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They agreed that "well-crafted arts experiences produce positive academic and social effects" p. In CAPE schools, teams of teachers and teaching artists planned and taught curriculum units that typically integrated a visual art form with an academic subject such as reading or social studies. The results "demonstrated that the low SES children in arts-integrated schools perform better than those in comparison schools in terms of [standardized tests of mathematics and reading] test scores" Deasy, , p. DeMoss and Morris investigated the question of how the arts support cognitive growth in students.
They found that "students from all achievement levels displayed significant increases in their ability to analytically assess their own learning following arts-integrated units," while "no such gains were associated with traditional instructional experiences" , p. Observations of final performances in the arts-integrated units corroborated students' own assessments. Students who had difficulties controlling their behavior and staying on task performed their parts in final events with seriousness and competency. This finding held particularly true for those children hardest to reach by traditional approaches.
These developments could have significant positive effects on students' general cognitive growth over time, particularly if students experience arts-integrated learning in their classrooms on a regular basis. A more recent study demonstrating the benefits of integrating visual arts in the curriculum on young children's cognitive development was reported in the New York Times Kennedy, Third grade students in the Learning through Art program sponsored by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum were found to have "performed better in six categories of literacy and critical thinking skills—including thorough description, hypothesizing, and reasoning—than did students who were not in the program" Kennedy, , p.
In this program, the Guggenheim Museum sends teaching artists to the schools where they collaborate with the teacher for 90 minutes per class one day a week over a or week period, helping students and teachers learn about and make art. Groups of students are also taken to the Guggenheim two or three times in that period to see exhibitions. Posters of artwork can enliven a classroom and be a starting point for enriching conversations. If there are restrictions on displaying such work on the walls, use inexpensive foam core panels that fold out and stand up as the background for a classroom gallery.
Invite children to describe the artwork on the posters and create a story about what is happening in the pictures—what may have happened before and what may happen next. Children can learn how to mix primary colors, discovering the secondary colors that are created when any two primary colors are combined. Children enjoy painting, whether it's finger paint for the youngest students or tempera paint for middle and high school students. Students can do collaborative arts projects, putting together individual pieces into quilts or developing murals.
Lawrence uses art to interpret the history of African Americans who migrated from the South to the North during the early 20th century. Such visual references to historical events bring social studies to life. Photography is another art form that children can learn from an adult, be it a teacher, a teacher's colleague, or a parent. Students can use disposable cameras to select locations, people, and objects from their environment to photograph; the photos can be posted in the classroom "gallery" and discussed or used to build a story, play, or poem.
Photographic "essays" are another way of sharing one's home culture with others. Middle and high school students enjoy "poetry slams" in which they compete to be the best performer of their own poems. Learning songs is another way to experience poetry. From the youngest children's songs of Woody Guthrie to favorite world folk songs to the songs of social justice in the Civil Rights Movement, music illuminates the human condition and makes social studies more memorable. Students can even read plays aloud in the classroom, and later the students themselves can write and perform plays for the class.
Caring for students includes positively influencing their decisions related to their physical well-being. Congress passed the Child Nutrition Act in June , requiring school districts to craft "wellness" policies. Such policies should include goals for nutrition education and ways to increase the physical activity of all students. Educators who are aware of the growing epidemic of childhood obesity and diabetes are alarmed. According to Kleinfield a, p. A1 , "One in three children born in the United States [in ] are expected to become diabetic in their lifetimes, according to a projection by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The forecast for Latinos is even bleaker: Nationally, the growing problem of overweight youngsters affects minority students disproportionately. Childhood Type 2 diabetes, the most common form, is often linked to obesity. In the —04 Child Trends study, Compare their rate to the figure for black males Among girls ages 6—11, the highest percentage In the 12—19 age range, black females were the highest percent of overweight youngsters at Moreover, "Asians, especially those from Far Eastern nations like China, Korea, and Japan, are acutely susceptible to Type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease" Santora, , p.
In addition, they develop Type 2 diabetes at far lower weights than people of other races; at any weight they are 60 percent more likely than whites to contract the disease. Teachers can help to counteract television commercials for fast food, larger portions, sodas, sugary snacks, and sedentary lifestyles that feed childhood obesity and often lead to diabetes, particularly among Asians, Latinos, and African Americans. Unfortunately, "even as health authorities pronounced obesity a national problem, daily participation in gym classes dropped to 28 percent in from 42 percent in , according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention" Santora, , p.
