Material appropriate for intermediate age groups
When his mother is sent to jail in Los Angeles, eleven-year-old Tony goes to live with his forest ranger great-uncle in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where Tony experiences unconditional love for the first time through his friendship with a rescue dog.
“Diamonds for everyone.” That’s what fifteen-year-old Patson Moyo hears when his family arrives in the Marange diamond fields. Soon Patson is working in the mines himself, hoping find his girazi–the priceless that stone that could change his life forever. But when the government’s soldiers comes to Marange, Patson’s world is shattered. Set against the backdrop of President Robert Mugabe’s brutal regime in Zimbabwe, Diamond Boy is the story of young man who succumbs to greed but finds his way out through a transformative journey to South Africa in search of his missing sister, in search of freedom, and in search of himself.
Provides an illustrated collection of maps covering the continents and major nations of the world, detailing cities, landmarks, and cultural icons for each.
Battles, protests, standoffs, strikes. We hear about them all the time. On the surface, a battle and a protest don’t seem to have much in common, but they’re really just two ways of handling a dispute. One uses violence, the other uses signs and picket lines. But both start as a disagreement between two groups of people. Both are conflicts. Since it’s impossible for people to agree on everything all the time, conflicts naturally pop up every day, all over the world. Sometimes they turn into full-blown wars, which can be a lot trickier to understand than the conflicts that pop up in everyday life, but every conflict has some things in common. Using real world examples, Why Do We Fight? teaches kids to recognize the structures, factors, and complex histories that go into creating conflicts, whether personal or global as well as the similarities between both. They’ll be given tools to seek out information, enabling them to make informed opinions while learning to respect that others may form different ones.
We spend most of our lives in buildings. We make our homes in them. We go to school in them. We work in them. But why and how did people start making buildings? How did they learn to make them stronger, bigger, and more comfortable? Why did they start to decorate them in different ways? From the pyramid erected so that an Egyptian pharaoh would last forever to the dramatic, machine-like Pompidou Center designed by two young architects, Patrick Dillon’s stories of remarkable buildings — and the remarkable people who made them — celebrates the ingenuity of human creation. Stephen Biesty’s extraordinarily detailed illustrations take us inside famous buildings throughout history and demonstrate just how these marvelous structures fit together.
This guide to language takes readers on a trip of the tongue, exploring how languages — spoken, written and sign — originate and change over time.
Since the year 1900, cheetah footprints quickly dwindled in African dirt as the species plummeted from more than 100,000 to fewer than 10,000. At the Cheetah Conservation Fund’s (CCF) African headquarters in Namibia, Laurie Marker and her team save these stunning, swift, and slender creatures from extinction. Since the organization’s start in 1990, they’ve rescued more than 900 cheetahs, most of whom have been returned to the wild.
When a Russian billionaire robs the Norwegian Gold Reserve and melts the last remaining gold bar into the Premier Soccer League trophy, it’s up to Doctor Proctor, Nilly, and Lisa to recapture the precious prize. But after a failed break-in attempt at the billionaire’s subterranean gold-melting lab, and with the Norwegian Gold Reserve Inspection in just three days, the only way to retrieve the trophy is to win it back.
Hoping to prevent national panic and uproar, Nilly and Lisa join the Rotten Ham soccer team to try and lead the hopeless underdogs to victory before time runs out. And with the use of Fartonaut Powder, along with a handful of Doctor Proctor’s other wacky inventions, they just might have a chance!
Henry has a clubfoot and he is the target of relentless bullying. One day, in a violent fit of anger, Henry lashes out at the only family he has — his mother. Sent to live with other troubled boys at the Home of Lesser Brethren, an isolated farm perched in the craggy lava fields along the unforgiving Icelandic coast, Henry finds a precarious contentment among the cows. But it is the people, including the manic preacher who runs the home, who fuel Henry’s frustration and sometimes rage as he yearns for a life and a home.
Noble is a knight with a heart that’s true and, well, noble. With his not-so-trusty sword, Smite, he fights his way through a vicious, unfriendly landscape, sure (or at least, he thinks he’s sure) that one day he’ll defeat the bad guys (whoever they are) and win the heart (at least he guesses that’s the idea) of a beautiful princess. Then one day Rufus comes along and turns his world upside down. Rufus has his own ideas about how to get ahead: don’t fight, negotiate! Don’t play by the rules! Suddenly, life is more interesting–and less painful–than ever before. But the new rules are harder to live by than the old ones, and suddenly, it appears possible that Rufus might have an ulterior motive–at the very least.