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Mariah and Justin presented us with a really personal anniversary gift that captures the essence of the Yardley home and philosophy. They redid the focus wall in our great room with a picture montage that really captures our twin ideologies of the importance of family and literacy.
We haven't got all of the pictures in the frames yet, but it still ( Read more... )

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My middle school kids are back in the swing of reading and a couple of books (and series) have been getting lots of attention and vampires are center stage.
      Naturally, the Twilight series is extremely popular. I see the covers all over campus. In fact, I keep having to tell kids not to read while they are walking down the hall. (Not an easy ( Read more... )

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     Whew! Back at school this week and I haven't carved out a single minute to write until tonight. 
     Today a colleague handed me this wonderful little picture book while we were discussing the difficulty of teaching inferencing. I found out later that this version of Rose Blanche by Roberto Innocenti is an English translation of the original. ( Read more... )

 Riding the coattails of the stunning success of the original Spiderwick series and the subsequent release of the movie last fall, the publication of this second series was highly anticipated by young fantasy fans. I'm pretty sure libraries as well as parental units snapped up The Nixie's Song by Tony DiTerLizzi and Holly Black thinking it would ( Read more... )

In this intelligent, attractive volume, Who Was First?: Discovering the Americas, Russell Freedman examines the issue of the pre-Columbus exploration of the Americas, and offers both theory and evidence that many cultures including Norse, Chinese, and perhaps even Irish monks preceded European exploration by hundreds, possibly thousands of years. ( Read more... )