To promote healthier eating habits, teachers can assign research projects comparing the calories in fast foods in various restaurants, soft drinks including diet sodas , breakfast foods, and snacks fried versus baked chips, the nutrition facts about various kinds of microwave popcorn. If each child researches one product, the class can create a chart comparing all of them. A similar class project could ask students to act as detectives, uncovering the amount of high-fructose corn syrup in various products by investigating and recording the information on the ingredients label.
Teachers of older students can show the film Super Size Me , which puts a human face on the effects of fast foods and also contains information about nutritious foods. Teachers interested in making wellness a part of the curriculum can integrate units on the health benefits of food with complex carbohydrates beans and multigrain or whole grain bread compared to highly refined carbohydrates such as white bread and most pastas.
They also might help students investigate why eating apples and other fruits as snacks is healthy as well as delicious; the health benefits of leafy green vegetables; making sandwiches or wraps of roasted vegetables; the higher levels of mercury in larger fish compared to smaller fish; and the benefits of olive oil compared to butter and margarine.
One school district in Texas used the Get FIT Families in Training program for a nine-week summer intervention camp for their students who were overweight. For five days each week, students exercised, ate healthy snacks and lunches, and learned about good nutrition; their parents came to the school one night a week to learn about nutrition to support their children.
The program, developed by Peggy Visio, a dietitian and adjunct professor, also introduced the 5th graders to dancing, kickboxing, yoga, swimming, and volleyball. The benefits of involving parents are clear: Community-based organizations often sponsor summer camps and after-school programs. Taking part in sports; yoga; tai chi; or simple deep, slow breathing also helps reduce stress. Even inviting a well-informed parent or a teacher or a health professional from a local hospital to share information on healthy nutrition, exercise, and stress reduction will positively influence students in this area.
Develop community ties and build community schools. Teachers can explore community schools as models for an educational approach that puts children at the center and addresses cognitive, social, emotional, and physical needs and strengths. Community schools also offer "structured enrichment activities and acknowledge students' need for choice, control, competence, and belonging" p. Community schools open their classrooms to community-based organizations and resources that support children through after-school homework help and enrichment programs as well as supportive programs for parents, such as ESL, GED preparation, parenting courses, and parent and community leadership workshops in the evening.
Some community schools have dental clinics on site; others have nurseries so that teenage mothers can complete school. Some schools in high asthma areas have clinics in the school so students can get assistance and miss less school. Community schools make an array of community resources accessible to support children and families in reaching their potential. The ASCD Commission identified several nonschool factors that influence academic achievement such as nutrition, parent participation in their child's school, time watching television, mobility, and mothers' educational level.
Important, too, is research by McLaughlin and colleagues showing that adolescents who participate regularly in community-based youth development programs—including arts, sports, and community service—have better academic and social outcomes as well as higher educational and career aspirations than other teens. Chicago, Illinois, has one of the largest community school initiatives in the United States.
Of Chicago's schools, now operate as community schools. They serve an average of 15, students and their families each year. A study by Blank and Berg , p. In Indianapolis, Indiana, a community high school started in now has 49 community partners. These organizations offer mental and physical health consultation, day-care and after-school programs, college preparation, and adult education programs.
Their students' standardized test scores have risen 10 to 15 points every year since the program began. The sophomores tested in outscored those in all the traditional high schools in Indianapolis. Incorporate multiple forms of assessment. In recent years, standardized testing has been used to drive school reform, with decidedly mixed results.
Multiple indicators of academic performance and progress on schoolwork throughout the year should be a part of this approach. Valenzuela and colleagues suggest an approach that would take into account: The use of standardized testing alone tends to focus on output, neglecting the other two dimensions. Students who live in communities of poverty often do not have the access to resources or highly qualified teachers that students in wealthier districts do. Thus, they are far from experiencing equal educational opportunity.
Among many others, Hodgkinson has suggested that the focus of the current high-stakes standardized testing system is too narrow: An additional problem involves the heavy preoccupation with reading and math readiness skills and abilities in the early years of schooling. While these skills are obviously important, factors that are less focused on academics, such as self-confidence, resilience, caring, emotional development, and supportive family members may be just as important.
