While her mother chats away, Shirley is busy escaping into a world of adventure, bold knights, green forests - and plastic ducks.

SUMMARY: Shirley's adventures at the beach are interspersed with familiar parental warnings.

A nursery picture book, featuring a lively toddler and her baby brother. It is designed to introduce concepts such as opposites, colours, sounds, and shapes and sizes to young children.

The most accessible approach yet to children's literature and narrative theory,Telling Children's Storiesis a comprehensive collection of never-before-published essays by an international slate of scholars that offers a broad yet in-depth assessment of narrative strategies unique to children's literature. The volume is divided into four interrelated sections: "Genre Templates and Transformations," "Approaches to the Picture Book," "Narrators and Implied Readers," and "Narrative Time." Mike Cadden's introduction considers the links between the various essays and topics, as well as their connections with such issues as metafiction, narrative ethics, focalization, and plotting. Ranging in focus from picture books to novels such asTo Kill a Mockingbird, from detective fiction for children to historical tales, from new works such as the Lemony Snicket series to classics likeTom's Midnight Garden, these essays explore notions of montage and metaphor, perspective and subjectivity, identification and time. Together, they comprise a resource that will interest and instruct scholars of narrative theory and children's literature, and that will become critically important to the understanding and development of both fields.

Features an audio read-along! Splish! Splash! Sploosh! The adorable stars of Bears on Chairs and Bears in Beds are back, and they’re ready for bath time. Or are they? Water, soap, and sponge are there. The bath is ready. Where are the bears? The four little bears are grimy, dirty, and covered in mud! But when they see the bath and Big Brown Bear ready to scrub, they back away. "We don’t want a bath," they say. Will those grungy bears ever get in the tub? Whether bath time’s a favorite time of day or a fraught one, this fun-to-read rhyming story and the silly antics of impossibly cute bears will make a splash with toddlers and parents alike.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate.

When pirate mommy announces bath time, it is yo ho ho and to the bath we go for her little pirates.

"These little bears will soon be part of many a bedtime routine." — Kirkus Reviews Features an audio read-along! It’s time for Big Brown Bear to tuck all four little bears into their beds. Then he’s ready to climb into his own bed and turn out the light. Five warm beds, holding five sleepy bears, until something goes whoosh in the middle of the night, and all the bears wake up in a fright. Luckily, Big Brown Bear knows just what to do! A fun, rhyming read-aloud that parents will love and tired little cubs will be happy to snuggle up with.

“I promise: you will be transported,” says Bill Moyers of this memoir. Part Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, part Growing Up Amish, and part Little House on the Prairie, this book evokes a lost time, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, when a sheltered little girl named after Shirley Temple entered a family and church caught up in the midst of the cultural changes of the 1950”s and ‘60’s. With gentle humor and clear-eyed affection the author, who grew up to become a college president, tells the story of her first encounters with the “glittering world” and her desire for “fancy” forbidden things she could see but not touch. The reader enters a plain Mennonite Church building, walks through the meadow, makes sweet and sour feasts in the kitchen and watches the little girl grow up. Along the way, five other children enter the family, one baby sister dies, the family moves to the “home place.” The major decisions, whether to join the church, and whether to leave home and become the first person in her family to attend college, will have the reader rooting for the girl to break a new path. In the tradition of Jill Ker Conway’s The Road to Coorain, this book details the formation of a future leader who does not yet know she’s being prepared to stand up to power and to find her own voice. The book contains many illustrations and resources, including recipes, a map, and an epilogue about why the author is still Mennonite. Topics covered include the death of a child, Pennsylvania Dutch cooking, the role of bishops in the Mennonite church, the paradoxes of plain life (including fancy cars and the practice of growing tobacco). The drama of passing on the family farm and Mennonite romance and courtship, as the author prepares to leave home for college, create the final challenges of the book.

Daddy picks up Corey from the daycare center, goes to the store with him and has dinner cooked by the time Mom arrives home from work.