Calabash Cat, a West African cat, sets out one day to find where the world ends. His adventures take him across a desert, grasslands, a jungle, and the ocean, until he finds what he is looking for. Illustrated in the style of the calabash engravers of the country of Chad, James Rumford’s original tale will keep you thinking long after you have closed the covers of this book—about our one world, and about seeking knowledge and finding wisdom.
Read Pam Allyn's posts on the Penguin Blog The books to read aloud to children at the important moments in their lives. In What to Read When, award-winning educator Pam Allyn celebrates the power of reading aloud with children. In many ways, books provide the first opportunity for children to begin to reflectively engage with and understand the world around them. Not only can parents entertain their child and convey the beauty of language through books, they can also share their values and create lasting connections. Here, Allyn offers parents and caregivers essential advice on choosing appropriate titles for their children—taking into account a child’s age, attention ability, gender, and interests— along with techniques for reading aloud effectively. But what sets this book apart is the extraordinary, annotated list of more than three hundred titles suitable for the pivotal moments in a child’s life. With category themes ranging from friendship and journeys to thankfulness, separations, silliness, and spirituality, What to Read When is a one-of-a-kind guide to how parents can best inspire children through reading together. In addition, Pam Allyn includes an indispensable “Reader’s Ladder” section, with recommendations for children at every stage from birth to age ten. With the author’s warm and engaging voice throughout, discussion questions to encourage in-depth conversations, as well as advice on helping kids make the transition to independent reading, this book will help shape thoughtful, creative, and curious children, imparting a love of reading that will last a lifetime. These Penguin Young Reader's Books are referenced in What to Read When Sylvia Jean: Drama Queen by Lisa Campbell Ernst (Penguin Young Reader’s Group: 2005) Two Is For Twins, by Wendy Cheyette Lewison, illustrations by Hiroe Nakata (Penguin Young Readers: 2006) Remember Grandma? by Laura Langston (Penguin Group (USA): May 2004) Soul Looks Back in Wonder compiled by Tom Feelings (Puffin Books) Time of Wonder by Robert McCloskey (Penguin Books USA, Incorporated: December 1957) When I was Young in the Mountainsby Cynthia Rylant illustrated by Diane Goode (Penguin Young Readers Group: January 1993) Nana Upstairs and Nana Downstairs by Tomie DePaola (Puffin Books, an imprint of Penguin Books, Inc.:1973) Good Night, Good Knight by Shelly Moore Thomas, illustrations by Jennifer Plecas (Penguin Young Readers Group: 2002)
Librarians and educators can shake up storytimes, help children stay healthy, and encourage a lifelong love of reading with Dietzel-Glair’s easy-to-use resource. Demonstrating exactly how to use children’s books to engage preschool-age children through movement, it’s loaded with storytimes that will have children standing up tall, balancing as they pretend to walk across a bridge, or even flying around the room like an airplane. Presenting hundreds of ideas, this all-in-one book is divided into six sections: “Art” spotlights titles that are natural hooks for art or craft activities alongside ideas on how to create art just like the character in the story, while an appendix includes art patterns that can be used as coloring sheets; “Games” includes searching games, follow-the-leader games, and guessing games to enhance the books in this section; “Movement” features books that kids can jump, stomp, clap, chomp, waddle, parade, wiggle, and stretch with; “Music” chooses books perfect for activities like shaking a maraca, singing, dancing between the pages, and creating new sound effects; “Playacting” lets kids pretend along with the characters in these books, whether it’s washing their face, swimming with fish, or hunting a lion; “Props” encourages storytime leaders to bring out their puppets, flannelboard pieces, and scarves—these books have enough props for everyone in the program to have a part. Each chapter includes as much instruction as possible for a wide range of motions. Pick and choose the amount of movement that is right for your storytime crowd, or do it all!
Twenty-eight African cultures are represented here by artifacts created to communicate with ancestors, spirits, and gods, about such issues as health, conception, and determination of guilt or innocence. Issued in conjunction with an April-July 2000 exhibit at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, this catalog contains extensive ethnographic, descriptive, and interpretive text in connection with each of 50 pictured pieces, as well as a 13-page essay about divination in Sub-Saharan Africa (by John Pemberton III) and an introductory essay by LaGamma. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
A compendium of funny feline facts and strange stories even more entertaining than a stuffed mouse on a stick! The relationship between cats and us lower animals cannot be summed up in mere words, but leave it to Uncle John to try anyway. Curl up with the Cat Lover’s Companion, and you’ll explore the unique, amusing, and mysterious side of the common housecat (Felis domesticus). Read about the origins of your favorite breeds, meet some kitty movie stars, and decipher those strange feline mannerisms. Then take a catnap. Then run wildly around your house for no apparent reason. Then read about a cat raised by a gorilla, a cat that uses the toilet (for its intended purpose), and much, much more!
Southeastern Panama is historically the oldest region of continental America. The object of this handbook is to catalogue and describe the several ethnological collections from this region now in the United States National Museum.
The Sacred Door and Other Stories: Cameroon Folktales of the Beba offers readers a selection of folktales infused with riddles, proverbs, songs, myths, and legends, using various narrative techniques that capture the vibrancy of Beba oral traditions. Makuchi retells the stories that she heard at home when she was growing up in her native Cameroon. The collection of thirty-four folktales of the Beba showcases a wide variety of stories that capture the richness and complexities of an agrarian society’s oral literature and traditions. Revenge, greed, and deception are among the themes that frame the story lines in both new and familiar ways. In the title story, a poor man finds himself elevated to king. The condition for his continued success is that he not open the sacred door. This tale of temptation, similar to the story of Pandora’s box, concludes with the question, “What would you have done?” Makuchi relates the stories her mother told her so that readers can make connections between African and North American oral narrative traditions. These tales reinforce the commonalities of our human experiences without discounting our differences.
The landmark history of France and French culture in the eighteenth-century, a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize When the apprentices of a Paris printing shop in the 1730s held a series of mock trials and then hanged all the cats they could lay their hands on, why did they find it so hilariously funny that they choked with laughter when they reenacted it in pantomime some twenty times? Why in the eighteenth-century version of Little Red Riding Hood did the wolf eat the child at the end? What did the anonymous townsman of Montpelier have in mind when he kept an exhaustive dossier on all the activities of his native city? These are some of the provocative questions the distinguished Harvard historian Robert Darnton answers The Great Cat Massacre, a kaleidoscopic view of European culture during in what we like to call "The Age of Enlightenment." A classic of European history, it is an essential starting point for understanding Enlightenment France.
