Beth's Basketball Game


Book Description

Beth's Basketball Game in the Little Blossom Stories series uses curriculum based fiction to get children comfortable with reading--and excited about playing basketball. This book uses a combination of sight words and short-vowel words in repetition to build recognition and confidence. Original illustrations help guide readers through the text. Text and format is created by Cecilia Minden, PhD, a literacy consultant and former director of the Language and Literacy program at Harvard Graduate School of Education. Includes phonics and teachers' guide.




They Came to Nashville


Book Description

Marshall Chapman knows Nashville. A musician, songwriter, and author with nearly a dozen albums and a bestselling memoir under her belt, Chapman has lived and breathed Music City for over forty years. Her friendships with those who helped make Nashville one of the major forces in American music culture is unsurpassed. And in her new book, They Came to Nashville, the reader is invited to see Marshall Chapman as never before--as music journalist extraordinaire. In They Came to Nashville, Chapman records the personal stories of musicians shaping the modern history of music in Nashville, from the mouths of the musicians themselves. The trials, tribulations, and evolution of Music City are on display, as she sits down with influential figures like Kris Kristofferson, Emmylou Harris, and Miranda Lambert, and a dozen other top names, to record what brought each of them to Nashville and what inspired them to persevere. The book culminates in a hilarious and heroic attempt to find enough free time with Willie Nelson to get a proper interview. Instead, she's brought along on his raucous 2008 tour and winds up onstage in Beaumont, Texas singing "Good-Hearted Woman" with Willie. They Came to Nashville reveals the daily struggle facing newcomers to the music business, and the promise awaiting those willing to fight for the dream. Co-published with the Country Music Foundation Press




Halving It All


Book Description

The best way to have it all--both a full family life and a career--is to halve it all. That's the message of Francine Deutsch's refreshing and humane book, based on extensive interviews with a wide range of couples. Deutsch casts a skeptical eye on the grim story of inequality that has been told since women found themselves working a second shift at home. She brings good news: equality based on shared parenting is possible, and it is emerging all around us. Some white-collar fathers achieve as well as talk about equality, and some blue-collar parents work alternate shifts to ensure that one parent can always be with the children. Using vivid quotations from her interviews, Deutsch tells the story of couples who share parenting equally, and some who don't. The differences between the groups are not in politics, education, or class, but in the way they negotiate the large and small issues--from whose paid job is "important" to who applies the sunscreen. With the majority of mothers in the workforce, parents today have to find ways of sharing the work at home. Rigid ideas of "good mothers" and "good fathers," Deutsch argues, can be transformed into a more flexible reality: the good parent. Halving It All takes the discussion beyond shrill ideological arguments about working mothers and absent fathers. Deutsch shows how, with the best of intentions, people perpetuate inequalities and injustices on the home front, but also, and more important, how they can devise more equal arrangements, out of explicit principles, or simply out of fairness and love.




A Box of Dreams


Book Description

What if you could see everyone else’s dreams? Sara Barnes has just discovered that she can. And this gift – or curse – will lead her on an extraordinary journey. Follow Sara as her newfound ability leads her into adventures she never imagined. She will hunt down a serial killer, investigate a plot to murder one of her teachers, unravel a conspiracy between a mobster and a corrupt politician and face off against her nemesis: a woman who shares her talent, but uses it to destroy lives rather than save them. And Sara will have to manage all that while finishing college, becoming a doctor and falling in love, too. Here are the first five books of the Dream Doctor Mysteries, along with bonus material created especially for this collection. Included in this set are DREAM STUDENT, DREAM DOCTOR, DREAM CHILD, DREAM FAMILY and WAKING DREAM. In addition, you’ll find the short story BETTY & HOWARD’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE starring Sara’s parents. But most of all, when you open this box of dreams, you’ll find romance, suspense, humor and plenty of heart…




