Treat your students to an exciting hot air balloon ride across the USA. There's lots to see and do as each state is visited (the District of Columbia, too), its history and geography explored, and fascinating facts explained. There are map activities, places and physical features to identify, and topics for further investigation. There are parks, lakes, mountains and swamps to discover as well as the thousands of plants and animals that share our land and water. This product has been selected by a national panel of classroom teachers as a winner of Learning Magazine's Teachers' Choice Award.

China is one of the oldest states in the world. It achieved its approximate current borders with the Ascendancy of the Yuan dynasty in the 13th century, and despite the passing of one Imperial dynasty to the next, it has maintained them for the eight centuries since. Even the European colonial powers at the height of their power could not move past coastal enclaves. Thus, China remained China through the Ming, the Qing, the Republic, the Occupation, and Communism. But, despite the desires of some of the most powerful people in the Great State through the ages, China has never been alone in the world. It has had to contend with invaders from the steppe and the challenges posed by foreign traders and imperialists. Indeed, its rulers for the majority of the last eight centuries have not been Chinese. Timothy Brook examines China's relationship with the world from the Yuan through to the present by following the stories of ordinary and extraordinary people navigating the spaces where China met and meets the world. Bureaucrats, horse traders, spiritual leaders, explorers, pirates, emperors, invaders, migrant workers, traitors, and visionaries: this is a history of China as no one has told it before.

Where can you find dinosaur footprints or rune stones? How salty is the Great Salt Lake? Where can you find a moon bow? From Maine to Hawaii, from Alaska to Florida, students tour the USA with a collection of fun facts, games and puzzles. Enhance your geography and social studies curriculum with reproducible activities such as Alabama Bingo, Florida Tic-Tac-Toe and Louisiana Question Game.

Explore the varied features of the United States while reinforcing basic map reading skills. Sixteen student pages and accompanying blackline and full-color maps coordinate to provide a relational study of the elevation, vegetation, products, population, and peoples of the United States. Full-color maps are provided as transparencies for print books and PowerPoint slides for eBooks. Student pages challenge students to combine maps and additional resources in order to answer questions and make judgments. Question topics follow the Five Themes of Geography as outlined by the National Geographic Society: finding absolute and relative locations on a map, relating physical and human characteristics to an area, understanding human relationships to the environment, tracing movement of peoples and goods throughout an area, and organizing countries and continents into regions for detailed study.

As students become engrossed in this collection, they’ll become equally absorbed in the accompanying earth science lessons. Children will enjoy these fun stories.

Tyler Cowen’s controversial New York Times bestseller—the book heard round the world that ignited a firestorm of debate and redefined the nature of America’s economic malaise. America has been through the biggest financial crisis since the great Depression, unemployment numbers are frightening, media wages have been flat since the 1970s, and it is common to expect that things will get worse before they get better. Certainly, the multidecade stagnation is not yet over. How will we get out of this mess? One political party tries to increase government spending even when we have no good plan for paying for ballooning programs like Medicare and Social Security. The other party seems to think tax cuts will raise revenue and has a record of creating bigger fiscal disasters that the first. Where does this madness come from? As Cowen argues, our economy has enjoyed low-hanging fruit since the seventeenth century: free land, immigrant labor, and powerful new technologies. But during the last forty years, the low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau. The fruit trees are barer than we want to believe. That's it. That is what has gone wrong and that is why our politics is crazy. In The Great Stagnation, Cowen reveals the underlying causes of our past prosperity and how we will generate it again. This is a passionate call for a new respect of scientific innovations that benefit not only the powerful elites, but humanity as a whole.

Another fun book in the popular Daily Discoveries series! Jam-packed with reasons for your students to celebrate every day of January in your classroom. Special days include: Soup Day, Magnificent Mittens Day, Solo Day, Popcorn Day, Nothing Day, Martin Luther King Jr's Birthday and many more. The creative activities can by plugged into your regular curriculum: language arts, social studies, writing, math, science and health, music and drama, physical fitness, art, etc. Your students will look forward to every day of the month when they realize it's a day to celebrate! Included are patterns for writing assignments and art projects as well as lists of books and bulletin board ideas.