Books by James T Charnock

Author James T. Charnock shares the best from his thirty-plus years' experience teaching language arts in The Creative Teacher, a teacher's guide filled with student activities in writing, public speaking, researching, dramatizing, and more. There is also a detailed extensive list of recommended K-3/4 read-aloud books. This is the revised edition of his 2011 publication of the same name.Charnock's clarity, energetic style, and practical approach make this book a worthy addition to your teaching library. You will be impressed with how simple and fun teaching language arts can be when compared with the onerous and complicated methods propagated in the past.About the AuthorJames Charnock, MEd, is a veteran teacher of more than thirty years at the elementary and junior high levels. For most of those years he was a certified reading-language arts specialist. In addition to creating educationally-oriented market products, Charnock has been a feature writer/children's book reviewer for The Reading Teacher, a national reading journal, and has served on the editorial board of Language Arts, a national English journal.Former top students have honored Charnock four times in Who's Who Among America's Teachers. He has also been listed in Who's Who in the East and Who's Who in America.In addition, Charnock has published Mt. Horeb: The Little White Schoolhouse on Little Deer Creek, about the history and memories of one of Maryland's last one-room rural schoolhouses, where he started his education.Charnock lives in a suburb of Philadelphia, where he continues as a freelance writer, often serving as a seminar speaker on the teaching of language arts, geography, and classroom art.

Is your public school too large and distant (both physically and socially) for you and your children, too impersonal (take a number, please), and too bureaucratic (with layers and layers of officials)?Though one-room and small schools are sometimes seen through rose-colored glasses, they made parents and students feel more welcomed, more interactive, more intimate with each other and the school''s programs, and-even today where they still exist in the United States (the mid- and far-West)-more academically superior.Today, with electronic advancements available-computers, videos, distance libraries and learning for research-there is no reason to crowd students like a herd of cattle into schools and classrooms. Research has proven that a smaller economy of scale is not more expensive. Some have recently started talking about scaling down the size of schools (not those, of course, with a vested interest in the large school "plant"), but it has been mostly talk. When will the real community school return?This volume has three focuses: 1) The nostalgic remembrances of an early Maryland one-room school by those who attended and taught there (with interesting data and old-timey pictures), 2) a brief, succinct, and eye-opening history of small schools in America, and 3) easy-to-read research briefs that support returning to smaller, local-community schools today.