A terrific resource for elementary-level educators wanting a classroom full of raised hands and green thumbs.
An inspirational children’s book that chronicles the growth of an elementary school’s garden from seed to harvest.
Nagro’s loving tribute to an elementary school’s agricultural adventure cheerily promotes the garden programs that have become an educational phenomenon in recent years. The book is written from the perspective of a child giving a tour of the school’s precious garden, its pages minimally formatted with photographs of children enthusiastically attending to their crops. Along the way, an illustrated ladybug appears in the borders of most pages and provides informative caption. There is slight detail on the specifics of a garden’s flora and fauna, but the book’s narrative is designed more for inspiration than rote gardening instruction. The photographs are colorful and charming, but are unimpressively rendered to look like illustrations, lessening the book’s appeal for readers outside the classroom and buyers looking for a more polished product. However, this does not detract from the message of respect, both ecological and social, that is gently encouraged and will please those who want their garden to provide lessons beyond the merely botanical. The book is most relevant for primary educators beginning a gardening project and seeking a teaching framework that will excite and interest younger children. Also included are a recipe list and instructions for sketching a “garden plot” on graph paper that will encourage students to create their own imaginary landscapes. Nagro provides a website for additional information, activities and online discussions, which posits the book as only one prong in the author’s multimedia pitchfork approach to promoting school gardens. The message is genuine and will inspire children to enjoy the fruits and vegetables of their labor.
A terrific resource for elementary-level educators wanting a classroom full of raised hands and green thumbs.Pub Date: July 21, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-9793739-4-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
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