A must-read for parents, new teachers, and classroom veterans, "Educating Esme" is the exuberant diary of Esme Raji Codell s first year teaching in a Chicago public school. Fresh-mouthed and free-spirited, the irrepressible Madame Esme as she prefers to be called does the cha-cha during multiplication tables, roller-skates down the hallways, and puts on rousing performances with at-risk students in the library. Her diary opens a window into a real-life classroom from a teacher s perspective. While battling bureaucrats, gang members, abusive parents, and her own insecurities, this gifted young woman reveals what it takes to be an exceptional teacher.
Heroine to thousands of parents and educators, Esme now shares more of her ingenious and yet down-to-earth approaches to the classroom in a supplementary guide to help new teachers hit the ground running. As relevant and iconoclastic as when it was first published, "Educating Esme" is a classic, as is Madame Esme herself."

Are children reading enough? Not according to most parents and teachers, who know that reading aloud with children fosters a lifelong love of books, ensures better standardized test scores, promotes greater success in school, and helps instill the values we most want to pass on.
Esme Raji Codell--an inspiring children's literature specialist and an energetic teacher--has the solution. She's turned her years of experience with children, parents, librarians, and fellow educators into a great big indispensable volume designed to help parents get their kids excited about reading.
Here are hundreds of easy and inventive ideas, innovative projects, creative activities, and inspiring suggestions that have been shared, tried, and proven with children from birth through eighth grade.
This five-hundred-page volume is brimming with themes for superlative storytimes and book-based birthday parties, ideas for mad-scientist experiments and half-pint cooking adventures, stories for reluctant readers and book groups for boys, step-by-step instructions for book parades, book-related crafts, storytelling festivals, literature-based radio broadcasts, readers' theater, and more. There are book lists galore, with subject-driven reading recommendations for science, math, cooking, nature, adventure, music, weather, gardening, sports, mythology, poetry, history, biography, fiction, and fairy tales. Codell's creative thinking and infectious enthusiasm will empower even the busiest parents and children to include literature in their lives."

Janusz Korczak was a Polish physician and educator who wrote over twenty books--his fiction was in his time as well known as "Peter Pan," and his nonfiction works bore passionate messages of child advocacy. During World War II, the Jewish orphanage he directed was relocated to the Warsaw ghetto. Although Korczak's celebrity afforded him many chances to escape, he refused to abandon the children. He was killed at Treblinka along with the children.
"King Matt the First," one of Korczak's most beloved tales, is the story of a boy who becomes king and sets out to reform his kingdom. He decrees that all children are to be given a piece of chocolate at the end of each day. He visits faraway lands and befriends cannibal kings. Whenever his ministers tell him something's impossible, he puts them in jail. He disguises himself as a soldier and becomes a hero. But, as in real life, fantasy is tempered by reality: Matt's fellow kings become jealous of his success--and in the end, Matt falls, although it's clear that he was the greatest king there ever was.
Now this rediscovered classic is available again, and with a vibrant new cover by award-winning artist Brian Selznick. This timeless tale shows that only through the honesty and spontaneity of children can grown-ups begin to imagine and to create a better world.