Literature Themes and Activities for Grades 48 Jean E Brown, Elaine C. Stephens. 0 An understanding of cultural and ethnic heritage helps us to recognize the. Teaching Young Adult Literature: Sharing the Connection (Education). $ Paperback. Exploring Diversity: Literature Themes and Activities for Grades
One of the hidden agendas here is that educational success will be defined by the student's ability to take standardized multiple-choice tests. Half of the elementary schools in Fairfax County, Virginia, are evaluating their kindergartners using an page report card, assessing language, reading, writing, math, science, social studies, health, movement, art, and music as well as social and emotional development. Rather than checkmarks for "sometimes," "usually," and "consistently," parents are encountering terms such as "pre early emergent," "early emergent," "emergent," and "novice.
They will need some help to understand the difference between seeing an "A" on their child's report card and looking at a child's stage of development, regardless of the advantage of getting a better feeling of what students are really learning. Unless parents are prepared for this change, the desirable shift to see learning as growth, using a variety of clinical and statistical measures, may not catch on.
The Just for the Kids Study of Best Practices NCEA, also noted that "all of the high-performing schools we visited draw data from multiple assessments and use those data to inform every decision. In addition to the outcome skills of reading and mathematics, most of us want our students to develop such habits of mind as questioning, observing closely, making connections, creating meaning, valuing their experience, identifying patterns, exhibiting empathy, and evaluating their own work.
Students become more aware of these capacities when they are identified, discussed, and assessed. Lincoln Center Institute has developed an assessment tool to assess habits of mind that are not measurable through standardized tests. Looking to the year history of philosophy and practice at the institute, Madeleine Fuchs Holzer developed definitions for nine capacities for imaginative learning. For example, she defined "creating meaning" as creating interpretations on the basis of previous capacities such as questioning, noticing deeply, identifying patterns, and making connections , seeing these in light of others in the community, creating a synthesis, and expressing it in your own voice Holzer, Holzer shared the capacities with faculty from at least eight colleges and numerous elementary and high schools during the Lincoln Center Institute Summer Institute.
She encouraged and received feedback about them and revised the capacities through several iterations. The institute published the definitions of the capacities Holzer, and then asked a consultant, Drew Dunphy, to work with a group of teachers from the High School for Arts, Imagination and Inquiry in New York City to develop rubrics for the capacities. There are several advantages to working as a team to develop rubrics.
Teachers can spot gaps in colleagues' efforts and work to strengthen them. In addition, when teachers develop and own an assessment instrument, students' goals and outcomes become more consistent. By identifying the development of these capacities as their goal, teachers let students know that they value the expression of these innate qualities of thought and emotion. Another assessment that engages students in the process is the use of portfolios. Teachers and students can develop portfolios containing samples of their classwork and teacher-made tests over the year.
Asking students to review their portfolios bimonthly and select the best examples of their work for that time period coaches them in self-assessment and enables them to see their progress. The teacher can share these portfolios on parents' night to show how students are doing. In addition, if students don't perform well on a standardized test used in a high-stakes event, such as promotion to the next grade, their work samples could also be used to show that they are ready for the next grade.
The term "linguistically and culturally diverse students" encompasses a vast array of young people. As President John F. Kennedy famously suggested, America is a "nation of immigrants.
Now that so many dual-language bilingual programs have been in place for the past 20 years, however, we can see that coming to a school that supports becoming bilingual and biliterate can actually be an advantage. As the world becomes more economically interdependent, the advantages of bilingualism and cross-cultural understanding are better understood. According to the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, the number of high school students who are enrolled in foreign language programs in public high schools has grown steadily from —when 3. Recent research has redefined the nature of how we understand the educational vulnerability of linguistically and culturally diverse students.
Stereotypes and myths have begun to give way, laying a foundation on which to reconceptualize existing educational practices. Current thinking emphasizes the value of speaking more than one language.
Rather than being considered "disadvantaged" as speakers of a language other than English, such students are now being considered potentially bilingual and biliterate. The first language L1 is now considered a base on which English language learners ELLs can build "additive" bilingualism learning a second language [L2] while becoming literate in their first language and eventually literate in both.
Teachers wishing to see evidence of the effectiveness of various programs for ELLs should be aware of the work of Thomas and Collier , who conducted the most comprehensive longitudinal research study to date on the long-term academic effectiveness of eight different K—12 programs for language-minority students, as well as English monolingual students who participate in two-way immersion also called dual-language programs. Thomas and Collier researched English as a second language ESL , transitional bilingual education, developmental bilingual education DBE , one-way one group learning bilingually and two-way two groups learning each other's language as a second language bilingual programs, as well as the placement of ELLs in mainstream classes.
