Core Standards-Based Curriculum in Program Planning Guide

Mirrors & Windows comprehensive Program Planning Guide serves as a road map to the entire Mirrors & Windows: Connecting with Literature program. It lists all the components available for each lesson in the textbook and offers options that help you address your own curriculum needs, student requirements, and schedules. This integrated approach makes it easy to incorporate language arts skills such as reading, vocabulary, critical thinking, and media literacy into each lesson.

To help you meet the diverse needs of your students, the Mirrors & Windows program offers a wealth of material—much more than you can teach in one school year. As a result, one challenge you will face is identifying the resources that are best suited to your particular situation. The Program Planning Guide offers several tools to help you meet that challenge.

The guide begins with a Core Standards-Based Selections chart outlining a basic course of study for teaching the common core standards and critical skills covered in formal language arts assessments. If you start your curriculum planning with this chart, you will know that you are teaching the key material your students need for success.

Save Valuable Prep Time with Mirrors & Windows

Looking for planning and pacing guides to help plan your daily lessons? Mirrors & Windows makes it easy.
• Visual Planning Guides are located before each unit. Approximate days of teaching the selection are indicated in this section. Lesson-by-Lesson Resources for each selection are indicated visually for additional support.
• Following the Visual Planning Pages, you will find a Scope & Sequence. This breaks down the selection features, indicating the reading support, word count, literary elements, writing options, and extension activities. You can use this page to determine what lessons you will want to incorporate into your instruction for that selection.
• The Lesson Planner CD allows the teacher to populate all the various lessons within each selection. It also automatically incorporates a “pacing guide” indicating what can be taught on day 1 of selection, day 2, and so on. You can then edit, removing lessons you do not want to teach, or add additional resources located outside the M&W program. See below.

Listen to Audio While Reading Ebook Online!

EMC has downloadable audio available for most selections in the Mirrors & Windows Common Core State Standards Editions. To run an audio while reading the book online or with the CD you would
1) Go to the mirrorsandwindows.com site and locate the selection within the Audio tab
2) Download the audio folder to your computer. (You may also run the audio directly from the site but downloading is easier to manipulate once you open your online or CD edition).
3) Open up the Audio and the player window will appear. Push the pause button.
4) Open up the selection you are reading. Once opened, minimize the textbook window, push the play button on the audio player, and then maximize your textbook window.
5) The student now will be able to read the text while listening to the Audio!

Implement CCSS with Mirrors & Windows

Mirrors & Windows will help you meet the ELA Common Core
State Standards with our results oriented CCSS implementation model:

Professional Support:
• EMC's content area experts will provide ongoing professional support to help you implement the Mirrors & Windows Common Core State Standards Edition language arts program.
100 % Aligned Materials:
• CCSS correlations are included in the front of the Teacher's Edition and on the bottoms of the selection and feature pages.
• Common Core Selection Based Curriculum Maps are included in the Planning Guide.
• Lessons plans are correlated to CCSS in the E-Lesson Planner on the Teacher's Resources DVD.
• The student textbook covers 100 % of the Range of Text Types in every level!
Formative Assessments & Intervention:
• Meeting the Standards includes a practice test for each unit correlated to common core reading standards.
• Formative Surveys and Remediation Rubrics are provided in the Assessment Guide.
Measureable Results:
• ExamView test bank questions are aligned to CCSS to identify standards that students need to focus on.

Mirrors & Windows is your best source for meeting College and

Career Readiness standards in English Language Arts!

http://www.emcp.com/product_catalog/resourcelist.php?GroupID=2903

Call for E-book Pilot Partners

Is your literature class currently using an e-book reader, electronic notebook, or tablet computer for delivery of textbook content in lieu of a hardcover student edition?

EMC is looking for partners to pilot a sample from our literature program (grades 6-12) in portable electronic devices. For more information, please contact us at litmail@emcp.com.

EMC Authors Host Annual Writers Week

February 28 through March 4, Gary Anderson and Tony Romano, authors of EMC’s Expository Composition: Discovering Your Voice, are hosting the seventeenth annual William Fremd High School Writers Week. During this week-long celebration of writing, Fremd students, faculty, and staff learn about the art and craft of writing from nationally-known and local authors, as well as from Fremd student and faculty authors. Since its beginning in 1995, Writers Week has brought more than 200 writers to the Fremd campus in Palatine, Illinois.

Writer’s Week XVII guest writers include Chris Crutcher, Sierra DeMulder, Buddy Wakefield, Dave Cullen, Jonathan Eig, Billy Lombardo, Mary Fons, Julie Halpern, and Fremd alumni authors Daphne Willis ('05), Kathryn Janicek ('94), and Mark Buenning ('03).

I was lucky enough to attend a session on Writers Week presented by Gary Anderson and Tony Romano at NCTE last fall, and it was truly inspiring. To find out more about Fremd Writers Week, visit the website at http://fremdwritersweek.ning.com/.

Read Across America Day March 2

The National Education Association’s Read Across America day is March 2, the birthday of Dr. Seuss. The goal of the NEA’s signature program, now in its thirteenth year, is to build a nation of readers. Thousands of schools, libraries, and community centers across the country participate in this national reading celebration by bringing together kids, teens, and books. The program focuses on motivating children and teens to read through events, partnerships, and reading resources year-round.

In Anna Quindlen’s essay, “How Reading Changed My Life,” that appears in EMC's Mirrors & Windows Level V, she writes,

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself.…There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books, a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a universe in which I might be a newcomer but was never really a stranger.

Make sure to celebrate Read Across America by sharing a favorite book with a young person on March 2. For more information about ways to participate and activity ideas go to http://www.nea.org/readacross.