Reviewing textbooks for elementary school is never an easy assignment. Many times the first step is deciding what type of pedagogy your textbook should follow. I am a firm believer that everything in life changes: the way we wash our clothes, the car we drive and yes even the way we teach our children. All thanks to great research and the development of technology.
If you are looking for elementary school textbooks for math begin with a great article which not only summarizes some of the most recent research on education but some really good links to additional information. Check this out!
Research Supporting NCTM-Standards-Based Mathematics Education Reform
http://mathematicallysane.com/evidence/researchbase.asp
It’s almost time for our new Kendall Hunt PreK-8 and 9-12 catalogs! I was just looking at the proofs, and they look great. I always love this time of year, new catalogs portend a new school year, new books, and new supplies. This year’s catalogs are full of books for gifted students, elementary school science textbooks, high school science textbooks, math programs, health & fitness curricula, teacher edition textbooks, kits, games, technology, and much, much more. Once the catalogs are complete and up on our website, I’ll provide a link for you to go to and download them. Watch this space!!
How can we keep up with all the new and ever-changing technologies that have kids mesmerized? Teachers often feel overwhelmed with the challenges and options this digital culture presents to students. We want students to take advantage of all technology has to offer; however, how familiar are teachers with technology? Teachers often throw up their hands and say, “My students know how to work this stuff and I don’t” or “How can I utilize and implement something that I don’t understand?”
The digital world is growing and changing very fast. Technology companies release products so rapidly that there is little time for anyone to stop and think of the many issues that may arise with their use. Too often when schools and districts purchase new digital technology for their elementary school textbooks they look at all the bells and whistles and don’t think of how will this fit into an inquiry based science classroom or a teacher's daily lesson plan.
Technology offers exciting opportunities in the science textbook publishing arena, but for some teachers this strange new world can be intimidating. Thankfully, there is help available…
The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) has developed the National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) for students, teachers, and administrators. With these standards, ISTE provides structure for utilizing technology in an effective and responsible way. This site offers a plethora of information, tips, direction, and support. You can even visit a school that has embraced the digital world: http://www.istevision.org/watch.php?vid=fc10dbd9251623e4379652fd1cb0ac54e5ad04a5
As an educational publisher we are committed to assisting teachers to best educate students. Inspiring teachers to transform their classrooms away from traditional teaching toward a new vision of student-centered learning is our mission.
We aim to offer technology that is relevant and to provide implementation support in our teacher edition textbooks. And if you are still struggling with turning on the laptop or downloading the Nano Legends game that came with your KH high school biology textbook, just ask your students for help...they love to show off their expertise.
I was just updating the elementary school, middle school and high school pages on the Kendall Hunt website to include cover images for each of our programs when it occurred to me how great our primary school textbooks, middle school textbooks, and secondary school textbooks look. (Check out the Global Science cover to the right.) For this, I must give a shout out to my talented designer friends here at KH. They’ve won many Addy awards for their outstanding work, and if you look around our website, you can see why. They have the ability to take a high school physics textbook, or a teacher edition textbook (books not normally oohed and aahed over for their visual appeal) and create a cover that jumps right off the shelf and grabs you. Certainly you can’t always judge a book by its cover, but seeing the quality, care and effort that go into the outside is usually a pretty good indicator of what went into the inside.
I love what I do.
I love working at an educational publishing company.
I love that we make things that help teachers teach and children learn.
And I love that we still make physical books with covers and pages.
Don’t get me wrong, the digital learning tools, kits and online resources we put out are amazing, and I think they add such an important dimension to our elementary school textbooks, secondary school textbooks and everything in between.
But for book junkies like me, there’s nothing like a book hot off the press, as it were. Opening a new book for the first time is a sensory experience. The first crackles of the adhesive in the spine as I flip open the cover. The feel of the crisp, new pages as I rifle through them, and the smell. Oh, that printing press smell. You’d laugh at us here because we all do it. We get in a new high school science textbook, for example, and the first thing we do is stick our noses in it to get a whiff of the fresh ink on the new paper. And I’d hazard a guess that you’d find employees at any other educational textbook publisher doing the same thing.
