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In this issue of the PH Footnotes Newsletter:
Prestwick House at NCTE
 Will you be attending the NCTE Convention this month in Philadelphia? Make sure you stop by booths 334-337 to meet Prestwick House employees, learn more about products, get a Free Literary Touchstone Classic book and a $5.00 off coupon for a Free Downloadable eLesson, and register to win our popular plagiarism sweatshirt!
Free Monthly Lesson from Prestwick House  Click here to download this lesson or view our complete list of past free lessons!
This month's lesson comes from Succeeding: Overcoming the Odds, an inspirational collection of short biographies of people who have defied economic, social, or physical handicaps to achieve success.
This lesson includes:
- An introductory goal-setting exercise
- An inspirational short biography of Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel
- Comprehension and personal response questions to check student understanding
Click here to download this lesson or view our complete list of past free lessons!
30 Days and 30 Nights of Literary Abandon
NaNoWriMo, officially National Novel Writing Month (although in recent years it’s gone international), is an annual project in which participants attempt to write a novel of 50,000 words in a single month—November.
Anyone can enter. Everyone can play. The goal is to write, write, write, not sweat the “quality” (sort of like a month-long freewrite). T he project’s slogan is, “Thirty days and nights of literary abandon!”
The rules are really very simple: novels can be on any theme, in any genre, and in any language. Format and structure are completely up to the author. Metafiction, post-modernist chaos, use of trademarked characters—anything goes. As the NaNoWriMo site says, “If you believe you’re writing a novel, we believe you’re writing a novel too.”
The competition starts on midnight November 1. Beginning November 25, participants can submit their manuscripts to the NaNoWriMo site to be verified for length (minimum of 50,000 words). All “successful” participants receive a PDF certificate, a “web badge,” and inclusion on the site’s “Winners Page.” Everyone who writes at least 50,000 words in the month is a “winner.” The final deadline to submit a manuscript for length verification is 11:59:59 p.m. November 30 (local time).
A Ghost Story for the Ages
 Mr. Magoo did it. So did the Muppets, Mickey Mouse, and Star Trek’s Patrick Stewart. In fact, Stewart did it on television and live on stage in an award-winning one-person performance. Jim Carrey’s doing it right now (in 3D). Matthew McConaughey did it at a wedding, and Henry Winkler did it in Depression-era New England.
It’s been done on bare stages with no set or costumes, in colorful and elaborate period film extravaganzas, in black and white, with puppets and with two-dimensional cartoon figures. It’s been at least two operas, a ballet, no fewer than twenty-one films, and fifty television shows—including episodes of such favorites as Sanford and Son, Sesame Street, The Flintstones, The Odd Couple, Family Ties, and Northern Exposure. (Set during Yom Kippur, the episode was titled “Shofar So Good.”)
It was, however, first (and to many purists like me, first and foremost) a novel. A beloved novel.
It is Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, the extraordinary tale of Ebenezer Scrooge and his Christmas-season visits with the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come.
This Month at The Prestwick Café Blog
Calling All Bloggers!
 For those of you who follow Prestwick House on Twitter and Facebook, you may already know about our initiative to bring new voices to the Prestwick Café Blog. We are looking for teachers, administrators, edtech enthusiasts, teacher advocates, student teachers, and anyone else who is involved in English literature or language arts and loves to write.
Do you have a great story that will help new teachers? Could you write a tutorial on how teachers might use technology in the classroom? Are you interested in sharing your experiences at an educational conference like NCTE? Whether it's three paragraphs or three pages, we'd love for you to share your opinion and insights with our blog readers.
Email annie@prestwickhouse.com for more information or to submit an idea. Prestwick House Employee Cover Model
 This month's cover art is from our Literary Touchstone Classic edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and features Prestwick House Senior Graphic Designer, Jen Mendoza.
You can read more about Jen and this cover shoot in the article section of our website.
Save $25.00 On Christmas Carol Teaching Unit Plus 30 Student Books Set!
 Get your students into the holiday spirit with Dickens's classic A Christmas Carol! Prestwick House makes teaching this title easy and affordable with $25.00 off our Teaching Unit Plus 30 Student Books Package.
Along with a class set of 30 books, our A Christmas Carol Teaching Unit will help you get your students thinking critically about literature. This unit contains a title-specific list of objectives to ensure that by the end of the unit, students have gone beyond basic comprehension to master the critical elements of Dickens's classic work.
After students have completed the unit, a multiple choice and essay test are provided to test whether the objectives have been met.
Regularly $84.69, this class set is marked down to $59.69 and we'll ship it to you within 24 hours. Simply enter coupon code DICKENS to receive your discount.
Coupon code DICKENS is available online only from Nov 15, 2009 through Dec 31, 2009. Limit one coupon per customer. Available exclusively on the A Christmas Carol Teaching Unit + 30 books class set. May not be used in combination with any other offer. |
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