Schools and Instruction Books

Recieved item on time, right when we were told it would arrive. Book in very good condition.

This book gives tips and suggestions for the beginning workshop teacher. Ideas for constructing mini-lessons, organizing books and classrooms, and month by month suggestions for topics to use to make your workshop a success.

This book is a companion book to Serafini's "Lessons in Comprehension". You do not need to have that book in order to use this one, but because minilessons in "Lessons in Comprehension" are cited throughout the book I would recommend using them together. If you've read a lot about balanced literacy it does repeat a lot, however, there are useful new ideas like poetry discussion groups.

The book provides the philosophy behind NCLB. I describes ways to include slow learners and those labeled "Special Ed". It provides practical advice on how those students can function and succeed in the regular classroom.

Amy Benjamin knows her stuff. She gives clear, specific instructions and a great rationale for not only differentiated instruction but writing and reading across the curriculum. She also writes with a passion of doing right by kids.

I particularly like her lessons for how to introduce a class to the textbook or anthology -- how to take kids through it step by step so that all are included and engaged, no matter what ability levels you juggle in your classroom.

Some may not like the way the book is organized: it isn't flashy or full of visuals, but it's very meaty and worth every penny.

I recommend this book for all secondary educators along with Carol Tomlinson's Differentiation in Practice: A Resource Guide for Differentiating Curriculum, Grades 9-12. For English teachers, I recommend not only these two books but also Teaching Romeo and Juliet: A Differentiated Approach. If you take Benjamin's and Tomlinson's principles plus the specifics of the English units provided in both Tomlinson's book and the NCTE book, you will be good to go as an English teacher.

I have been teaching high school for 12 years and when I studied for GATE certification we had to read a lot of material on differentiating instruction, but it was mostly applicable for primary school teachers and environments. It was frustrating to feel like my certification class was "inventing the wheel" as we tried out different techniques in our various classes. The year after my certification I was coaching a Critical Friends Group that chose differentiation as our topic and we read this book together, trying out many of the techniques described. It was an enormously helpful resource (as is the second book using technology) and I strongly recommend it to anyone looking for a text that deals with the secondary school environment. My teaching and classroom now reflect many of the tools and philosophies described by Ms. Benjamin.

This is a great tool for reference and for showing different types of mediums. I own it and love it. Shows details of eyes, lips and nose and how to use a grid to get the facial proportions correct.

This book's illustrations are very colorful and beautifully laid out. From caricatures to torn paper collage, this is a great little book that will jumpstart lots of ideas. Mediums discussed include pencil, colored pencil, computer graphics, pen/ink, pastels, tempera, acrylic, watercolor, paper collage, pastel scratch, printing, and paper sculpting.

This is a pretty good one for learning the basics for drawing faces. Shading, contouring, etc. is covered, as well as eyes, ears, etc.

I saw this book at a local bookstore and decided it looked very interesting. Upon reading the first page I was intrigued! A heartwarming exciting story about a girl just beginning puberty. A must-read for any 11-13 year old!

I found this at my local bookstore and I thought that the colorful cover looked appealing. The book was very interesting. 11-12 year olds should read it! I recommend it for any girl who is starting puberty.

This book was exsquisted! 12-year old River is in a Sixth grade sex ed class where she learns the expeience of having a child. At home the things she learns are real. But the one she thinks is pregnant might not be at all. I won't spoil the ending for you but I suggest all pre-teens read this.

This is far more than a book of glossy game art pics, and certainly not a coffee table prop. Appropriately the book has a number of layers and themes which together provide an absorbing insight into the history of computer games. The text is free from the gushing sycophantic praise that blemishes many of the genre art books. Instead the authors produce a clear categorisation of games with illustrations in support. Comments from game designers are likewise intelligent, thoughtful and devoid of self agrandisement. What the reader gets is a book of useful illustrations, clear game categorisation by features, useful insights into game creation and an indication of where the genre is probably headed. Overall there is a subtle intellectual tone to the book which makes it both a pleasure to flick through but a much more profound pleasure to read.

If the book as any underdeveloped theme it is arguably the absence of game postmortems. What went right? What went wrong? This would have rounded out the book very nicely. However, if you are interested in game design and the role of art in creating various immersive experiences, then this is a book to buy and revisit from time to time.

