autonomy, self-esteem—are practically nil. While it is almost universally agreed that children should learn to read in the primary grades, there is disagreement about how to achieve that goal, as suggested by the subtitle of a classic study of the teaching of reading, Jeanne Chall’s Learning to Read: The Great Debate. But as that study and others have demonstrated,2 while fashions come and go in education, pulling schools toward one pedagogical extreme or another, there is a reasonable middle ground that is best for children. This middle ground balances two approaches to the teaching of reading and writing that some educators (wrongly) see as mutually exclusive. The first approach emphasizes the systematic teaching of the “nuts and bolts” of written...
