Welcome to WinkWorld. As I write this month, I am in Santa Fe in the middle of a beautiful snowfall. This month WinkWorld is brief with a few good websites, a sad story of ERIC, and a great story of Wyatt's reading. It continues: a flood of books works*.

Happy New Year to us all. We wish you peace, love, health, and joy.

We are happy to announce that Teaching Passionately: What's Love Got To Do With It? is now available in your local bookstores or click on the title page below, which will take you to the Allyn & Bacon online order form: Allyn & Bacon Catalog

At the end of every semester, I find treasures left lying around on my desk. Last week was no exception, when I found a few websites, which grad students/teachers had shared with their colleagues. Here are a few:

Need a rubric?
Karalee shared two websites, which have many examples:
Rubric Bank        Rubrics

Need a good story from Alma Flor Ada?
Alica shared the following websites: http://www.eduplace.com/kids/hmr/mtai/ada.html
http://www.soe.usfca.edu/institutes/childlit/about.html
http://almaproject.dpsk12.org/stories/storyReader
http://dept.kent.edu/virginiahamiltonconf/ada-pge.htm

Need to have practical ways of implementing multicultural strategies?
Nila found WestEd to be helpful in many ways.    WestEd Online

Deleting History

We sadly report that as of December 19th, 2003, that education has lost one of its greatest resources, ERIC. Despite a national grassroots struggle to maintain our educational research database, the U.S. Department of Education discontinued the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC). This radical revision of ERIC eliminates all of the ERIC Clearinghouses, our repository of exceptionally valuable research & information, which students, teachers, researchers, policy-makers have relied on for 11 years. ERIC has responded to over 335,000 requests for education information in the past decade, and the ERIC website served 4.5 million visitors a year.

In an effort to maintain service, AskERIC has moved to a new home at Educator's Reference Desk, eduref.org. Through this new site you can still access AskERIC's 2,000+ lesson plans, 3,000+ links to online education information, and 200+ question archive responses. AskERIC Update will no longer be available, but all the ERIC database tip are available at Database Tips. Please plan to visit the Educator's Reference Desk.

Calling all who have an experience with NCLB they would like to share:

NCTE and IRA are soliciting teachers to share their experiences with NCLB. We hope you will take advantage of this opportunity and share your experiences.

Wyatt's reading

For those of you who are following the adventures of our 7-year old reluctant reader grandson, you may recall that Dawn (very reluctantly) switched from the Harry Potter series to the Captain Underpants series. Within days Wyatt was decoding paragraph-by-paragraph and page-by-page after a few more days. You can imagine my joy this week, as Wyatt reads to me, not only Captain Underpants**, but also Dr. Suess, and now even Harry Potter.**

*Thanks to Steve Krashen for articulating "book flood."

** Banned Books