By Mary Dodson Wade

Introduces different types of maps and how they are used, including those that show how to get to a place and those that show what you will find when you arrive.

By Loreen Leedy

Lisa’s class is learning about maps, she decides to draw one of her bedroom and then makes a few for her Boston terrier. These maps show where the pet has hidden her toys and treats, the best route for a neighboring animal to take to their house, biking and hiking trails, and a 3-D map of places where the pup likes to play. Lisa explains terms such as "key," "scale," and "symbol," and introduces tools such as pedometers and odometers. The concepts are clear, illustrations are uncluttered and ably clarify the text. Readers will enjoy traveling with this duo and learn much in the process.

By Joan Sweeney

A child introduces the world of cartography. Using the premise that simple drawings can be maps, the book begins with crayon drawings of the floor plans of the girl's room and house. The concept becomes progressively more complex, as her horizons expand from home to street, to town, to state, to country, and finally to the world. Colorful illustrations show a composite of the entire area that is being charted on the facing page. On each successive page, the child points out her street, hometown, state, and country. The process then reverses as she finds the U.S. on a world map and works back down the scale to her own room again.

By Neil Chesanow

Part of being a child is wondering. This charming book uses easy words and color illustrations to explain to children exactly where they live. It starts with their room, in their home, in their neighborhood, in their town, their state, their country-then moves out to the planet earth, the solar system, and the Milky Way galaxy. From there, children trace their way home again.

By Jack Knowlton

Maps and globes can take you anywhere -- to the top of the tallest mountain on earth or the bottom of the deepest ocean. Maps tell you about the world: where various countries are located, where the jungles and deserts are, even how to find your way around your own hometown. If you take a fancy to any place on earth, you can go there today and still be home in time for dinner. So open a map, spin a globe. The wide world awaits you.

By Gail Gibbons

Gibbons' easily identifiable artistic style works well with her explanations of sometimes misunderstood weather-related terms. Drawings are appealing, attractively arranged, and closely matched to the textual information. Temperature, air pressure, moisture, and wind are broadly defined and illustrated. Each of the four areas is then broken down further: moisture is illustrated as rain, drizzle, hail, snow, etc. The term describing each type of weather phenomenon is highly visible in large type and is contained in a dialogue balloon that stands out from the accompanying illustration.

By David Wiesner

For brothers David and George, the only thing more unforgettable than the gusty storm that assailed their neighborhood for most of one day is the downed giant elm they find the next morning. The formidable tree becomes a vehicle for hours of imaginative play and fanciful excursions.

By Melvin and Gilda Berger

Information on topics of great interest in a format that is sure to appeal. The questions, set in large-print, color type, cover the whys, hows, and wheres of their subjects. The concise answers are set in smaller black type. The queries are either superimposed over attractive, colorful illustrations or face them. While children will enjoy browsing through these titles, the extensive indexes also make them useful for reports. They're particularly accessible for younger or reluctant readers who might have problems with multi-paragraphed, wordier texts.

By Judi Barrett

If food dropped like rain from the sky, wouldn't it be marvelous! Or would it? It could, after all, be messy. And you'd have no choice. What if you didn't like what fell? Or what if too much came? Have you ever thought of what it might be like to be squashed flat by a pancake?

By David Shannon

On Saturday morning, the rain came down. It made the chickens squawk." But that's only the beginning. Before the sun comes out again, an entire neighborhood is in a crabby uproar. The owner of the beauty parlor squabbles with the barber, who argues with the painter, who has just accidentally bonked the barber in the head with his paint can. Then the baker unintentionally pokes the pizza man in the nose with his umbrella, and they start quarreling. Soon, "the whole block was honking, yelling, bickering, and barking." There's no end in sight... until the rain stops, the sun comes out, the air smells fresh and sweet, and a rainbow appears. Before they know it, the bickerers are helping each other clean up the mess caused by the ruckus, and everyone's smiling again.

By Joanna Cole

Another wild and wacky field trip for Ms. Frizzle and her intrepid students-this time into the eye of a hurricane. The magic school bus changes into a weather balloon and then into an airplane as the class experiences the hurricane and a spin-off tornado firsthand. As usual, Ms. Frizzle's wardrobe is as changeable as the weather. The familiar format features lots of weather information delivered via students' written reports and spoken comments (dialogue balloons). A subplot features the hapless Arnold, who becomes separated from the group with only Ms. Frizzle's talking radio for company. He survives several harrowing adventures before the magic school bus/plane picks him up. All ends well, the class celebrates with a party, and the Frizz has bees in her bonnet as she anticipates the next class project with a new outfit.

