"....Jerry Terheyden's narration alternates between the slow pace of a turtle and the bounce of an exuberant spider.... Balloons filing with air and underwater bubbles are among the fitting sound effects." -AudioFile Magazine

Anansi the Spider's plan to trick his friend Turtle into doing all the work while he teaches Anansi to catch fish somehow gets turned around. While Anansi doesn't learn his lesson, he does learn the invaluable skill of weaving.

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.

In 1967, then-unknown writers David Godfrey and Dennis Lee founded a small press they grandly named “The House of Anansi,” after an African trickster spider-god. Their goal was to publish groundbreaking new Canadian work in three core genres: literary fiction, poetry, and topical nonfiction. Forty years later, Anansi is not only going strong but enjoying a fascinating creative renaissance, bolstered by both its important backlist and its renewed commitment to seeking out the best new writers and ideas to publish alongside its established ones. Assembled by award-winning writer Lynn Coady, The Anansi Reader features excerpts from ten of the best books from each decade of the existence of the press, for a total of 40 entries. Samples from Lynn Crosbie's Queen Rat, Northrop Frye's The Educated Imagination, and Kevin Connelly's Drift are among the treasures included. In a thoughtful coda, Coady shows readers the future with selections from seven exciting works-in-progress coming from Anansi in the next two years.

MOTHERLAND SIERRA LEONE ANANSI STORIES Traditional African stories Sierra Leone ? West Africa Traditional African oral stories, Anansi Stories Nansi-stori or Nansi-tori reflect social values in the African culture that motivate the listeners in their pursuit of a meaningful life. These stories reveal ideas, themes, beliefs, and facts that are widely spread. They link the past, present and future, interpret the universe, resolve natural and physical phenomena, teach morals, maintain cultural values, pass on methods of survival and praise God. The storyteller uses her tactics with the intention that the listeners connect with the story and uses her skills to be linked with the listeners through the story. The storyteller teaches the listeners the African morals, values, beliefs; tells each story with gestures, songs, dances, expressions and impersonations to arouse the listeners. The storyteller repeats words, phrases or sentences which make the story easy to understand and recall from memory. The listeners actively participate as they learn the important aspects of the African culture. These Sierra Leone traditional African oral stories keep the family and the community united, pass on traditions, codes of behavior and maintain social order. These oral stories passed down by the writers grandparents and parents using their own words were transcribed from her committed to memory version in written format to preserve the traditional African Krio history or African oral tradition, and with the hope that these written stories be appreciated by adults and children throughout the world and perpetuated by future generations.

Whether used for thematic story times, program and curriculum planning, readers' advisory, or collection development, this updated edition of the well-known companion makes finding the right picture books for your library a breeze. Generations of savvy librarians and educators have relied on this detailed subject guide to children's picture books for all aspects of children's services, and this new edition does not disappoint. Covering more than 18,000 books published through 2017, it empowers users to identify current and classic titles on topics ranging from apples to zebras. Organized simply, with a subject guide that categorizes subjects by theme and topic and subject headings arranged alphabetically, this reference applies more than 1,200 intuitive (as opposed to formal catalog) subject terms to children's picture books, making it both a comprehensive and user-friendly resource that is accessible to parents and teachers as well as librarians. It can be used to identify titles to fill in gaps in library collections, to find books on particular topics for young readers, to help teachers locate titles to support lessons, or to design thematic programs and story times. Title and illustrator indexes, in addition to a bibliographic guide arranged alphabetically by author name, further extend access to titles.

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year * Named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker, NPR, Newsweek, The Economist, Slate and TIME "Catch Me if You Can meets Coming to America in this epic tale of one of the greatest scammers of all time."-NPR The astounding, never-before-told story of how an audacious Ghanaian con artist pulled off one of the 20th century's longest-running and most spectacular frauds. When Ghana won its independence from Britain in 1957, it instantly became a target for home-grown opportunists and rapacious Western interests determined to snatch any assets that colonialism hadn't already stripped. A CIA-funded military junta ousted the new nation's inspiring president, Kwame Nkrumah, then falsely accused him of hiding the country's gold overseas. Into this big lie stepped one of history's most charismatic scammers, a con man to rival the trickster god Anansi. Born into poverty in Ghana and trained in the United States, John Ackah Blay-Miezah declared himself custodian of an alleged Nkrumah trust fund worth billions. You, too, could claim a piece--if only you would “invest” in Blay-Miezah's fictitious efforts to release the equally fictitious fund. Over the 1970s and '80s, he and his accomplices-including Ghanaian state officials and Nixon's former attorney general--scammed hundreds of millions of dollars out of thousands of believers. Blay-Miezah lived in luxury, deceiving Philadelphia lawyers, London financiers, and Seoul businessmen alike, all while eluding his FBI pursuers. American prosecutors called his scam “one of the most fascinating--and lucrative--in modern history.” In Anansi's Gold, Yepoka Yeebo chases Blay-Miezah's ever-wilder trail and discovers, at long last, what really happened to Ghana's missing wealth. She unfolds a riveting account of Cold War entanglements, international finance, and postcolonial betrayal, revealing how what we call “history” writes itself into being, one lie at a time.