Since 1991 De Lange / Henderson has published fifty-three titles for language arts teachers. We
are a two-teacher company whose materials and methods have arisen
out of our own classroom needs. We began the late 1980’s
by creating materials to address the CAP writing test in Sheri’s
district. When student writing scores rose by a significant percentage
and remained there, other districts began to request training
and materials, and a business was born. Today Resources for
Teaching the New Standards in Writing is in use by more than
5,500 teachers spanning grades 3-12 in more than 400 districts
throughout California and the United States.
To address the advent of standards-based reading
requirements, we created the STARLits series: title-specific literature
units that put research into practice through simple, effective
methods which integrate content requirements of California's
standards and format requirements of multiple choice
testing through the substance of timeless literature.
STARLits offerings are growing rapidly and currently offer support
for more than forty popular titles. Check our site often; we regularly
add titles to the STARLits family.
You may have seen us at conferences sponsored
by CLMS, CATE, CRA, NMSA, NCTE, or CASCD You may have heard Sheri
present at one of the above conferences or in one of numerous
district and county-level in-services. You may have run across
our writing in such publications as the CASCD monograph series, CTB/McGraw-Hill testing,
or Holt, Rinehart, and Winston's Holt Literature and Language
Arts Grades 6-12 for California's 2002 adoption cycle, and
Elements of Literature Grades 6-12 2004 national editions,
or Holt's 2006 Multicultural Reader grades 6-10 for which we served as special contributing authors. However it
is that you have found your way to us, welcome.
With great sorrow we announce that Flo Ota De Lange died in January 2008. It was sudden, completely unexpected. We, her family, are still reeling. Flo wrote the biographical information below. It has been minimally updated.
"A writer is somebody for whom
writing is more difficult than it is for other people." - Thomas Mann
James Agree wrote, “In every child
who is born, under no matter what circumstances, and no matter
what parents, the potentiality of the human race is born again,
and in [them], once more, and of each of us, our terrific responsibility
toward human life.”
Flo Ota De Lange was a former teacher with a thirty year concurrent career in psychotherapy.
Retired after a decades long study of learning processes
in children and adults with a dedicated emphasis on literature
as a boat that enables us to cross the abyss separating us from
ourselves, she embarked on a third career as a full-time
writer and did so in partnership with Sheri Henderson from 1991 to 2007.
In her years of one-to-one involvement with people,
she saw no stronger psychological impulse in either children or
adults than the desire to define oneself, lest others assume the
power to explain us. Consequently, her primary writing focus centered
on what is termed ethnic diversity, inclusive of aardvarks to
zwieback and Sheri in the in-betweens.
Sheri is currently considering how to reshape the future of the company. In the meanwhile, Flo's legacy continues through her writing, her art work, and her astonishing garden. Click
here to see it (and yes, she did it
all. Herself. Even those rock walls...from that wheelchair.) It always gave her great pleasure to see that others had found their way to her garden site, so please do take a few moments to enjoy it when you can do so. And if you happen to be in the Orange County area on the first weekend in May, we open the garden for charity every year. You can access that information through Flo's site as well.
Sheri Henderson offers
more than twenty-eight years' experience in education: as a California research practitioner, writer, speaker, consultant,
and, for nineteen of those years, a full-time middle school language arts teacher. Her classroom assignments have
included all levels of instruction in language arts and reading,
and she has served extended terms in multiple teacher support
roles: English department chair, school-site council coordinator,
writer/coordinator of twenty-two grants totaling in excess of
one million dollars, mentor teacher, and more than fifty district,
county, and state level projects.
Offering practical, immediately
usable ideas for solving the challenges real teachers face, Sheri regularly presents through in-services
at site, district, and county levels, statewide and national conferences. You can be assured that Sheri will continue this work.
As to the rest, who knows? It's time to write the next chapter ...
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