Their report of their study from to covers six sites in the United States. In researching more than , student records each year, they converted standardized test scores into normal curve equivalents and percentages. They found the following highlights. Enrichment [90 percent instruction in L1 and 10 percent in L2] and one-way and two-way developmental bilingual education DBE programs or dual-language, bilingual immersion are the only programs … found … that assist [English language learners] to fully reach the 50th percentile in both L1 and L2 in all subjects and to maintain that level of high achievement, or reach even higher levels through the end of schooling.
The fewest dropouts come from these programs. The research findings of this study indicate that ESL or bilingual services, as required by Lau v. Nichols , raise students' achievement levels by significant amounts. ELL students who attend remedial, segregated programs do not close the achievement gap after being placed in mainstream classes. Instructional gains are best accomplished in an enrichment, not a remedial, program, Thomas and Collier observed.
They cautioned against short-term bilingual education one to three years. They found that it takes a minimum of four years of bilingual schooling or four years of schooling in a student's L1 in the home country and four years in bilingual programs for students to reach grade-level performance in English the 50th percentile on the subtest of reading in English.
Thus the most efficient schooling is in dual-language programs where both L1 and L2 are learned simultaneously and students have the opportunity to talk with students fluent in that L2. Thomas and Collier found that the strongest predictor of student achievement in English L2 was formal L1 schooling in either the home country or the host country United States.
Schools need to create a natural learning environment in school, with lots of natural, rich language L1, L2 , both oral and written, used by students and teachers; meaningful, "real world" problem-solving; all students working together; media-rich learning video, computers, print ; challenging thematic units that get and hold students' interest; and using students' bilingual-bicultural knowledge to bridge to new knowledge across the curriculum.
Because one of the goals of bilingual programs in the 21st century is to prepare students to be proficient bilingually in the workplace, Thomas and Collier , p. Native-English speakers in two-way bilingual immersion programs maintained their English, added a second language to their knowledge base, and achieved well above the 50th percentile in all subject areas on norm-referenced tests in English.
These bilingually schooled students equaled or outperformed their comparison groups being schooled monolingually, on all measures. In addition, the L2 academic achievement of older immigrant arrivals with strong grade-level schooling completed in L1 in the home country was less influenced by low socioeconomic status and more dependent on number of years completed.
Likewise, students of low socioeconomic status who were born in the U. Today, educators prefer that students develop linguistic facility in both English and their home language, rather than learn English only and lose the home language, only to have to relearn a second language later in their school years. Research shows that students' cognitive development proceeds more readily in their native language and that students learn content more easily in the native language while they are learning English as a second language.
An interdisciplinary approach to curriculum—breaking from many decades of separation among the various disciplines—is a powerful ally in teaching culturally and linguistically diverse children. Instead of teaching reading as a separate subject, for instance, teachers now view reading as a process for learning concepts and exploring subjects and their connections. Cooperative learning groups and peer tutoring work well in conjunction with computer-mediated language learning.
And parents are partners in their children's schooling, as well as resources for teachers in understanding young people's cultural patterns of communication and interaction. The following strategies synthesize the approaches that research emphasizes as most promising in raising the achievement levels of linguistically diverse students. Establish truly bilingual classrooms. Students who come to school with a home language other than English learn more from programs in which their native language is one of the languages of instruction.
By continuing to learn subject content in their native language, the students do not fall behind in their academic subjects while acquiring English. Potentially bilingual students who are in developmental or late-exit bilingual programs for five years seem to progress at a faster rate in subjects presented in English than do their counterparts in early-exit bilingual programs. When potentially bilingual students continue to learn in their home language while learning English, they continue to develop cognitively and acquire skills such as reading that can later be transferred to English.
Once they have learned vocabulary in English, they can comprehend what they decode. The context of learning is more difficult if instruction is entirely in a student's second language. Students taught solely in the second language also risk losing the opportunity to become bilingual and biliterate. A school that respects the language and culture of its ethnically and linguistically diverse students and their parents or guardians develops educational situations that maximize the resources these students bring to school.
Instead of being confused and distressed by trying to cope in a language they cannot understand, students continue to learn content and skills and develop a feeling of efficacy as well as belonging to their new school. If the school context does not allow for this linguistic and cultural diversity, students are more likely to feel alienated and confused.
When the number of students in a school who speak the same language merits the establishment of a bilingual program, encouraging young people to learn content in their native language while learning English as a second language is likely to increase overall learning. Students can learn subjects such as mathematics, science, and social studies in their native language until they have learned sufficient English to study the academic content in English.
