A boy unites an immigrant community and rebuilds his family–using a simple sourdough bread recipe. Eliot Winston, a grieving son, must convince his new step-mother – now Griff Winston’s widow – to adopt him. But when she married Griff Winston, Marj hadn’t bargained on being the single mother of a twelve-year-old boy. Alli Flynn, a foster child new to the school, convinces Eliot that he must fight to keep his family intact and the best way to do that is to help Mrs. Winston with the Bread Project, a fund raising project for the school. With his whole future at stake, Eliot tries hard to please Marj; but as the deadlines near for the Bread Project and for Marj to sign his adoption papers, Eliot finds it harder and harder to hang on to hope. In the tradition of Dicey’s Song by Cynthia Voigt, this story follows two kids who search for a family and a home.

For decades, the southern states have witnessed the relentless migration of vagabonds from Mexico. They are now found as far north as the Ozarks of southern Missouri. No one knows why they keep traveling north, ever northward. Until now. In the tradition of Charlotte's Web or The Underneath comes the American fantasy, VAGABONDS, the saga of El Garro's armadillo colony, the scouts and pioneers who have always been at the forefront of the migration. Rumors from their original homeland, the jungles far to the south, indicate that El Garro's colony may be nearing the fabled Faralone Falls, where they will find the answer to why they have traveled northward for decades. Galen must leave the comfort of his den and lead the search party. Accompanying him are Tex, a representative of the southern clans, Corrie, who is El Garro's daughter, and Blaze, the barn owl. Galen's quest for answers plays out against the background of the armadillo colony who has never before challenged their nomadic way of life. VAGABONDS is an American fantasy set in the Ozark mountains. Like El Garro's clan, we are a nation of immigrants, people who have known the sacrifice of leaving everything behind in hopes of finding a future and a hope for their families.

Strengthen programs of family and community engagement to promote equity and increase student success! When schools, families, and communities collaborate and share responsibility for students′ education, more students succeed in school. Based on 30 years of research and fieldwork, the fourth edition of the bestseller School, Family, and Community Partnerships: Your Handbook for Action, presents tools and guidelines to help develop more effective and more equitable programs of family and community engagement. Written by a team of well-known experts, it provides a theory and framework of six types of involvement for action; up-to-date research on school, family, and community collaboration; and new materials for professional development and on-going technical assistance. Readers also will find: Examples of best practices on the six types of involvement from preschools, and elementary, middle, and high schools Checklists, templates, and evaluations to plan goal-linked partnership programs and assess progress CD-ROM with slides and notes for two presentations: A new awareness session to orient colleagues on the major components of a research-based partnership program, and a full One-Day Team Training Workshop to prepare school teams to develop their partnership programs. As a foundational text, this handbook demonstrates a proven approach to implement and sustain inclusive, goal-linked programs of partnership. It shows how a good partnership program is an essential component of good school organization and school improvement for student success. This book will help every district and all schools strengthen and continually improve their programs of family and community engagement.

BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A novel that follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning achievement in Julian Barnes's oeuvre. Tony Webster thought he left his past behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.

London is poised on the brink of World War 11. Timid, scrawny Willie Beech -- the abused child of a single mother -- is evacuated to the English countryside. At first, he is terrified of everything, of the country sounds and sights, even of Mr. Tom, the gruff, kindly old man who has taken him in. But gradually Willie forgets the hate and despair of his past. He learns to love a world he never knew existed, a world of friendship and affection in which harsh words and daily beatings have no place. Then a telegram comes. Willie must return to his mother in London. When weeks pass by with no word from Willie, Mr. Tom sets out for London to look for the young boy he has come to love as a son.

"Even as they see their wages go down and their buying power decrease, many parents are still putting their kids' material desires first. These parents struggle with how to handle children's consumer wants, which continue unabated despite the economic downturn. And, indeed, parents and other adults continue to spend billions of dollars on children every year. Why do children seem to desire so much, so often, so soon, and why do parents capitulate so readily? To determine what forces lie behind the onslaught of Nintendo Wiis and Bratz dolls, Allison J. Pugh spent three years observing and interviewing children and their families. In Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture, Pugh teases out the complex factors that contribute to how we buy, from lunchroom conversations about Game Boys to the stark inequalities facing American children. Pugh finds that children's desires stem less from striving for status or falling victim to advertising than from their yearning to join the conversation at school or in the neighborhood. Most parents respond to children's need to belong by buying the particular goods and experiences that act as passports in children's social worlds, because they sympathize with their children's fear of being different from their peers. Even under financial constraints, families prioritize children "feeling normal". Pugh masterfully illuminates the surprising similarities in the fears and hopes of parents and children from vastly different social contexts, showing that while corporate marketing and materialism play a part in the commodification of childhood, at the heart of the matter is the desire to belong."--pub. desc.

"Over the last forty years, a variety of developments in American science, politics, and culture have reimagined addiction in their own ways, and yet they share something in common. Increasingly, addiction is understood as deeply normal, resembling our most ordinary attachments. On this view, a potential for addiction, or even a drive to addiction, is latent in all of us and a natural response to what now so often surrounds us, namely, an ample and sure supply of potent thrills and pleasures. This book documents where and how this view has taken hold in society and considers what its rise and wide circulation can reveal about how we imagine the human subject in the late-modern United States. Just as addiction has been reimagined as extreme yet ordinary attachment, and the addict as a suffering yet normally constituted subject, so too has the 'human as such' become reimagined in striking and significant ways. Jaeyoon Park argues that studying addiction's normalization promises not only to expand our knowledge of the recent history of thought about addiction, but to reveal and reflect what may well be an increasingly common, even commonsensical, understanding of the human subject in our time as constructed by accretion"--