Happy Anderson
The Happy Anderson Adventure Series and my teaching strageties behind the books are a giant leap forward in helping children learn to read. Written primarily for classroom use because of their interest, these books are now available to all schools, parents and children everywhere, in formats for specific uses.
Through my years of teaching experience, I have become intimately familiar with all grade levels and enjoy creating and implementing programs for students to simplify understanding of what they have to learn. My strategies for every level have been created to help students accelerate, become independent learners, and enjoy their teaching experience at the same time.
When I taught high school students, I she created a department we titled Communications to simplify and enhance the learning of students entering high school with less then optimum skills. When approximately half the students in the program had a PGA of at least a B, even though they had been mainstreamed in ALL classes, the program received recognition, and more students were introduced to strategies. The program was later changed to Strategies, and it is still strong after many years. A teacher manual published by the NCEA explains the events. ( Custureri, Mary ; Maureen Goldstein and Ann Frearson. Strategies: Helping all Students Succeed.: Washington, D.C.: NCEA, 2003)
I created the Happy Anderson series to enable instructors at all levels of experience to easily and quickly adopt these same strategies for learning success. In my presentations, many elementary school teachers asked for a book they could use in their classrooms that was based on my strategies. Mrs. Jane Anderson, a media specialist, whose dog Happy was the inspiration for Dr. Custureri’s stories, lent Happy’s name to the series and helped inspire me to go on. Thus, the Happy Anderson series of adventures began.
When I discovered that the children not only learned from the book but also liked it for the stories themselves, I began to think of all kinds of adventures a dog can get into. Some of the 27 adventure ideas have been inspired from “doggie tales” of my friends, some from newspaper stories, and some from my imagination. Ms. Patricia Folmsbee’s artwork captures the perfect feeling of the childlike atmosphere and appeals to young children, and thus the “hero” has now been adopted by a number of children who have used the books and read them “just for fun.” They also like the coloring books they can print from the CD that comes with the book.
Mr. Ken Christopher, an experienced professional computer guru who has written five books on computer technology, lent his expertise to create the computer programs with interactive exercises on each disk (included with each book), as well as on the web site lectures and handouts.
The Happy Anderson series is published by HighPoint Publishing, Inc and are available for sale on their website.
