Activities are designed to enliven domains of knowledge like history, current affairs, and writing and to enhance social and emotional skills. Ideas for sparking discussion in the college classroom are provided, along with nonthreatening activities that teachers of adolescents can use. Falker by Patricia Polacco is used to demonstrate the power of picture books when professors use them in their classrooms and when teachers, in turn, use them in theirs. Teachers who understand theory develop new ways of thinking and possess better problem-solving skills, and are better prepared to assist struggling adolescent readers who need cognitive, social, and emotional support. The benefit of picture books does not stop at the college door, because when students graduate and have classrooms of their own they can use the stories and pictures to remember and apply theories in their classrooms. Ages 5-9.Using picture books in teacher education courses allows instructors to set theory in context, create a visual representation of it, and make theory come alive. This will encourage the child who feels like a failure and the teacher who cares. Trisha isn't idealized: we see her messy and desperate, poring over her books. As always she tells the story with intense emotion: no understatement here reading is 'torture.' The big line-and-watercolor illustrations are bright with color and theatrical gesture, expressing the child's happiness with her grandparents in a family of readers, her fear and loneliness in the classroom ('she hated hated hated school'), her anguish when the kids jeer at her in the schoolyard, and her joy when finally she reads the words on the page ('she was happy, so very happy').

'That little girl was me,' Polacco says in a final note. Who would believe that this gifted storyteller had started off with a serious learning disability? From kindergarten on, Trisha gets attention because she can draw but she hides the fact that she can't read-all she sees on the page are 'wiggling shapes' -until her fifth-grade teacher discovers Trisha's problem, gets her special help, and sets her free.

Like many of Polacco's picture-book stories, this one is autobiographical.

The book thank you mr falker