Rhyme, rhythm, and music are essential parts of a quality early childhood program. The authors of the perennial favorite, Where is Thumbkin? have created activities children will love to accompany the 250 rhymes and songs in this invaluable new literacy book. Children learn letter recognition, vocabulary, and phonemic awareness while they are singing and rhyming. Each rhyme or song includes theme connections so teachers can easily add literacy and music into their daily plans.
In The Alphabet from Z to A (With Much Confusion on the Way), Judith Viorst once again applies her clear-sighted wit to a subject of universal appeal, turning the traditional alphabet book on its head by going through the alphabet backwards. Viorst's lively verse irreverently demonstrates that the spellings and sounds of our language are often so maddeningly inconsistent -- "blue" and "blew," "chute" and "shoe" -- that, as her exasperated narrator complains, "It could drive you berserk." Aimed at children who already have some facility with language (and at anyone else who likes to play with words), The Alphabet from Z to A is an entertaining and thought-provoking romp through the quirks and quagmires of the English language. Richard Hull's exquisite drawings enrich the text and offer a playful challenge.
In this book, conceptual photographer Wendy Ewald researches the ability of language to create barriers or alliances between groups according to gender, age, and race. In collaboration with different groups of children she created four alphabets: a Spanish alphabet with English-as-Second-Language students in North Carolina, an African-American alphabet with students at an elementary school in Cleveland, a White Girls alphabet at a boarding school in Massachusetts, and an Arabic alphabet with students at a middle school in Queens, New York. The children collaborated with Ewald to create photographs of objects they chose to represent each letter of their alphabets, objects they picked with a particular eye to the cultural nature of the alphabet they were defining. The result is a dynamic, colorful, idiosyncratic, and overwhelmingly cross-cultural lexicography.
Readers of Diary of a Wimpy Kid and The Name of This Book Is Secret will love Cheesie's wacky lists, drawings, and made-up words as he tells the story of the time he became famous! Sort of. In his fourth adventure, Cheesie and his best friend, Georgie, are exploring a construction site when they find a weird-looking . . . thingie . . . sticking out of the muddy ground. Whatever it is, it's very old. And very valuable! Before they know it, Cheesie and Georgie discover they're in possession of an object that dates all the way back to Colonial times. They're instant celebrities! At least at school. Will Cheesie and Georgie hold on to the ancient artifact and the fame it brings, or give it away for the good of all? Only time will tell!
“One of the most satisfying accounts of a great passion that I have ever read.” —Vivian Gornick, New York Times Book Review Mary Norris, The New Yorker’s Comma Queen and best-selling author of Between You & Me, has had a lifelong love affair with words. In Greek to Me, she delivers a delightful paean to the art of self-expression through accounts of her solo adventures in the land of olive trees and ouzo. Along the way, Norris explains how the alphabet originated in Greece, makes the case for Athena as a feminist icon, and reveals the surprising ways in which Greek helped form English. Greek to Me is filled with Norris’s memorable encounters with Greek words, Greek gods, Greek wine—and more than a few Greek men.
Kendra Allen’s first collection of essays—at its core—is a bunch of mad stories about things she never learned to let go of. Unifying personal narrative and cultural commentary, this collection grapples with the lessons that have been stored between parent and daughter. These parental relationships expose the conditioning that subconsciously informed her ideas on social issues such as colorism, feminism, war-induced PTSD, homophobia, marriage, and “the n-word,” among other things. These dynamics strive for some semblance of accountability, and the essays within this collection are used as displays of deep unlearning and restoring—balancing trauma and humor, poetics and reality, forgiveness and resentment. When You Learn the Alphabet allots space for large moments of tenderness and empathy for all black bodies—but especially all black woman bodies—space for the underrepresented humanity and uncared for pain of black girls, and space to have the opportunity to be listened to in order to evolve past it.
The island of Ireland, north and south, has produced a great diversity of writing in both English and Irish for hundreds of years, often using the memories embodied in its competing views of history as a fruitful source of literary inspiration. Placing Irish literature in an international context, these two volumes explore the connection between Irish history and literature, in particular the Rebellion of 1798, in a more comprehensive, diverse and multi-faceted way than has often been the case in the past. The fifty-three authors bring their national and personal viewpoints as well as their critical judgements to bear on Irish literature in these stimulating articles. The contributions also deal with topics such as Gothic literature, ideology, and identity, as well as gender issues, connections with the other arts, regional Irish literature, in particular that of the city of Limerick, translations, the works of Joyce, and comparisons with the literature of other nations. The contributors are all members of IASIL (International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures). Back to the Present: Forward to the Past. Irish Writing and History since 1798 will be of interest to both literary scholars and professional historians, but also to the general student of Irish writing and Irish culture.