Ahmed is a poor orphan boy who lives with a travelling circus, working for cruel Madame Saleem, the circus-owner. But his life is changed when he finds a beautiful egg in the forest, and brings it back to the circus. From the egg hatches a child, a little girl called Aurelia, a child who, as she grows, sprouts soft feathers that turn into wings. But Madame Saleem keeps Aurelia in a cage, to be her top attraction at the circus, and never lets her out. Ahmed knows he must free Aurelia the Feather Girl from her cruel cage or she will die. One night he creeps into Madame Saleem's caravan, takes the key to Aurelia's cage and lets her fly free. Now Ahmed's life becomes even harder, as the circus-owner takes revenge for losing her star attraction. But one night Aurelia comes to him in a dream and brings him a feather... and Ahmed begins to hope again. Dreams and memories are the key in this beautiful and fantastic tale of magic, enchantment and freedom from a master storyteller and illustrator of children's books.

Life as Zeba knows it could be over for good . . . Zeba Khan is like any other sixteen-year-old girl: enjoying herself, waiting for exam results . . . and dreaming of the day she'll meet her one true love. Except her parents have other plans. In Pakistan for the summer, Zeba's world is shattered. Her future is threatened by an unthinkable - and forced - duty to protect her father's honour. But does she hold the secrets that will help her escape? ** Sufiya Ahmed's stunning debut teenage book explores the illegal practice of forced marriage in Britain. ** 10 million under 18s in the world become child brides every year. ** The UK government's Forced Marriage Unit (FMU) receives over 1,700 calls from at-risk annually. Up to 15% of victims of forced marriage are male.

Written by an experienced teacher and literacy consultant, More Planning to Teach Writing offers an easy to use, tried and tested framework that will reduce teachers’ planning time while raising standards in writing. Using the circles planning approach, it provides fresh inspiration to teachers who want to engage and enthuse their pupils, with new, exciting, and varied hooks into writing, including modern and classic picture books, short stories, and novels. Exploring how best to use baseline assessment to build upon children’s writerly knowledge and skills, each chapter puts the needs and interests of pupils at the forefront of planning and models how to design units of work that will lead to high-quality writing outcomes in any primary classroom. The book uses a simple formula for success: Find your students' gaps in learning. Choose a hook that you know will engage your students. Select a unit plan that you know will support you to get the best writing out of your students. Tailor it to your students. Teach it! With a brand new and fantastic range of hooks to inspire teaching and learning, More Planning to Teach Writing ensures successful planning that will maximise engagement, enjoyment, and achievement. This book is an accessible and necessary resource for any teacher planning to teach writing in their classroom.

I've known you since you started. I've seen a thing or two . . . . . . or three or four or five or six! In fact, I've seen a few . . . Sometimes we are loud, sometimes we are quite, sometimes bold and clanky, sometimes soft and cuddly. Sophy Henn celebrates all the different, extraordinary and sometimes contradictory things we are in this joyful and colourful rhyming picture book. Perfect to read aloud - and then read again, and again!

For fans of Alice Munro and Lorrie Moore. A young girl, renamed Amerika in honour of the US role in the liberation of Kuwait, finds her name has become a barometer of her country's growing hostility towards the West. A middle-aged man dying from cancer looks back on his extramarital affairs and the abiding forgiveness of his wife. The headlines tell of war, unrest and religious clashes. But if you look beyond them you will see life in the Middle East as it is really lived – adolescent love, the fragility of marriage, pain of the most quotidian kind. Mai Al-Nakib's luminous stories unveil the lives of ordinary people – and the power of objects to hold extraordinary memories.

Today's students need to be able to do more than score well on tests—they must be creative thinkers and problem solvers. The tools in this book will help teachers and parents start students on the path to becoming innovative, successful individuals in the 21st century workforce. The children in classrooms today will soon become adult members of society: they will need to apply divergent thinking skills to be effective in all aspects of their lives, regardless of their specific occupation. How well your students meet complicated challenges and take advantage of the opportunities before them decades down the road will depend largely upon the kind of thinking they are trained and encouraged to do today. This book provides a game plan for busy librarians and teachers to develop their students' abilities to arrive at new ideas by utilizing children's books at hand. Following an introduction in which the author defines divergent thinking, discusses its characteristics, and establishes its vital importance, chapters dedicated to types of literature for children such as fantasy, poetry, and non-fiction present specific titles and relevant activities geared to fostering divergent thinking in young minds. Parents will find the recommendations of the kinds of books to read with their children and explanations of how to engage their children in conversations that will help their creative thinking skills extremely beneficial. The book also includes a case study of a fourth-grade class that applied the principles of divergent thinking to imagine innovative designs and come up with new ideas while studying a social studies/science unit on ecology.

Tracing the development of African American political though since the 1960s, The Making of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement offers a new look at the contemporary legacy of the civil rights movement.