Literacy Improves Lives!

With the right instruction and support, all students can learn to read and write. That is the core belief behind this teacher-friendly handbook, a practical guide to providing comprehensive, high-quality literacy instruction to students with significant disabilities.

Drawing on decades of classroom experience, the authors present their innovative model for teaching students to read and write print in grades PreK-12 and beyond.

Readers will discover 10 success factors, teach emergent readers and writers skillfully, help students acquire conventional literacy skills, and organize and deliver comprehensive literacy instruction.

Foundational teaching principles blend with concrete strategies, step-by-step guidance, and specific activities, making this book an indispensable guide that starts with the core understandings and moves all the way to implementation in the classroom. An essential resource for educators, speech-language pathologists, and parents.

Nursing Made Incredibly Easy!

This series of books help you succeed on the job and in the classroom by breaking down challenging clinical concepts and presenting them in a refreshingly original, engaging style that is easy to understand. The tone is light, but never simplistic, and makes learning both interesting and effective. All resources combine informative clinical artwork with illustrations that reinforce key points and the series’ trademark humour. The ACU library now has 10 of these titles for checkout. 

The Critical Care Nursing helps to master the basics like the science and skills needed to tackle critical care basics, holistic care, and body system-based issues. Nursing Documentation is there to avoid errors and pitfalls and assist in charting crucial data quickly and accurately. Discover the latest in research and therapeutic Maternal-Neonatal nursing interventions, covering areas such as prenatal care; high-risk pregnancy; family planning, contraception and infertility; labour and birth; and postpartum care. These texts assist in making different areas of nursing easy and fun to learn.

New Year, New Planner

Many teacher resources explore the fundamentals of Universal Design for Learning (UDL). This one takes UDL to the next level for educators who understand the basics—and can’t wait to start using UDL in their lesson plans and classrooms. In this practical, accessible guidebook, UDL expert Patti Kelly Ralabate walks teachers through the entire UDL lesson planning process, from developing learning goals to monitoring student progress.

This book guides teachers to

  • review and understand the big ideas of UDL
  • create learning goals
  • make sure learning goals are S.M.A.R.T.
  • design lesson plans that address learner variability
  • measure what matters
  • infuse UDL features into traditional instructional methods
  • enhance UDL lessons with materials, tools, and media
  • use self-reflection strategies and professional learning communities

Through vignettes, exercises, video demonstrations, and other immediately useful resources, K—12 educators will discover how to translate UDL from theory to practice and plan lessons that meet every learner’s needs. 

Pulling Back the Veil

It’s Not About Grit pulls back the veil, revealing the social systems that marginalise and stigmatize mostly poor, urban students of colour and their communities. Steve Goodman, founding director of NYC’s highly acclaimed Educational Video Center, shows the tremendous intelligence, resilience, and sense of agency of these students. Through the students’ experiences, enhanced with curriculum guides and award-winning video clips from EVC, this book demonstrates how to create a safe and inclusive school climate that responds to students’ culture, race, gender, sexual orientation, language, housing status, and ability. Teachers will use this book to develop a pedagogy of transformative teaching.

True Health

True health is not simply the absence of disease. It is a state of being in which the miraculous physical and mental forces that make us human work together in proper balance. True health allows us to be ourselves and live every day at our own personal best. Achieving true health is a journey—unique to every individual.

However, many of us do not feel the need to begin this journey until we experience symptoms, such as pain or dysfunction, that interfere with our quality of life.  The disruption of our health becomes something that needs to be “fixed.” So we visit our doctors in the hope of finding relief. Traditional mainstream medicine, while immensely helpful in combating disease and medical conditions, neglects the deeper concept of true health by treating the condition and its symptoms, not the total individual. Under our present system, doctors simply do not have the time to evaluate the overall health of their patients. Therefore, they are forced to focus on the specific symptom or condition, instead of trying to find the underlying source of the problem and treating it with an appropriate therapy to heal the entire body.

Applied Kinesiology utilizes a spectrum of noninvasive diagnostic and treatment protocols to restore optimal function to your body. These include various muscle manipulation techniques, chiropractic therapies, acupuncture, nutrition, cranial therapy, specific exercises, and mind/body procedures.

Big Ideas with Small Hands

This book is designed to build educators’ confidence and competence so they can bring STEM to life with young children. The authors encourage pre-K teachers to discover the value of engaging preschoolers in scientific inquiry, technological explorations, engineering challenges, and math experiences based on learning trajectories. They explain the big ideas in STEM, emphasizing teaching strategies that support these activities (such as language-rich STEM interactions), and describe ways to integrate concepts across disciplines. The text features research-based resources, examples of field-tested activities, and highlights from the classroom.

Drawing from a professional development model that was developed with funding from the National Science Foundation, this book is an essential resource for anyone who wants to support children to be STEM thinkers and doers.

Waiting on the World to Change

This concise and accessible resource provides an overview of the fundamentals of teaching in early childhood settings (pre-K–2), with a focus on what high-quality practices look like. It details the features of developmentally appropriate, linguistically responsive, culturally relevant/sustaining teaching and how this approach can prepare our youngest citizens for the challenges of our 21st-century world. 

“This text is a portrait of what it means to be an early childhood professional and to take seriously the job of establishing meaningful relationships with children, families, and professional colleagues. It is these relationships that will shape the social, emotional, and cognitive foundations of generations of productive and enlightened citizens. No work is more important.” From the foreword by Jacqueline Jones, president and CEO, Foundation for Child Development

Action Oriented Approach for Early Childhood Educators

Providing readers with opportunities to critically reflect upon the impact of culturally responsive practices and intercultural communication when communicating and collaborating with families. With a special focus on inclusive practices and ways to effectively develop partnerships with families, pedagogical strategies are provided highlighting specific case studies. The impact of critical reflection is also explored in this valuable monograph.

Lessons for Professionalism, Partnership and Practice

Bullough and Hall-Kenyon focus on preschool teachers as people, what they do, and how they are affected by what they do. Highly politicized and hotly debated, preschool today is increasingly focused on comparatively narrow views of school readiness and academic outcomes which are generally in opposition to the broader view of readiness proposed by NAEYC. This powerful book, based around interviews and data drawn primarily from Head Start programs, illustrates the profound humanity of this profession and underscores the pressing and insistent need for greater investments in teachers’ well-being.

Stories and Studies from the Field

Bullough and Hall-Kenyon focus on preschool teachers as people, what they do, and how they are affected by what they do. Highly politicized and hotly debated, preschool today is increasingly focused on comparatively narrow views of school readiness and academic outcomes which are generally in opposition to the broader view of readiness proposed by NAEYC. This powerful book, based around interviews and data drawn primarily from Head Start programs, illustrates the profound humanity of this profession and underscores the pressing and insistent need for greater investments in teachers’ well-being.

Preschool Teachers’ Lives and Work raises the curtains on a decade of Head Start reforms for the educators charged with their daily implementation. Drawing on a rich trove of interlocking observations, interviews and surveys, Bullough and Hall-Kenyon illuminate preschool teachers’ assessment of current policies and the impact on their practice and well-being. The authors use multiple theoretical perspectives drawn from psychology, organizational development, and social theory to challenge readers to examine their assumptions about issues such as the motivations of Head Start teachers and the team nature of preschool teaching in the context of these reforms. This is a provocative and essential read for all committed to improving early childhood policy and practice.” Marcy Whitebook, Director of the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, University of California, Berkeley