Marveltown's adults are outstanding inventors, but when their best engineers create giant but stupid robots that threaten the town, it is the children's outrageous creations that save the day.

In a world where reading is reportedly dead, renowned humorist, illustrator, and New Yorker contributor Bruce McCall offers 50 inventive, outlandish, and wickedly entertaining things to do with all those excess books in 50 Things to Do with a Book. From starting a band, building a stairway to paradise, and saving your town from a flood to improving your marriage, entertaining guests, or killing a mockingbird, the options presented in 50 Things to Do with a Book are brilliant, visionary, ironic, and absurd.

Weekly columns by an elementary school principal during his six years in a small town in Maine.

Volume contains: 209 NY 531 (Town of Pelham v. Shinn)

Six months after its American introduction in 1985, the Yugo was a punch line; within a year, it was a staple of late-night comedy. By 2000, NPR's Car Talk declared it "the worst car of the millennium." And for most Americans that's where the story begins and ends. Hardly. The short, unhappy life of the car, the men who built it, the men who imported it, and the decade that embraced and discarded it is rollicking and astounding, and one of the greatest untold business-cum-morality tales of the 1980s. Mix one rabid entrepreneur, several thousand "good" communists, a willing U.S. State Department, the shortsighted Detroit auto industry, and improvident bankers, shake vigorously, and you've got The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History. Brilliantly re-creating the amazing confluence of events that produced the Yugo, Yugoslav expert Jason Vuic uproariously tells the story of the car that became an international joke: The American CEO who happens upon a Yugo right when his company needs to find a new import or go under. A State Department eager to aid Yugoslavia's nonaligned communist government. Zastava Automobiles, which overhauls its factory to produce an American-ready Yugo in six months. And a hole left by Detroit in the cheap subcompact market that creates a race to the bottom that leaves the Yugo . . . at the bottom.

Preschool teachers and early childhood professionals know that storybook reading is important, but they may not know how to maximize its benefits for later reading achievement. This indispensable guide presents research-based techniques for using reading aloud to intentionally and systematically build children's knowledge of print. Simple yet powerful strategies are provided for teaching preschoolers about book and print organization, print meaning, letters, and words, all while sharing engaging, commercially available books. Appendices include a detailed book list and 60 reproducibles that feature activities and prompts keyed to each text.

Young Rose discovers magical glass steps in New York's Central Park that lead to the fantastic city of U Nork, whose residents have been awaiting the arrival of the only person who can save them.