Faq Reference Data Information

Teaching a child to read is the foremost goal of any school. Some would say it’s the most important thing anyone will ever learn; this is most definitely true. Schools across the nation strive to achieve excellence in reading education, known as literacy to those in the biz. These institutes of learning want to turn out students who read and read well, and some are recognized for these efforts. Arizona Public Schools are among them.

Several different corporations exist who, in part, recognize and award Arizona Schools who have gone above and beyond when devising a program or curriculum to help students achieve literacy. Arizona Schools have worked hard to ensure that its students have the opportunity to learn to read, and to take that knowledge to another level.

But what is literacy? It is being literate - which is so much more than just being able to sound out words and read aloud slowly. Being literate is even more than being able to read aloud with clarity and adequate flow. Literacy encompasses all manner of skills that many of us, as adults, are unaware we even have. We do not remember learning them, we just know them! As the teachers of Arizona Schools know, achieving literacy is mastering the following list of skills:

* Understanding and identifying the main idea

* Grasping cause and effect

* The ability to pick out the details that support the main idea

* Mastery of basic grammar – nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns

* Knowing how to use punctuation correctly – periods, commas, question

marks, etc…
* Recognizing the beginning, middle, and end of a story or passage
* The ability to identify setting (time and place the story occurs) and plot
* Being able to differentiate between main and supporting characters

Arizona Schools students learn all these skills, and practice them on a daily basis. They work to become well-read – literate. Arizona Schools teachers follow proscribed curriculum and design lessons to help them achieve this goal. Many Arizona Schools have been recognized for their excellence in literacy education.

Fifteen Arizona Schools were recently awarded $1,000 cash prizes by the McDonald’s Readers Are Leaders Award program. This program, available to Arizona Schools provides funding for the books and reading materials for school libraries to enhance book collections and offer titles that will make the students of Arizona Schools want to drop everything and read. Applications were judged on creativity, ability to make good use of books, and solid strategy for long-term reading promotion activities.

As you can see, excellent literacy programs help students achieve the literacy they are working towards. And, for some Arizona Schools, that effort pays off; in cash and recognition for their admirable efforts.

Patricia Hawke is a staff writer for Schools K-12, providing free, in-depth reports on all U.S. public and private K-12 schools. For more information please visit schoolsk-12.com/Arizona/index.html Arizona Public Schools

There are many theories floating around out there on how Earthquakes occur, in fact many believe that some cycles happen almost like clockwork and there is evidence, which actually seems to condone such areas of thought on seismic activity. This has prompted one online think tank to address this issue as they consider the possibility of using such data to predict future quakes and cycles.

Joe states; “Some theories about large seismic events over the past couple thousand years in the Northwest where earthquakes are less frequent and powerful in comparison to the California area. They dirt tells us that every 300 years or so there’s a fairly large tsunami that dumps a whole bunch of sand across the surrounding Puget Sound.”

I have heard of longer periods but yes, they do predict that indeed there are some possibilities that Seattle thru Vancouver BC is over do for some big time events. Regarding if there are some correlations to other events “When Cycles Collide,” which I have always thought would be an excellent title for a book, like “The Day After Tomorrow” type Sci Fi genre, indeed generally my theory of cycles, flows, patterns, where every thing affects everything else, seems to predict that in fact it makes sense that the largest of events are like the NTSB Accident reports, that is to say it is “never just one thing” but rather a compilation of events.

So to prevent an event you choose the smallest easiest to control event in the set of converging cycles and get it to skip its cycles while letting the others occur naturally. Then trigger the other event you “skipped” later at the safest time during the lowest potentially problematic period. Your pattern may not look so hot “Mathematica-Stephen Wolfram Theory” but you prevent disaster without disrupting the normal cycles.

Yet one could say screwing with such cycles, weather, ionosphere is problematic, until which time you figure out what you are doing and how the cycles inter-relate then you are safe and can easily control the system without causing imbalance, you see; all abstract theory, but you get the point and your questions therefore are also relevant to the equation? My answer is I do not know, but would like to. Although I do suspect there is a lot more too it and the CalTech guys are way ahead of me on this. Consider this in 2006.

“Lance Winslow” - Online WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs/ Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance in the Online Think Tank and solve the problems of the World; WorldThinkTank.net www.WorldThinkTank.net/