From Newbery Medalist Patricia MacLachlan comes a reassuring story about new beginnings and making friends. Nora and her family have just arrived from Russia and are making a new home on the American frontier. The prairie is very different from the forested hills Nora is used to. Most of all, it’s lonely. Papa has the cows he sings to as he milks them. Baby brother Milo has a dog to follow him wherever he goes. But Nora has no one and nothing to call her own until Papa brings home a dozen chicks and two geese. Nora names each one, and they follow her everywhere — even to church! But what will happen when one of her beloved chicks goes missing?

The clouds drift across the bright blue sky--all except one. Little Cloud trails behind. He is busy changing shapes to become a fluffy sheep, a zooming airplane, and even a clown with a funny hat. Eric Carle's trademark collages will make every reader want to run outside and discover their very own little cloud.

Society columnist Nora Blackbird is thrust into the world of celebrity tabloid gossip when a billionaire buys the farm…. Nora’s assigned to write a profile on billionaire fashion designer Swain Starr, who recently retired to build a high-tech organic farm with his new wife, Zephyr, a former supermodel. But before Nora can get the story, the mogul is murdered. And now her boss wants her to snap up an exclusive on who killed Starr before the cops do. But solving this murder won’t be easy with a family as colorful as Nora’s. Mick, her sort-of husband, is associating with unsavory characters from his past. Her sister Libby is transforming into a stage mom for her diabolical twins. And Emma, the youngest Blackbird, is mysteriously kicked out of the house by Mick. Nora’s home life may be hogging the spotlight, but there’s also a matter of Starr’s missing pig, which just might be the key to solving this mystery and the way Nora can bring home the bacon….

Nora's outdoor tea party with her toys at the home of some friendly geese is disrupted by Benji, the greedy sheep from next door, but he eventually makes amends.

This is the seventh volume of a series of books on fundamental research in spatial cognition. As with past volumes, the research presented here spans a broad range of research traditions, for spatial cognition concerns not just the basic spatial behavior of biological and artificial agents, but also the reasoning processes that allow spatial planning across broad spatial and temporal scales. Spatial information is critical for coordinated action and thus agents interacting with objects and moving among objects must be able to perceive spatial relations, learn about these relations, and act on them, or store the information for later use, either by themselves or communicated to others. Research on this problem has included both psychology, which works to understand how humans and other mobile organisms solve these problems, and computer science, which considers the nature of the information available in the world and a formal consideration of how these problems might be solved. Research on human spatial cognition also involves the application of representations and processes that may have evolved to handle object and location information to reasoning about higher-order problems, such as displaying non-spatial information in diagrams. Thus, work in s- tial cognition extends beyond psychology and computer science into many disciplines including geography and education. The Spatial Cognition conference offers one of the few forums for consideration of the issues spanning this broad academic range.

Numerous spatial biases influence navigation, interactions, and preferences in our environment. This volume considers their influences on perception and memory.