Physical: Feats and Failures - Softcover

Herweck Rice, Dona

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1433348705 ISBN 13: 9781433348709

Publisher: Teacher Created Materials, 2012

Synopsis

The human body can achieve amazing feats, but with every new physical feat, there are many failures. Readers will learn about some of the most amazing physical feats in history in this inspiring nonfiction title. Readers will learn about sports records, daredevils like Evel Knievel, and the incredible determination that athletes of all kinds have in order to achieve amazing things. Featuring brilliant images and photos, charts, graphs, informational text, and stunning facts, this book will have readers engaged and amazed!

About Shell Education
Rachelle Cracchiolo started the company with a friend and fellow teacher. Both were eager to share their ideas and passion for education with other classroom leaders. What began as a hobby, selling lesson plans to local stores, became a part-time job after a full day of teaching, and eventually blossomed into Teacher Created Materials. The story continued in 2004 with the launch of Shell Education and the introduction of professional resources and classroom application books designed to support Teacher Created Materials curriculum resources. Today, Teacher Created Materials and Shell Education are two of the most recognized names in educational publishing around the world.

About this title

About the Author

Dona Herweck Rice is the prolific author of books, stories, and poems for children of all ages. She’s written hundreds of books and more on just about every topic under the sun, from acrobats to zucchini and everything in between. She has also written award-winning books and curriculums for educators, especially on the subjects of writing and language arts. In fact, her first publications were a series for teachers on how to teach writing in the classroom. She spearheaded the development of Write TIME for Kids, which earned the Golden Lamp award for curriculum from the Association of American Publishers. Her writing is featured heavily in such acclaimed series as Focused Phonics, Untold Stories, Fiction Readers, Nonfiction Readers, Learn and Create, and more.

Dona’s best-selling children’s title with more than 13,000 copies is How Plants Grow, and her most recent titles include dozens of books for the Exploration Storytime series, two titles in the Curious Me!™ board book series, and Ride with Rampage in partnership with the Los Angeles Rams. When Dona visits classrooms to talk about being an author, the most requested titles include History’s Mysteries, Bad Guys and Gals of the Wild West, and Oh, Rats!––the latter being one of Dona’s particular favorites.

Dona is the creator of Cam E. Chameleon, the enchanting little reptile featured in her books The Adventures of Cam E. Chameleon and Cam and Sam’s Colorful Adventure. Observant readers can also find Cam singing and dancing throughout the illustrated retelling of If You’re Happy and You Know It.

Writing is Dona’s passion, but she also loves reading, live theater, and handmade arts and crafts, with many artists and creatives in all mediums among her extended family. Dona was a preschool and middle school teacher and is an acting coach for all ages. She lives in southern California with her husband, son, and one cute, silly, and loveable little dog.

Reviews

Gr 3-5-Covering a wide range of high-interest topics in science, history, sports, vocations, and avocations, these small volumes offer tight, busy-looking mixes of color photos, present-tense overview narratives, boxed facts, and captions, supplemented by various combinations of charts, tables, interviews, open-ended questions, and, where applicable, recipes. Each volume is capped by a current, annotated set of multimedia resources. The biographies present highly idealized, inspirational portraits of their subjects. Aside from Healthy, (in which the old food pyramid is replaced with the newer MyPlate recommendations), the Straight Talk titles are not quite "straight." Both Drugs and Smoking fail to deliver enough information for readers to come to their own conclusions about the topics. More balanced alternatives to the entries in both subseries are available elsewhere. Otherwise these titles are acceptable choices for both assignment use and casual browsing.α(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Books in this subset of the Time for Kids series feature plenty of historical high points and, for good measure, some low points, too. According to a note, the content is based on “writing from TIME for Kids magazine.” While the use of many short sentences helps to make the books accessible, the text is brief and often superficial, as the series’ small format and many illustrations leave little space for discussion. However, many good color photos do appear throughout the books. Focusing mainly on athletes who have excelled despite occasional failures, Physical spotlights figures such Wilma Rudolph, Michael Phelps, Aimee Mullins, Philippe Petit, and Evel Knievel. However, in the review copy, Phelps is credited with eight gold medals in the 2004 (rather than the 2008) Olympics. A colorful paperback series with some appeal to browsers. Grades 4-6. --Carolyn Phelan

Edition details

• Publisher: Teacher Created Materials
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1433348705
• ISBN 13: 9781433348709
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 48