By the Grace of the Game


Book Description

A multi-generational family epic detailing history's only known journey from Auschwitz to the NBA When Lily and Alex entered a packed gymnasium in Queens, New York in 1972, they barely recognized their son. The boy who escaped to America with them, who was bullied as he struggled to learn English and cope with family tragedy, was now a young man who had discovered and secretly honed his basketball talent on the outdoor courts of New York City. That young man was Ernie Grunfeld, who would go on to win an Olympic gold medal and reach previously unimaginable heights as an NBA player and executive. In By the Grace of the Game, Dan Grunfeld, once a basketball standout himself at Stanford University, shares the remarkable story of his family, a delicately interwoven narrative that doesn't lack in heartbreak yet remains as deeply nourishing as his grandmother's Hungarian cooking, so lovingly described. The true improbability of the saga lies in the discovery of a game that unknowingly held the power to heal wounds, build bridges, and tie together a fractured Jewish family. If the magnitude of an American dream is measured by the intensity of the nightmare that came before and the heights of the triumph achieved after, then By the Grace of the Game recounts an American dream story of unprecedented scale. From the grips of the Nazis to the top of the Olympic podium, from the cheap seats to center stage at Madison Square Garden, from yellow stars to silver spoons, this complex tale traverses the spectrum of the human experience to detail how perseverance, love, and legacy can survive through generations, carried on the shoulders of a simple and beautiful game.




Little Blossom Stories (Set)


Book Description

The Little Blossom Stories series uses curriculum-based fiction to ease children into reading. Each book uses decodable text, a repetition of sight words, and vowel sounds to increase readability. Original illustrations help guide readers through the text.




The Together Years


Book Description

This book is not a memoir but a compilation of actual journals that the author kept as her children were born and growing from infants to young adults. It captures the funny sayings of young children we all wish we had written down at the time. It also captures the very real problems of parenting, sibling rivalries, and settling into new neighborhoods. The author writes with her heart and records the ordinary moments so they wont be forgotten. She also writes with a very young voice, and we see her mature along with her children over the fifteen years that this book encompasses.




Conditions


Book Description

Charlie and his grandmother's assistant, Kristine, stand to inherit ten million dollars. The rub is that the old lady stipulated a condition in the will they must marry and remain faithful to each other for one year. Havoc arises when Kris's boyfriend, a man with more muscle than brain, blunders in and Charlie ends up impersonating an Italian speaking gardener instead of a groom. While the battle axe maid and Charlie's greedy sister plot revenge for being cut out of the will, Charlie's lover arrives in a panic and demands to know why Charlie stood him up. Confusion, misinterpretations, hilarious antics and false identities abound, all under the watchful eye of a strict lawyer and his accident prone nephew. Slapstick comedy at its best, this brilliant entanglement of love, greed and lust will make you laugh till you cry.




Foul or Fair?


Book Description

There's more to sports than what occurs during games. Check your social media, listen to sports talk radio, or watch ESPN--there are daily stories of social issues in sports regarding concussions, playing hurt, gambling, Olympics and politics, athletes as social activists, paying college athletes, recruiting violations, academics, youth sports, diversity and gender issues, hazing, athletes' mental health, disabled athletes' rights, sportsmanship, and media coverage. How do these issues affect athletes, fans, and society? Written equally for casual and hardcore fans, this book analyzes social and ethical issues in sports in a lively, journalistic manner, combining quotes from writers, broadcasters, athletes, coaches and others with the author's observations. It shows pros and cons of how sports affect our daily lives and society. While sports inspire and excite us and lead to social change like the civil rights movement, Title IX, and rights of disabled people, controversies surrounding sports can be divisive even as sports work as a uniting factor in society.




School, Family, and Community Partnerships


Book Description

Strengthen programs of family and community engagement to promote equity and increase student success! When schools, families, and communities collaborate and share responsibility for students′ education, more students succeed in school. Based on 30 years of research and fieldwork, the fourth edition of the bestseller School, Family, and Community Partnerships: Your Handbook for Action, presents tools and guidelines to help develop more effective and more equitable programs of family and community engagement. Written by a team of well-known experts, it provides a theory and framework of six types of involvement for action; up-to-date research on school, family, and community collaboration; and new materials for professional development and on-going technical assistance. Readers also will find: Examples of best practices on the six types of involvement from preschools, and elementary, middle, and high schools Checklists, templates, and evaluations to plan goal-linked partnership programs and assess progress CD-ROM with slides and notes for two presentations: A new awareness session to orient colleagues on the major components of a research-based partnership program, and a full One-Day Team Training Workshop to prepare school teams to develop their partnership programs. As a foundational text, this handbook demonstrates a proven approach to implement and sustain inclusive, goal-linked programs of partnership. It shows how a good partnership program is an essential component of good school organization and school improvement for student success. This book will help every district and all schools strengthen and continually improve their programs of family and community engagement.