This has been a lifelong thing for me. As a child, my mom always wanted me to get books from the library. Okay, fine, I did, and I love the library, but I wanted to own the book, to keep the book, to watch my books line up on my bookshelves like a literary growth chart, showing me where I’d been and where I might be going. My son has inherited this from me. He told me once when I was ranting about the mess in his room, that I could, “get rid of everything but my football, my baseball glove, and my books.” I almost took him up on it. It’s no wonder I ended up at a school textbook publisher, my love of books brought me here. I wonder where his love of books will lead him.
Kendall Hunt Publishing Company (KH) is an educational publishing company with three divisions: Pre-K-12, higher education and Kendall Hunt Professional.
I work in the Pre-K-12 Division. We produce programs for pre-kindergarten as well as textbooks for elementary school, middle school and high school. We work in various disciplines, but concentrate mainly on mathematics, science, gifted education books and custom publishing. We also develop various ancillary materials to go with our textbooks to create solution-based programs.
For this series of discussions, I'll concentrate specifically on the development of a high school science textbook.
Acquisition and Publishing Plan
The initial step for the education textbook publisher is the acquisition of a new product. This would include discussions between the author or curriculum developer and the publishing acquisition editor to determine whether or not it is feasible to go forward with new product. This would include discussions on the physical specifications of the book (size, number of colors, number of pages, etc.) and number of ancillary components (teacher edition textbook, test generator, website, and so on). At KH, the acquisitions editor would work with a project manager to determine a budget. We would also work with marketing and sales personnel to develop a publishing plan. The publishing plan may include review stages and/or field testing. The project manager would also create a schedule for the program.
Step 1a: Development of the Manuscript and Art Package
Once a contract is signed for a project, we begin with manuscript development. The project manager works with the author to ensure the manuscript and art package is being prepared properly. We may have the author work within a template in Word or just directly in Word or a similar word processing program. The art package needs to be kept separate from the Word document. One mistake new authors sometimes make is that they try to make their manuscript "pretty." That's our job! We want our authors to concentrate on the writing and we'll concentrate on the publishing.
The high school science textbook is usually submitted by batches of chapters. The chapters are then run through a safety check to be sure the experiments are safe and to add any cautions or warnings that may be needed. They would also develop a materials list for the kit component of the program.
We would also have the manuscript copy-edited. A copy-editor reads the manuscript and checks grammar, spelling and sentence structure. They may also cross reference the student and teacher editions and any other ancillary components to be sure everything makes sense. They will also watch for consistency in the writing style and may be asked to adjust the sentence structures to lower a a certain reading level, if needed. The terms within the content will also play a role in the reading levels. We would have authors review and approve the copy-edits.
At the same time the manuscript is being developed, we work with designers to create the cover and interior designs. I'll discuss that more in my next submission.
I don’t know about you, but when I was in school, there was no such thing as talented and gifted resources, gifted education books, or, for that matter, talented and gifted education. We had accelerated courses, but those were more about working a grade level ahead, using a high school biology book in 8th grade, or using middle school books in 5th grade, rather than the textbooks for elementary school.
What type of accelerated learning resources is your school using? Do you have a budget for books for gifted students? At my son’s school, the gifted teacher does a wonderful job of creating projects for the children using ideas of her own because she doesn’t have a budget. But I think about how much easier her job would be and how much more robust the program could be if she had a budget to purchase a curriculum for high ability learners.
Have you checked out our gifted and accelerated learning resources lately? Whether it's elementary education books for gifted students or high school science textbooks for accelerated learners, we have something that will meet your needs. One of our partners is the Center for Gifted Education at the College of William & Mary with whom we publish a curriculum for high ability learners that spans the subjects of Language Arts, Science and Social Studies and grades 1-11. Additionally, the program offers teacher resources and lesson plans for gifted and talented. You can find the program 
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