Gulmamadak the Great
An Afghan folktale retold: Gulmamad is a grown man, but everyone in the village–even his wife–insists on calling him Gulmamadak, which means “Little Gulmamad the Cute.” So Gulmamadak leave the village to do great deeds and gain some respect. Reading level: 4th to 5th grade.

Holiday Histories: The Complete Set This 12-book series, written at the first-grade level, uses various political holidays as windows for presenting relevant topics in history. For example, Labor Day provides a frame for telling the story of the Industrial REvolution and the labor movement–all in 26 pages with no more than 25 words per page.

Native Americans (Set) This ten-book set, written at the second grade level, covers the various Native American cultures of North America, with a description of the environment of each region, the cultures that flourished there before the advent of the Europeans, the consequences of their encounters with Europeans, and what is happening with the Native Americans of that region today. Each book draws strong connection between the environment and native culture of each region, but emphasizes that Native Americans are modern people existing today. For example: Arctic Peoples looks at the people of the far north, the Inuit and the Aleuts.

Cool Collections: Insects is part of a series for first graders that uses various types of collections–stamps, dolls, natural objects, and so on–as a tool for introducing children to critical thinking skills such as cassifying and categorizing.

Alien Alert is part of a series of educational comic books called Adventures Plus. Each page tells a story but also has an embedded activity. To move from one page to the next, readers need to complete the activity. The stories are written at the 5th grade level, and the skills are coded to those in the Texas and national curriculum standards for that grade level. Alien Alert, for example, focuses on vocabulary skills such as prefixes and antonyms. The Case of the Missing Millie, by contrast, emphasizes real-life and study skills such as reading maps and bus schedules and tracking expenses.

Grammar Handbook Is there such a thing as a grammer handbook that makes you laugh? There’s one. This one. Goes with Adventures Plus.

Science All Around Us: Matter presents basic concepts about matter with simple experiements first-graders can perform to comprehend such concepts in physics as weight, denisty, volume, and precipitation.

The Lost Boy and Spiders from Outer Space are high-interest low-readability novels for students of high school age reading at a third-grade level or below.