Game Art by Dave Morris and Leo Harris is one of the best ways I have found to learn about the history of video games. There are great drawings and pictures of many different games from Pong to Halo. This book has a lot of great information.
There is a whole section about a game called Fable, which is the second most popular on X-Box. Fable allows the player to make choices and each choice leads to a different destiny. It's possible to take over the world and rule with an iron fist or you can save it. This is somewhat like the book, The Pearl, because the main character must choose between the pearl and his family. In this book, the pearl represents greed and evil, and the family is happiness.
Overall, this is a nicely done book. I would recommend it to anyone that likes video games, or wants to know more about them. This is not just a book with a lot of pictures. It's like portal that shows you about lots and lots of video game and information for every one.

I've never been an avid computer games player (wrong generation, mostly), but their progressive development, and especially the continuing quest for verisimilitude, fascinate me. I remember when Asteroids and Pac-Man and Space Invaders first appeared (in the lobbies of movie theaters, when "arcade" still meant pinball), and how addicted my adolescent kids quickly became. But that level of 2-D was nothing, of course, compared to the MYST series and to god/simulations like SimCity 3 -- not to mention keyframe animation and real-time interaction and detailed storyboarding that wouldn't be out of place in Hollywood. This is the first book I've seen that really gets into all aspects of video game art and design (there wouldn't have been enough to say even a few years ago), and it succeeds nicely both in its glossy-paper graphics and in the discursive text, which includes numerous interviews with designers.

A superb book, very informative and with wonderfdul and some greatly enlarged photographs.
There is a fair amount of information about faience production technology though the very best work on Egyptian faience and
frit is "Vitreous Materials at Amarna - The production of Glass and faience in 18th Dynasty Egypt" by Andrew J Shortland, this is available from Oxbow books if not avaalable on amazon. Also worth trying to get hold of is "Faiences", the catalogue (in French only) for the recent wonderful exhibition at the Louvre. Unfortunately, this is not available online from the Louvre bookshop. (...)

I waited for some time to get my hands on this work. If you're interested in AE faience artistry - the pictures alone are worth it. A fine addition to the Egyptophile's library.

A well illustrated book , numerous examples of what is known in pottery as " Egyptian Paste ". Ornaments , tiles ,cups, figurines and the ever present ,beads. More than enough colour photographs to satisfy the thirst . The 3 different processes of manufacturing Egyptian Paste objects are explained technically. Plus ,the many variations in the paste through the centuries. My only reason for not giving another star , not enough goblets .

the book is exactly what it says it is, a step by step instruction guide. i think many will find this book helpful,it also gives practice pages to dreaw on and to learn their techniques.

There are many approaches that artists working in the 'furry' or anthromorphic field can take to their characters. Some place animal-like heads on top of what are essentially human bodies (the egyptian god approach) some twist quadrapeds into a bipedal position (and leave it to suspension of disbelief rather than anatomy to keep them walking!) and of course there are the 'taurs.And finally those weirdos that draw realistic animals......
The Famous Artist school's book 'How to Draw Animals' has something for every type of furry artist no matter what their style. I discusses the basics of animal anatomy, deals with many of the mistakes beginners make,does a very good job of showing how the various types of animal families differ and how to repepresent these differences well.The books has hundreds of sketches showing how the various artists approached the issues dealt with in the text,as well as diagrams of actaul muscular and skeltal structures of some common types.. Are you primarily interested in animal faces? There is also a section on how various animal heads are put together and again a good demonstration of how to differentiate them (an importan point, amatuer furry artists can have problems keeping their cats from looking like dogs and vice versa.) as well as how to use proportion to differentiate the members of a common family (emily the greyhound versus jack the bulldog) Finally it discusses how to analyze an unfamiliar animal and place it in a familiar animal family.
Pretty much all the commonly illustrated groups are dealt with, equines canines,felines,birds as well as how to us proportion to say use the same contstruction for a gazelle as for a clydesdale.
All in all I find this book to be an informative and useful one for the furry artist, I think all but the most advanced will finds something of use in it. This and the other famous artist books are commonly available used and can be acquired at cheaply at amazon.com. It is worth adding to the library of any furry artist.

Even though the Famous Artists School was found in many publications when I was a child growing up, it still is hard to beat their tried and true processes from step by step methods to the finished product. If you want simple, comprehensible and easily learned methodology of creating animal form.....this is a must have book. You learn the basic form here and add the individual spirit and media to your subject. I am glad I was able to find the Famous Artist School Step-By-Step Method Books....and for the price it is hard to be without.

This is not a giant book, but it certainly is a beautiful one, in which you'll find a decent helping of full-color plates that portray the majestic representation of idealized landscape painting that came to be known as the Hudson River School.

