Great Educational Resources


Turning Struggling Students into Superheroes: Comic Books as Teaching Tools

The following guest post is an excerpt from Michael Strom’s graduate thesis Finding Comfort in Comics: Using Comic Books and Graphic Novels to Reach Struggling Male Readers. Strom is a graduate student at C.W. Post where he is pursuing his Masters of Science in Literacy.

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The Hero’s Journey

I don’t remember what it was about reading that got me hooked so young. Did I really enjoy it, or was I pressured into it from my mom? Either way, I didn’t fight it. Reading was the ultimate adventure, and I was the hero in that journey.

The structure of a hero’s journey is outlined in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell argues that the fundamental structure of a hero’s journey (or “monomyth”) is found…

 

The Benefits of Puzzles in Early Childhood Development

People have long known that puzzles present many benefits for children as they develop. Children usually start out with simple knobbed puzzles that are outlines of simple shapes that fit into corresponding board cutouts. From there they go to more complex silhouettes of real world objects that take more consideration.

The last step that people take with puzzles is usually to jigsaw puzzles of varying complexity. The user is guided by an image they assemble and every time you end up with the same result.

I am here today to write about the benefits of puzzles for your child as they grow, and offer a step beyond jigsaw puzzles that are found at Puzumi.com.

 

Sparking Their Interest–Engaging Students with “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire”!

Today is the day! The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is now playing in theaters everywhere. Whether you're seeing the movie this weekend or later on, the excitement surrounding the release is sure to last a while. Why not take advantage of the buzz to get your students excited about learning?

Students' fascination with The Hunger Games can be more than an obsession with popular culture. Great teachers like yourselves recognize the potential to transform entertainment into education, harnessing students' interests to engage them in productive learning. Tracee Orman, Teach 100 blogger and the mind behind the wildly popular website Hunger Games Lessons has been using Suzanne Collins' popular franchise to add depth and excitement to her lessons since she first di…

Rue, Racism, & Reading: Using The Hunger Games to Talk About Comprehension Skills

Last year’s release of The Hunger Games garnered a great deal of media attention. The movie, adapted from Suzanne Collin’s science fiction novel(s), portrays a dystopian future where young children from each ‘district’ are selected to fight to the death as means of entertainment. The movie and novel have received high praise from critics such as Roger Ebert and The New York Times. The Hunger Games, while critically acclaimed, raised controversy in various corners of the Internet — fans of the young-adult novels voiced their concern and disappointment over the characters Rue, Thresh and Cinna being portrayed by African-American actors.

PUBLIC CONTROVERSY

This public discontent raises a number of concerns, including issues of representations of race and diversity in today’s media, and that Lenny Kravi…

History and The Hunger Games

With November 22 drawing near, legions of superfans are waiting with baited breath for Catching Fire, the second movie in the trilogy based off of Suzanne Collins’ hit young adult series The Hunger Games. The trilogy follows the trials of Katniss Everdeen, a teenage girl who lives in Panem—a country that rose from the ruins of America. Each year, the 12 districts in Panem are forced to send two children into the Hunger Games, a gladiator-esque battle to the death that is televised with alarming pomp and circumstance.

For many, the cultural and historical allusions are obvious nods to the brutality and bloodshed that lines our history books and the corrupt nature of politics and government that we see today. For students who have yet to learn about an…

 

Before “The Hunger Games” There Were…

The Hunger Games trilogy — The Hunger Games, Catching Fire and Mockingjay — has taken the world by storm with three bestselling novels and a hit movie franchise. Written by Suzanne Collins, the first novel was published in 2008 and is popular with a wide range of readers, from preteens to adults. The Hunger Games has even become a common teacher resource in schools.

The novel is popular with teens for its post-apocalyptic setting and 16-year-old heroine, Katniss Everdeen, who is forced into the annual battle of life and …

 

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