This story is set in the late seventies on the staff of an old London Primary School. Architecturally, the building is a late Victorian gem. Educationally, it is a multicultural kaleidoscope of four hundred children and twenty staff, who aspire to the cultivation of a learning community-against all the odds! The story concerns the staff only and the children will be heard in the background and referred to from time to time–but never seen! The National Curriculum and OFSTED are as yet but twinkles in a government mandarin’s eye!

For anyone who has ever wanted to step into the world of a favorite book, here is a pioneer pilgrimage, a tribute to Laura Ingalls Wilder, and a hilarious account of butter-churning obsession. Wendy McClure is on a quest to find the world of beloved Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder-a fantastic realm of fiction, history, and places she's never been to, yet somehow knows by heart. She retraces the pioneer journey of the Ingalls family- looking for the Big Woods among the medium trees in Wisconsin, wading in Plum Creek, and enduring a prairie hailstorm in South Dakota. She immerses herself in all things Little House, and explores the story from fact to fiction, and from the TV shows to the annual summer pageants in Laura's hometowns. Whether she's churning butter in her apartment or sitting in a replica log cabin, McClure is always in pursuit of "the Laura experience." Along the way she comes to understand how Wilder's life and work have shaped our ideas about girlhood and the American West. The Wilder Life is a loving, irreverent, spirited tribute to a series of books that have inspired generations of American women. It is also an incredibly funny first-person account of obsessive reading, and a story about what happens when we reconnect with our childhood touchstones-and find that our old love has only deepened.

Find out what happens when Santa's reindeer visit the home of a young child on Christmas Eve. Full of mischief and fun, this silly group does everything to enchant, excite, and engage our little tot! Help your child learn to count while enjoying the magic and merriment these reindeer provide in this award-winning storybook! An Amazon #1 new release!

Helena is an au pair in Paris, discovering the city and looking after two privileged and beautiful little girls: Sophie and Matilde. ut the longer Helena works for the family, the more the attraction between herself and the twins' father grows. Determined to keep her job, Helena fights her feelings, but the girls seem to know and become increasingly manipulative. Anxious and on edge, Helena is disturbed by the twins' doll's house, an exact replica of their family home - and everyone inside it. When the Dolls are put in strange places and odd things start to happen in the house, seemingly beyond anyone's control, Helena is petrified. And the twins watch and wait... A terrifying and bewitching thriller that will haunt you well past the last page. A short story.

When two emotionally abused servant-sisters respond to their pent-up hostilities, brutal murder of their mistress is the result. Based on a historical incident in Le Mans, France in 1933.

Books are as much a part of the furnishing of a house as tables and chairs, and in the making of a home they belong, not with the luxuries but with the necessities. A bookless house is not a home; for a home affords food and shelter for the mind as well as for the body. It is as great an offence against a child to starve his mind as to starve his body, and there is as much danger of reducing his vitality and putting him at a disadvantage in his lifework in the one as in the other form of deprivation. There was a time when it was felt that shelter, clothing, food and physical oversight comprised the whole duty of a charitable institution to dependent children; to-day no community would permit such an institution to exist unless it provided school privileges. An acute sense of responsibility toward children is one of the prime characteristics of American society, shown in the vast expenditures for public education in all forms, in the increasing attention paid to light, ventilation, and safety in school buildings, in the opening of play grounds in large cities, in physical supervision of children in schools, and the agitation against the employment of children in factories, and in other and less obvious ways. Children are helpless to protect themselves and secure what they need for health of body and mind; they are exceedingly impressionable; and the future is always in their hands. The first and most imperative duty of parents is to give their children the best attainable preparation for life, no matter at what sacrifice to themselves. There are hosts of fathers and mothers who recognize this obligation but do not know how to discharge it; who are eager to give their children the most wholesome conditions, but do not know how to secure them; who are especially anxious that their children should start early and start right on that highway of education which is the open road to honorable success.

In Every Word Tells a Story, each fascinating word is explored through a quirky, amusing story alongside the extraordinary etymology, word origin, and a definition.

A Collection of Short Stories by Michael Guest is exactly what it says it is, but that does not mean it's unsurprising. In these pages are stories of betrayal and murder, of passion, and redemption. The stories cover the gritty realism of life in a rehab center and the eerie supernaturalism of ghosts rising up to right wrongs and aid their ancestors. They range from the past, in which a civil war veteran returns home to find his land seized, the present, in which a small town preacher tries to overcome the temptations of the big city, through to hints of the future, where an astronaut lost in space becomes one of the first humans to encounter alien life. Ultimately, these are stories of redemption and community, of making things better and making things right. These are stories that hope to speak to the best in people, and to keep them entertained from start to finish.

This expanded edition of Wendy Ewald's now-rare book, first published in 1985, offers a view of the rural south over the past thirty five years. It includes pictures and stories by eight of Ewald's students, now grownups. Their visions, old and new, illuminate the present and the past.