With the help of such programs as Logo-Writer, students can use computers to do programming and word processing in their native language. In one 6th grade classroom, for example, new immigrant students compared dwellings around the world. They saw photographs of different types of dwellings and learned that cultural responses to different ecological systems were one of the reasons for differences among earlier cultures. Igloos were adaptations to their environment just as the adobe "apartments" of Native Americans in the southwestern United States were adaptations to theirs.
The builders of both types of dwellings used available resources. Using Spanish, students learned to program geometrical shapes to represent igloos and Anasazi dwellings. They also wrote about the structures in Spanish. Students proficient in languages other than English learn more effectively in dual-language learning situations. They continue to learn content in their native language while learning English as a second language by interacting with monolingual English-speaking students who are also learning a second language. This approach is valuable for several reasons.
First, young people's native language is affirmed and respected when it becomes a subject being taught to their English-speaking peers. Second, potentially bilingual students can share their native-language expertise as peer tutors to English-speaking students who are learning a second language for enrichment; in the process, they gain experience working in English as well. Third, the long-term gains are greater because, in this additive bilingual strategy, students proficient in languages other than English become bilingual and biliterate.
Fourth, students are not segregated into classes for potentially bilingual students or monolingual English-speaking students; all are integrated and become bilingual over a period of five or six years. In some schools, students spend half the day in an immersion situation, learning content in English, and the other half immersed in learning content in their native language. In other schools, students initially learn specific subjects such as math, art, music, or physical education in English, their second language.
Sometimes, monolingual English-speaking students are immersed in a second language, such as Spanish, with native Spanish speakers. Based on many years of working with scores of two-way immersion programs, Howard and Christian have specific suggestions for implementing two-way immersion bilingual programs. They follow Thomas and Collier and others in suggesting a minimum of four to six years of bilingual instruction.
Even the use of drawing as a teaching device may model for students the effectiveness of nonverbal means of mastering their new language and new culture; this activity may lead to the use of drawing as a tool for peer tutoring. Author's notes are particularly valuable. Such teachers avoid repetitive rote learning; instead, they involve young people in novel problem-solving activities. Nationally, while close to 30 percent of students do not graduate, only " After Ethan loses his best friend, Kacey, his family moves to a small town in Georgia. Students also were asked to develop a new perspective by getting inside the minds and emotions of the literary characters being studied and saying what they might say.
They advocate two possible approaches: Howard and Christian also suggest other teaching practices including constructivist, child-centered, active discovery learning. Cooperative learning offers students opportunities for conversations in both languages if the groups are structured to include equal numbers of native speakers of both L1 and L2.
Cooperative learning is also an opportunity to develop cross-cultural understanding. Teachers can enhance the learning of a second language by structuring informal situations in which students who are proficient in languages other than English act as peer tutors for monolingual English-speaking students learning a second language and vice versa. Second-language learning for both groups is enhanced when they can communicate informally at certain times during the school day in their second language.
This alternative social organization of learning a second language does not rely solely on the teacher as the locus of teaching. Students become teachers and resources for one another; second-language learning is reciprocal. Students learning Spanish as a second language, for example, can be encouraged to use the language in functional situations.
Younger students can learn aspects of Latino cultures by using recipes in Spanish to cook Mexican, Dominican, and Puerto Rican dishes. Or they can learn about the music of each culture by learning to sing songs in Spanish. Older students can learn about the rain forests in Central and South America; they might, as one example, graph the number of medicines derived from plants in this ecosystem.
Use integrated, holistic approaches to language experiences for second-language learners instead of rote drill and practice. Rote drill and practice are boring and lack meaning for young people; holistic experiences are much more engaging. For example, students can use language-experience approaches to learn science in English. In doing so, they connect doing and observing an experiment to speaking, writing, and reading.
Because their oral language is written down for later reading, they can understand what they read, and their reading has meaning. To be competent in communicating, students need to go beyond simply mastering the rules of grammar. They also must learn how to apply social and cultural rules. Students learning a second language must learn, for example, that the informal language used with peers and friends may not be appropriate in more formal situations, such as making a request of a teacher or answering questions during a job interview.
Students must learn how to take turns in a conversation, when to talk and keep still, how to "demonstrate" listening, and when to be direct or indirect. These culturally appropriate ways of speaking can be learned when students hear stories, see dramas, read books with dialogue, and write and act out plays. As previously discussed, instructional conversation is an extended dialogue that is educational and relevant to students' lives.
