Profiles Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont, who made great strides in the invention of flight.

In this beautiful picture book filled with soaring words and buoyant illustrations, award-winners Margarita Engle and Sara Palacios tell the inspiring true story of Aída de Acosta, the first woman to fly a motorized aircraft. On a lively street in the lovely city of Paris, a girl named Aída glanced up and was dazzled by the sight of an airship. Oh, how she wished she could soar through the sky like that! The inventor of the airship, Alberto, invited Aída to ride with him, but she didn’t want to be a passenger. She wanted to be the pilot. Aída was just a teenager, and no woman or girl had ever flown before. She didn’t let that stop her, though. All she needed was courage and a chance to try.

Are your students excited about writing? Do you want them to be? Do you want them to ask for more writing opportunities and assignments? Do you want them to engage in writing tasks more quickly and with more fluency? The traditional five-step writing process never explicitly teaches students to be fluent in their writing—to be able to write quickly on any topic. Extreme Writing targets precisely that with focused, daily writing sessions that provide students with consistent, long-term engagement. It is designed to appeal to students in grades 4–8, and—best of all—the approach involves little extra work for you. In The Power of Extreme Writing, author Diana Cruchley not only outlines the process but also describes what it looks like in the classroom, explains how to assess student work, and highlights more than a dozen unique inspirations that motivate students to write. Extreme Writing: it's fun, it's fast, and it works.

Aspiring journalist Emma leaves behind student life to begin an internship at her father’s newspaper in Rio. Then, a famous environmentalist, Milton Silva, is mysteriously murdered. Emma enters the Amazon rainforest to investigate. She has to brave its primal world, and a variety of other risks, in her fight to survive and solve the mystery.

Maria leaves Boston for Scotland on a Witness Protection Programme, becoming an au pair on a mysterious Estate. Odd behaviour, vanishing objects, cloaked figures, and night-time humming could relate to the Harley’s macabre family history. She confronts something more horrifying and threatening than that in Boston – perhaps not even of this world?

Louisville and baseball share a long and strong bond that also happens to be one rollicking tale. From scandals and superstars, to Louisville Slugger® bats and beyond, Baseball in Louisville explores the ups, downs, eccentricities, and historic elements that define America's great pastime in Louisville. With names like Honus Wagner, Fred Clarke, Earle Combs, Pee Wee Reese, Adam Dunn, and Chris Burke in the line-up, this volume delivers a substantial and entertaining overview of baseball's past and present.

This practical resource will help K–6 practitioners grow their literacy practices while also meeting the needs of emergent bilingual learners. Building on the success of The Reading Turn-Around, this book adapts the five-part framework for reading instruction to the specific needs of emergent bilinguals. Designed for teachers who have not specialized in bilingual instruction, the authors provide an accessible introduction to differentiating instruction that focuses on utilizing students’ strengths, identities, and cultural backgrounds to foster effective literacy instruction. Chapters include classroom vignettes, teacher exercises, illustrations of powerful reading plans for the student and teacher, resources for culturally and linguistically diverse children’s literature, and tools to engage with students’ families and communities. “Emergent bilinguals are the fastest growing population in our schools, and this important resource equips literacy educators with tools for providing equitable literacy experiences for emergent bilingual students. The authors have done an exceptional job of presenting their turn-around framework in a way that not only puts forth a vision for effective language and literacy development, but also presents a practical approach for applying the framework in today’s multilingual, multicultural classrooms.” —Jana Echevarria, professor emerita, California Statute University, Long Beach

**Kirkus Best Books of the Year (2013)** **Time Magazine 10 Top Nonfiction Books of 2013** **The New Republic Best Books of 2013** In this heart-lifting chronicle, Richard Holmes, author of the best-selling The Age of Wonder, follows the pioneer generation of balloon aeronauts, the daring and enigmatic men and women who risked their lives to take to the air (or fall into the sky). Why they did it, what their contemporaries thought of them, and how their flights revealed the secrets of our planet is a compelling adventure that only Holmes could tell. His accounts of the early Anglo-French balloon rivalries, the crazy firework flights of the beautiful Sophie Blanchard, the long-distance voyages of the American entrepreneur John Wise and French photographer Felix Nadar are dramatic and exhilarating. Holmes documents as well the balloons used to observe the horrors of modern battle during the Civil War (including a flight taken by George Armstrong Custer); the legendary tale of at least sixty-seven manned balloons that escaped from Paris (the first successful civilian airlift in history) during the Prussian siege of 1870-71; the high-altitude exploits of James Glaisher (who rose) seven miles above the earth without oxygen, helping to establish the new science of meteorology); and how Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Jules Verne felt the imaginative impact of flight and allowed it to soar in their work. A seamless fusion of history, art, science, biography, and the metaphysics of flights, Falling Upwards explores the interplay between technology and imagination. And through the strange allure of these great balloonists, it offers a masterly portrait of human endeavor, recklessness, and vision. (With 24 pages of color illustrations, and black-and-white illustrations throughout.)