Alvins Swap Shop

While running a swap shop, a group of youngsters become involved in the mystery of a sunken ship.

Alvin Fernald’s “Magnificent Brain” has a life of its own. In fact, somehow or other it has come up with the winning grand prize recipe in a candy-making contest—and no one, including Alvin, can figure out quite how it happened. Now, as guests of the Kitchenmate Appliance Company, Alvin, his friend Shoie, and his sister Daphne (“The Pest”) take off for a whirlwind tour of Europe. Having just come to the edge of flunking a class in economics (Magnificent Brain, where were you?), Alvin is about to be given a practical—and perilous—lesson in international trade. Mystery, ingenuity—and, well bicycles—hilariously collide in this next book about Alvin by the former editor of Popular Mechanics Magazine, Clifford B. Hicks.

Incorporating leveled reading within each script, readers theatre plays offer teachers the flexibility to include readers of every ability in the same read-aloud play. Hello Hi-Lo: Readers Theatre Math offers a proven way for teachers to build reading fluency in their classrooms, even if students do not all read at the same level. The book offers 15 readers theatre plays, each of which includes various levels of readability within one script. The plays thus provide lower-level readers the opportunity to follow along with accelerated reading parts, building confidence by reading aloud at their own levels. Each play includes speakers for three different grade levels of readability: 4th grade and lower, 5th-6th grade, and 7th-8th grade. Concepts are presented so that they are fluid among these grade levels. Taking a cross-curricular approach, the scripts reinforce key math concepts and standards-based math skills taught in the middle grades, such as order of operations, fractions, inequalities, positive and negative numbers, and graphing on a coordinate plane. Each play includes extended activities that will help the teacher incorporate the math concept into the classroom.