Tharp and colleagues advocate a holistic approach that employs all five standards, including: The teacher begins reading a children's story by first showing the illustrations and asking the students to describe them. After reading the story, the teacher asks a student to retell it. Subsequently, the teacher may ask the students to write the story as a play with a different ending or to write a continuation of the story.
This technique helps young people see the connection between writing and reading. The teacher asks students to break into groups of five. Each group is responsible for writing and illustrating a story. Group members must first negotiate who will do which tasks in English, then which events to illustrate. They must agree on the sequence of events and number them sequentially. One way of structuring this activity is to provide pages labeled "main characters," "problem to be solved," "first event," "second event," "third event," and "resolution of problem.
High school students can be assigned to watch one scene of a play that takes place in the culture they are learning about. They then form groups and write the scene as they recall it. After the groups respond to one another's efforts and refine the dialogue perhaps by referring to the video of the play , they act out the scene.
A subsequent assignment might call on them to change the role and status of one of the characters and decide how that character would speak: What might he or she say differently? How would the other characters respond? The students can then act out the scene, using the same basic content but saying things in a different way to someone with a different social role. Students can also imagine real-life situations in which they might find themselves and act out the parts of different speakers, alternating in social roles.
They can get feedback from peers who are members of the linguistic group they are studying. Teach language through subject matter rather than specific linguistic skill exercises. The learning of language cannot be separated from what is being learned. Too often, students with limited proficiency in English are required to learn the abstract or grammatical aspects of language as opposed to the functional and communicative aspects. These more important functional skills are best developed in conjunction with the learning of content. When students learn a second language in a functional way similar to the way they learned their first language , the process has real meaning.
Learning makes sense and is more interesting. Students also benefit by learning cross-cultural skills. Learning greetings in a second language, for example, as well as the "polite" behavior associated with that language enables young people to communicate more easily in a new culture. Learning how to request food at a dinner table requires basic grammar and polite behavior. Students can go on to discuss how polite behavior differs in different cultures and what "polite" means in the classroom among friends, in a restaurant, and in the school cafeteria.
Instead of removing students from a content lesson in mathematics because they are not yet proficient in English, the teacher can pair bilingual and monolingual students in small groups and provide math-related tasks within those groups. Bilingual students will assist the monolingual students in completing these tasks while providing natural models of language development within the content domain.
Returning from a summer spent with their mother in California, Delphine and her sisters settle back into life with their father, grandmother, and uncle. In addition to the usual family drama, Delphine has to deal with life as a sixth grader and copes by pouring her heart out in letters to her mom. A lovely story of a young Pakistani-American girl successfully navigating relationships with friends, family, and her faith community. Especially relevant in a time when minorities in the US are feeling victimized, this story highlights the value of diversity and the commonalities we all share.
Charlie, an autistic boy who struggles to understand the world, travels across the country with his family to seek medical treatment for his injured father. His ordinary life disrupted by this family crisis, Charlie holds on to what he can to make sure everything turns out okay. After Ethan loses his best friend, Kacey, his family moves to a small town in Georgia.
There he meets Coralee, a girl with a big personality and big stories to tell.
But is she be keeping a secret that could put them both in danger? Kate DiCamillo, one of our favorite middle grade authors, never disappoints. Love her as much as we do? Nine children live on an idyllic island where life is perfect, except for the one day each year when a boat arrives. Called the Changing, this is the day when a new child arrives to join the group and another is taken away.
How will Jinny cope when her best friend is taken away and she is appointed the new elder? A wonderful story told in a blend of prose and poetry. When Reena moves with her family to Maine, the last thing she expects is to have to work hard on a farm and form an unlikely friendship with an ornery cow named Zora.
A moving story of two friends who are caught in a war-torn world. When the army begins to recruit children, will Mathilde lose her best friend Megs? The fantastical story of a girl who finds friendship in the unlikeliest of companions—a young member of the Bigfoot clan. From building a tree house and mastering the art of skipping stones to learning about the history of pirates, this book is an essential catalog of old-fashioned skills and knowledge.
Tackling topics from karate moves and math tricks to all manner of creative pursuits, The Daring Book for Girls is a comprehensive manual of skills and knowledge that every child should master. Provide feedback about this page. There's a problem loading this menu right now. Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime. Get to Know Us. English Choose a language for shopping. Amazon Music Stream millions of songs. Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon. Alexa Actionable Analytics for the Web. AmazonGlobal Ship Orders Internationally.
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