Read Along or Enhanced eBook: A clever, singing rabbit eats his way through the pea patch until Little Girl snatches him up and he is soon singing a new tune as he plans his escape. With a nod to Brer Rabbit, Pickin Peas is adapted from two folktales collected in Alabama and Virginia. The lively storytelling voice of award-winning author Margaret Read MacDonald, combined with Pat Cummings' bright, bold contemporary illustrations, makes this timeless battle-of-wits an instant classic.

Includes twenty folktales that encourage audience participation.

A Black girl describes the hard work and the rewards involved in growing up on a farm during the Depression of the 1930s.

LIFE Magazine is the treasured photographic magazine that chronicled the 20th Century. It now lives on at LIFE.com, the largest, most amazing collection of professional photography on the internet. Users can browse, search and view photos of today’s people and events. They have free access to share, print and post images for personal use.

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Barbarian Days, this narrative nonfiction classic documents the rising inequality and cultural alienation that presaged the crises of today. “A status report on the American Dream [that] gets its power [from] the unpredictable, rich specifics of people’s lives.”—Time “[William] Finnegan’s real achievement is to attach identities to the steady stream of faceless statistics that tell us America’s social problems are more serious than we want to believe.”—The Washington Post A fifteen-year-old drug dealer in blighted New Haven, Connecticut; a sleepy Texas town transformed by crack; Mexican American teenagers in Washington State, unable to relate to their immigrant parents and trying to find an identity in gangs; jobless young white supremacists in a downwardly mobile L.A. suburb. William Finnegan spent years embedded with families in four communities across the country to become an intimate observer of the lives he reveals in Cold New World. What emerges from these beautifully rendered portraits is a prescient and compassionate book that never loses sight of its subjects’ humanity. A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • A LOS ANGELES TIMES BEST NONFICTION SELECTION Praise for Cold New World “Unlike most journalists who drop in for a quick interview and fly back out again, Finnegan spent many weeks with families in each community over a period of several years, enough time to distinguish between the kind of short-term problems that can beset anyone and the longer-term systemic poverty and social disintegration that can pound an entire generation into a groove of despair.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review “The most remarkable of William Finnegan’s many literary gifts is his compassion. Not the fact of it, which we have a right to expect from any personal reporting about the oppressed, but its coolness, its clarity, its ductile strength. . . . Finnegan writes like a dream. His prose is unfailingly lucid, graceful, and specific, his characterization effortless, and the pull of his narrative pure seduction.”—The Village Voice “Four astonishingly intimate and evocative portraits. . . . All of these stories are vividly, honestly and compassionately told. . . . While Cold New World may make us look in new ways at our young people, perhaps its real goal is to make us look at ourselves.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

Designed to promote literacy in young children and to empower parents, educators, and librarians, this guide is filled with simple strategies, creative activities, and detailed instructions that help make reading fun. Encouraging a love of reading in young children can be a source of both great frustration and immense joy. This handy resource provides essential tips, techniques, and strategies for making early literacy development fun and inspiring a lifelong love of reading. Read, Rhyme, and Romp: Early Literacy Skills and Activities for Librarians, Teachers, and Parents explores the six basic pre-literacy skills that experts agree are necessary for a young child to be ready to learn to read. Special sections within each chapter are dedicated to the specific needs of preschool teachers, parents, and librarians, making the content relevant to different settings. Recommended book lists, personal anecdotes, and literacy-rich activities combine to create an effective and accessible plan for implementing an early literacy program.