American Holidays: Exploring Traditions, Customs, and Backgrounds

The 4th of July, Election Day, Christmas, Martin Luther King's Birthday and New Year's Eve: reading about our American national holidays is not only fun, it is a way of exploring our diverse culture and values. How do we celebrate Memorial Day? What is the history of Thanksgiving? What does "Be my valentine" mean? New to this edition are readings on cultural holidays (Chinese New Year, Kwanzaa, and Cinco de Mayo) and on Christian, Muslim, and Jewish religious holidays. Also new in every lesson there are internet research assignments including specific topics and links to interesting sites carefully chosen to get the students started on original, creative web searches for information to be shared with their class. This is a cultural reader. The twenty up-dated readings serve as springboards for conversation and writing. Teachers have reported to us that it works great as the basis for all kinds of creative activities. But it is more than a cultural reader; it's also a vocabulary development text that both focuses on specific words (in bold in the text) and teaches vocabulary acquisition skills. From context, students work out the meaning of the words. Then they match these words to definitions and do exercises introducing them to the noun, verb, adverb, and adjective forms of the words. This is a new edition of one of Pro Lingua's most successful textbooks. If you and your students have been enjoying American Holidays for the last twenty years, don't worry. This is basically the book you've known. However, for twenty years we've been collecting from enthusiastic teachers many suggestions on ways to improve the book. This new, revised edition is the result. Thanks!