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Welcome back, teachers!

We've spent our summer working hard to find the best reads, great new themes, and exciting new ways to deliver literature to your students.

This year, you can also look forward to a makeover for the Weekly Reader Website. By the end of November, this landing page will have a new look. As a helpful teaching tool, we hope that you will come here for insight into the issues, as well as supplemental information, tips, and activities.

As always, you can check us out on Facebook for up-to-the-minute updates.

Our blog, Word, will also be receiving an overhaul, enhancing the student-friendly space where readers learn about literature, get writing tips, submit their writing, and have their voices heard. 

If you’re looking to have your voice heard, please ask to join our Teacher Advisory Board. This special group is completely free to join, but you will receive regular newsletters, and we will poll you for what you’d like to see in our pages. Help us make READ the best classroom resource we can be. Email us at read@weeklyreader.com and ask to join.

Now, on to Issue 1, Lost in Lit. This issue celebrates the joy of reading and storytelling. Our Center Stage play is a tale from The Arabian Nights, the original story of a storyteller. Follow the brave Scheherazade has she weaves her tale to spare her life, and the lives of her countrymen.
A note on the text: The Arabian Nights can be confusing to students for two reasons. One, the story-within-a-story format may be hard to follow. And number two, the names! Scheherazade, Schahiar, Schahzaman, Camalzaman, and so on. These names from the far east are uncommon in the US, and it is worth taking some time at the beginning to pronounce them to your students. We think this story is perfect for a read-aloud play. Having students read out loud should clarify who's who in the story. As for the story-within-a-story format, our article "Your Books Are Talking to You" goes in-depth to explain the purpose and the meaning of this plot device.

Our LSI, entitled "Armed and Literate" takes an excerpt from the Italian writer Italo Calvino's famous book If on a winter's night a traveler. Our excerpt allows us to show how description and imagery make any ordinary scene memorable.

For the fiction section, we have taken a new look at an old story, "The Lady or the Tiger" by Frank Richard Stockton. In our version, a young storyteller enthralls an audience with the classic cliffhanger. Electronic Connection: The editors at READ couldn't resist an opportunity to have fun with this classroom staple. Tune into the Word blog on September 8, 9, and 10 for the homespun video endings we’ve invented for this story. We welcome your students to write (or film!) their own versions and send them to us. As always, we'll post our favorites.

In the nonfiction essay "Your Books Are Talking to You," we tackle the topic of meta-fiction. This tricky concept is broken down into its parts. We focus on the different ways of telling a story through narrators. This essay will help students see the big picture when they are reading.

The Writing section features an essay titled "Adventures in Editing." After this issue, your students will be conscious of the different narrative tools used in storytelling. Help them synthesize the information by learning how to go back and make their story the best it can be.

This issue's stories are exciting and adventurous, and we expect it will inspire those qualities in your students' writing. As always, feel free to contact us with questions, comments, ideas, and concerns at read@weeklyreader.com.