Mo may not be the biggest, the strongest, or the fastest basketball player, but he won't let that stop him from playing! This Step 2 reader from Geisel Award winner David Adler is now in Step into Reading! Mo's latest obsession is basketball. He's determined to learn how to pass, but as the shortest member of the team, he can't seem to launch the ball high enough. Can Mo learn to pass in time to help his team win the big game? Step 2 Readers use basic vocabulary and short sentences to tell simple stories, for children who recognize familiar words and can sound out new words with help. Rhyme and rhythmic text paired with picture clues help children decode the story.

The third installment in this adorable Level 2 Geisel Award-winning series from a classroom favorite! Mo's latest obsession is basketball. He's determined to learn how to pass, but as the shortest member of the team, he can't seem to launch the ball high enough. Can Mo learn to pass in time to help his team win the big game? This Level 2 reader about a little African-American boy with a big passion for sports is a funny, motivational companion to the winner of the 2016 Theodor Seuss Geisel Award. Praise for Pass the Ball, Mo!: "...welcome addition to the easy reader shelves." --The Horn Book

Swish is the story of two high school jocks in an inner city high school. One of them a practical joker and the other is low key. Their lives take a serious change when the more serious of the two gets in trouble for an act his friend commits. This leads to the two of them taking the school nerd under their wings and in doing so they find out the school nerd possesses many talents they would have never had. This is a book of adventure, and mischief, and drama, and compassion. Every preteen and teen should read this book and everyone who teaches, and counsels preteens could use this book as their format.

group favorite, koi, getting rich, era, romance, city, modern romance, modern romance, ending

Just thirteen months before the opening match of the 2014 World Cup, Brazil has been declared fi nancially bankrupt and has no alternative other than to withdraw from hosting the tournament. Faced with this unprecedented emergency, the thoroughly inept yet ruthlessly tyrannical President of the Global Confederation de Football, Horst Gasch, and his obtuse sidekick, Senior Vice President, Serge Le Planque, must fi nd another host nation and fast. Both are zealous Anglophobes and are desperate to maintain their strategy of staging the tournament anywhere in the world . . . except England. Meanwhile, due the death of the local MP in extremely sordid circumstances, Alan Boots Boothroyd, football fanatic and manager of Sunday league team, overcomes a personal crisis by deciding to run for Parliament. After becoming sensationally elected, Boots stumbles across the debaucherous nocturnal pursuits of the countrys senior politicians. Armed with information that could bring down the government, Boots ingeniously maneuvers himself into an extraordinary position within the dark, sinister corridors of Westminster. On the fi eld, the English football team is in total disarray. Coached by a hapless manager and deprived of key players by the Premier League managers policy of club before country, the national team has suffered defeat after defeat in the matches leading up to the World Cup. When the tournament fi nally begins, Horst Gasch and the hierarchy of the Global Confederation de Football deviously conspire to engineer a humiliating exit for England. In response, Boots decides to fi ght back and do whatever it takes for England in her quest for a Second Star above the Three Lions Crest.

It's summertime, and that means it's time to play basketball! Tyler signs the All-Stars up for their first tournament at the local rec center. But he doesn't plan on the challenges that can come with summer. Cam and Brianna are in summer school, Jasmine has to go stay with her dad, and Markus has to mow laws all summer. Tyler is left alone to practice, and worries that the All-Stars are breaking up. Can the All-Stars find a way to deal with their summer schedules and still practice for the big game?

A genius abandoning the young, being treated as a servant by a beautiful female student, being stepped on by a tyrant, being bullied by his friends and relatives, being beaten up by his friends for the sake of his friends and being thrown to the ground to die.

This uplifting story of a boys' football team shines light on the under-appreciated virtues that can bloom in impoverished neighborhoods, even as nearby communities exclude them from economic progress. Never Ran, Never Will tells the story of the working-class, mostly black neighborhood of Brownsville, Brooklyn; its proud youth football team, the Mo Better Jaguars; and the young boys who are often at the center of both. Oomz, Gio, Hart, and their charismatic, vulnerable friends, come together on a dusty football field. All around them their community is threatened by violence, poverty, and the specter of losing their homes to gentrification. Their passionate, unpaid coaches teach hard lessons about surviving American life with little help from the outside world, cultivating in their players the perseverance and courage to make it. Football isn't everybody's ideal way to find the American dream, but for some kids it's the surest road there is. The Mo Better Jaguars team offers a refuge from the gang feuding that consumes much of the streets and a ticket to a better future in a country where football talent remains an exceptionally valuable commodity. If the team can make the regional championships, prestigious high schools and colleges might open their doors to the players. Never Ran, Never Will is a complex, humane story that reveals the changing world of an American inner city and a group of unforgettable boys in the middle of it all.

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