My Best Friend Dora is a new book series that aims to celebrate and explore the very special best-friend relationship between Dora and her youngest fans. With simple stories and a softer, more playful art style, these young books invite little explorers to come and enjoy a playdate with their best friend Dora. In this story, Dora invites the reader to come and play schoolhouse with her! Dora and her best friend take turns playing teacher. When Dora is the teacher, she plays games, sings Spanish songs, and offers gold stars to the best students in her class. School is so much fun when your best friend is the teacher! This Nickelodeon Read-Along features audio narration.
Dora and her best friend, Boots, go on more adventures than you can count. Now Dora fans can enjoy many of their favorite Dora stories all in one book! This best-selling collection includes: Dora's Backpack Little Star Happy Birthday, Mami! Meet Diego! Dora Saves the Prince Dora's Treasure Hunt Good Night, Dora!
In this eye-opening book, the first to investigate the explosion of the multibillion-dollar preschool entertainment business and its effects on families, Dade Hayes -- an entertainment expert, author, and concerned father -- lifts the veil on the closely guarded process of marketing to the ultra-young and their parents. Like many parents, Dade Hayes grabbed "me time" by plopping his daughter in front of the TV, relaxing while Margot delighted in the sights and sounds of Barney and the Teletubbies. But when Margot got hooked, screaming whenever the TV was turned off, Hayes set out to explore the vast universe of this industry in which preschoolers devour $21 billion worth of entertainment. Going behind the scenes to talk with executives, writers, and marketers who see the value of educational TV, Hayes finds compelling research that watching TV may raise IQs and increase vocabularies. On the other side, he brings in the voices of pediatricians and child psychologists who warn against "babysitter TV" and ask whether "TV trance" is healthy -- in spite of the relaxation that the lull affords exhausted parents -- as recent studies link early television viewing with obesity, attention and cognitive problems, and violence. Along the way, Hayes narrates the fascinating evolution of Nickelodeon's bilingual preschool gamble, Ni Hao, Kai-lan, from an art student's Internet doodles to its final product: an educationally fortified, Dora-inflected, test audience-approved television show. At the show's debut, jittery experts hold their breath as the tweaked and researched Kai-lan faces Mr. Potato Head in the battle for a three-year-old's attention. Anytime Playdate reveals the marketing science of capturing a toddler's attention, examining whether Baby Einstein and its ilk will make babies smarter, or if, conversely, television makes babies passive and uncritical, their imaginations colonized by marketing schemes before they even speak. It tells us why the raucous Dora the Explorer has usurped Blues Clues for preschool primacy, why the Brit hit In the Night Garden won't follow Teletubbies into American tot stardom, and why the comparatively quiet and wholesome Sesame Street has reigned for decades. Hayes vividly portrays the educators, psychologists, executives, parents, and, lest we forget, kids who have shaped the history of children's television, uncovering the tensions between the many personalities, the creative foment that combines story, music, and message in this medium to produce today's almost dizzying array of products and choices. In the end, Hayes gives readers a provocative but balanced portrait of an age in technological transition, and shows that what's at stake in the "Rattle Battle" is nothing less than the character of the next generation.
There are times when we all feel that no one is listening to us, and no one understands us. In sharing the sorrowful joy and the joyful sorrow of our lives as engaged people we begin to see ourselves in the lives of one another. World Voice: Connected Communities is a snap shot of a small space in time and a select few people that now know "We" are listening. Writers from around the globe share their lives, passions, poetry, stories, spiritual pilgrimages, and their own humanity, while becoming part of the historical record of a burgeoning global society. The World Voice book series has the goal of fostering communication and commonality of all people across borders. In supporting the World Voice series you are making a difference in people's lives by taking part in creating a community where neighbors might become friends, and all people can connect meaningfully to improve the quality of one life at a time with the intention to touch the whole world. So take your place, take a chance, and leave your mark.
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