Book

Around The World Through Holidays: Cross Curricular Readers Theatre includes scripts for twelve plays adaptable for any of the reading or performance methods of Readers Theatre presentation. Each play introduces students to a specific world culture by looking at holidays celebrated in that culture. The structure of the book introduces holidays chronologically throughout a calendar year—one play per month. The focus is on literacy and social studies, so the book is not tied to the traditional nine-month school calendar.

Amanda Freebold doesn't know what to do. Her father left three years ago for the new colony of Jamestown, in America, thousands of miles away. All Amanda has to remember him by is a little brass lion's head he gave his family to guard them while he is gone. Now her mother has just died, leaving Amanda to take care of her younger brother and sister.

Do you ever wonder where inventors get their ideas? Benjamin Franklin was one of the most famous inventors in American history, and according to this book he got most of his ideas—the good ones at any rate—from a mouse!

Funny and Wise, Ben and Me is a classic American story that celebrates its sixtieth anniversary in 1999. It has amused generations of young people, and once you've read it and met Amos, the mouse who tells the story, you will never think of Benjamin Franklin, or American history, quite the same way again.

In the 1820s, twelve-year-old Kanah and ten-year-old Patty journey with their family from Vermont, over the Mohawk Turnpike and Ridge Road, to a new farm in western New York State.

Destination Unknown...

Pedro de Salcedo could not have known what adventures lay ahead! His incredible voyage as ship's boy aboard Christopher Columbus' Santa Maria would bring both danger and excitement. Pedro captured his experience between the pages of a journal. If he did not return alive perhaps someone, someday would find it and learn of his incredible journey to the new world.

Chizuko came to visit her friend Sadako in the hospital. She had a piece of gold paper that she had cut into a large square. "Watch!" she said, and she folded the paper over and over, and it turned into a beautiful crane.

"If a sick person folds one thousand paper cranes," Chizuko said, "the gods will grant her wish and make her well again." The girl handed the crane to Sadako. "Here's your first one."

When Steve brings home a time machine he bought for $2.50 at a garage sale, Max is suspicious. "There's no such thing as time travel. Or time machines." Then they both end up in the year 1250 in medieval England—Steve as Sir Robert Marshall and Max as his horse!—and Max must admit the machine works.

Sir Robert soon finds himself in the midst of a duel to the death with the Hampshire mauler, defending not only his honor, but his life. Can Max rescue him? Will the machine return him in time to spare his life? The 20th century never looked so good.

Buildings were weaving in and out. The street pitched like a stormy sea. Bricks were raining down all around him. The ground shook with such violence that Jacob thought the world had come to an end.

It's 1816, and Remembrance Nye and her family are enduring a cold, hard summer in their new home in western New York. There's barely any food, since Papa's crops were destroyed by the late frosts. Mem's mama has never gotten used to their new home and finds it even harder to cope after she gives birth to baby Lily. Papa puts Mem in charge of caring for the baby, her younger brother, and their sick mother. Though Mem tries her best, it's hard to do the chores and watch them every moment. Then the worst happens: One stormy night Mama and Lily disappear.

Since its publication in 2000, hundreds of thousands of children all over the world have read and loved The Breadwinner. By reading the story of eleven-year-old Parvana and her struggles living under the terror of the Taliban, young readers came to know the plight of children in Afghanistan.

The Erie Canal comes to life in this classic children's book, illustrated by award winning artist Peter Spier, to the words of the familiar folk song, "Low Bridge, Everybody down." Enjoy reading and singing this song with your children. Teachers use this book to introduce curriculum subjects and to tell stories about what is happening in the paintings of canal town life. Every child, library and school should have this book.

Native American author and teacher Joseph Bruchac has collected 26 tales from Northeast tribes in this book. Some are gentle and humorous, like "Sunny Wundy's Skipping Stone", about a boy who outwits a stone giant. Others, like "The Origin of Medicine", are darker in tone.

An anthology of contemporary Iroquois writing, edited by Joseph Bruchac.

Eleven-year-old Ohkwa'ri and his twin sister must make peace with a hostile gang of older boys in their Mohawk village during the late 1400s.

Collection of poetry, prose, and pictures by contemporary Iroquois people.