In an easily readable fourteen-page introduction, author Louise Minks takes us from about 1825, when the definition of this genre of landscape painting was beginning to form, to the last decades of the 19th Century, when the term "Hudson River School" came into vogue as a way of distancing the style from the emerging Barbizon School in France. Ms. Minks recounts the goings-on of the writers, patrons and artists which influenced many Hudson River School painters, such as Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Martin Heade, George Inness, Worthington Whittredge and Albert Bierstadt, to name a few. Twenty black-and-white illustrations (mostly photos of paintings and noteworthy people) appear along with the text.

The 80 color plates, about half of which extend to both pages of the open book, are arranged according to phases of the Hudson River School development: "Formative," "Mature," and "Expansionist." Each phase is introduced with a page-long synopsis of what was happening at the time the artwork on the following pages was created. As expected, Cole, Bierstadt and Church are the most represented (25 artists overall). Also, Ms. Minks made sure to include in the color plates the artwork that was most discussed in the introduction. The color printing is of excellent quality, as is the paper stock on which the artwork appears. Given the size of the pages, I found it easy to spend a long time admiring all that was going on in each painting.

The pictures in this book are positively breathtaking. It is mainly about the paintings and phases of the movement. The sharpness of the images in this book are amazing and make it much more pleasurable to look at. I loved it.

Outstanding. If you can only get one book about this defining movement in American art, get this one. An absorbing and comprehensive grasp of the movement of the Hudson River School with stunning full-color reproductions. Best of all is the well researched narrative on the flow and development of the HRS, from its beginnings, through maturity and finally its end. A must for art history students and anyone susceptible to enchantment.

This is a large format book filled with paintings of several different famous landscape artists. Some paintings stretch to fill two pages and others are worked in at all different sizes. There is accompanying text to help you understand each artist and their role in this "Hudson Valley" artistic endeavor or community. Some of the paintings are reproduced very small and I would have liked to see them a bit larger, but overall this book is a great introduction to each of the artists and their work and an interesting overview of this school of artists. After seeing some of these paintings you'll definitely want to follow up on some of these artists and get a larger book on their works and life.

The Hudson River School of Artists included some of the World's greatest artists and their work can be found in this excellently produced book. This book is well written, well organized and shows off the treasures of the Hudson River Artists.
It is perfect for your library, coffee table, and excellent as a gift to art students, history students, loved ones.
Outstanding quality went in to this book.

I often give this book as a momento to people leaving their Hudson Valley homes. It has lovely pictures and an interesting text describing the history and importance of the Hudson River School of painting. In comparison to the Minks book- they are very similar except in cost.

I enjoyed this book. It spent two pages on every topic that's important to beginning artists. It never rambled on about useless, trivial information. The author focused in on clear definitions and illustrations. This reader was never confused by the book's precise method in handling complicated exercises. These exercises not only explained the material, but also led to completed works of art. The book also had a small, but vital glossary. The glossary helped to reiterate important concepts, such as scumbling, aerial perspective, fat-over-lean painting and high-key colors (just to name a few). Reading this book is like taking an art class. It focuses in on the most important concepts; and, it explains them in a brief, succinct manner.

My soft-cover version of this highly-attractive book has plenty of nice features. The overall concept is sound, (although a little cursory in places, even for a book aimed at beginners); the instructional and informational content is generally useful and interesting; the illustrations and reproductions are excellent. There are even some health and safety tips that were very welcome.

So, what's the problem? The low rating I gave this book falls squarely at the feet of the editor(s). Simply put, there are far too many mistakes for a book of this size!

Completely wrong labels on a graph of oil content in paints makes for total confusion, especially if you're trying to come to terms with the "fat over lean" concept or similar technical ideas. Page cross-references that are incorrect are frustrating, but tolerable, in a monthly magazine or daily newspaper, but not in a textbook! There are numerous other little labelling, spelling, word-usage and grammatical errors, as well as a couple of invented words ("sawned off" is going to stick in my memory for a long time!) and a few "explanations" that don't explain anything.

I'm not sorry I bought the book, but it would be so much easier for my wife, who is just starting out in oil painting, and who is not a native user of English, if the information were a bit more reliable.

I purchased another Ray Smith book [Portraits, hardcover] and have no real criticisms of that book. I would consider buying others in the series, but this one is a little disappointing. A very beautiful book spoiled by sloppy editing. It's really a shame!

This is the kind of book that organizes the information you need to know in a logical and straight-forward manner. A great place to start for any aspiring artist.