By Pearl S. Buck

Kino lives on a farm on the side of a mountain in Japan. His friend, Jiya, lives in a fishing village below. Everyone, including Kino and Jiya, has heard of the big wave. No one suspects it will wipe out the whole village and Jiya's family, too. As Jiya struggles to overcome his sorrow, he understands it is in the presence of danger that one learns to be brave, and to appreciate how wonderful life can be. This is a famous story of a Japanese boy who must face life after escaping the tidal wave destruction of his family and village.

By Johanna Spyri

Johanna Spyri's classic story of a young orphan sent to live with her grumpy grandfather in the Swiss Alps is retold in it's entirety in this beautifully bound hardcover edition. Heidi has charmed and intrigued readers since it's original publication in 1880. Much more than a children's story, the narrative is also a lesson on the precarious nature of freedom, a luxury too often taken for granted. Heidi almost loses her liberty as she is ripped away from the tranquility of the mountains to tend to a sick cousin in the city. Happily, all's well that ends well, and the reader is left with only warm, fuzzy thoughts. Spryi's story will never grow wearisome--and this is a very appealing edition.

By Diane Siebert

Tumbleweeds bounce and roll along the ground. Lizards dart, tortoises creep, and snakes glide out of sight. The Mojave Desert is a special place. Its landscape is powerful and mesmerizing.

Here is an extraordinary celebration of this vast and ever-changing wonder for readers and nature lovers of all ages.

By Lee Bennett Hopkins

Seven regions plus Washington, DC, are explored through 51 poems by 40 different poets. The selections explore each area's geography, climate, or urban or rural features. Classic poets such as Langston Hughes, Carl Sandburg, and Nikki Giovanni are represented along with David McCord, X. J. Kennedy, Myra Cohn Livingston, and Hopkins himself. Twenty poems were commissioned especially for the book. Alcorn's paintings reflect the emotional range of the poems through a variety of styles and images. The artist expresses the diversity of American geography using shape, colors, and texture to evoke a variety of landscapes and including people from many cultural backgrounds. Each section is preceded by a painted map of the region and brief lists of facts, including a "Great Fact" for each state. Previous collections of poetry about America have taken chronological, thematic, or biographical approaches. This regional arrangement invites connections to literature set in the places presented.

By Faith Ringgold

This book depicts a Depression era girl's imaginative foray to heights from which she can see and therefore claim her world. Picnicking on the roof of her family's Harlem apartment building--a "tar beach" to which they bring fried chicken and roasted peanuts, watermelon and beer, and, not least, friends and laughter--Cassie pictures herself soaring above New York City: above the George Washington Bridge, which her father helped build; above the headquarters of the union that has denied him membership, because he's black; above the rooms in which they live. Ringgold's strong figures and flattened perspective bring a distinctive magic to this dreamy and yet wonderfully concrete vision, narrated in poetic cadences that capture the language and feel of flight.

By Katharine Lee Bates

In this book the words to "America the Beautiful" are illustrated with drawings of some of the most beautiful places around the U.S.A. The music for the song is also included along with brief descriptions of each of the monuments used in the book.

By Gloria Houston

Arizona, a child of the Blue Ridge, is named by her older brother, a cavalryman out West. As she grows up, she longs to visit the faraway places she learns about, but life doesn't offer her those opportunities. Her mother dies and she takes on family responsibilities. Still she becomes a teacher in spite of the obstacles in her path. For 57 years, she teaches generation after generation of students in her one-room schoolhouse, describing for them the wonders of the larger world that she herself has never seen and inspiring in them the satisfaction of learning.

By Diane Siebert

Through poetic text and realistic paintings, this book tells of the beauty and natural disasters of Midwest. It is a joyful celebration of America's heartland.

By Jeannie Baker

A mother, holding her newborn son, gazes out the window of his room at lush vegetation, tropical birds, a pond, a kangaroo. Ten double-page illustrations following show the development--during a 20-year period--of the area outside the window. As the baby grows older, the land is cleared, a road is built, then a farm. A housing development goes up, then takes over a hill that was once green with lush growth. Development becomes suburb, then city, complete with billboards, high-rises, noise pollution, litter, and overpopulation. A final, short author's note explains the inspiration for the book: ". . .by understanding and changing the way we personally affect the environment, we can make a difference." This unusual, exceptionally well-crafted picture book might be a good way to begin.

By Jim LaMarche

magine passing a summer drifting up and down a slow-moving river, watching as cranes, turtles, raccoons, otters, and ducks grow accustomed to your presence. Envision days spent poling the raft through lily pads and grasses, glimpsing foxes through the trees on shore. On hot, sticky nights, picture a tent set up on the raft, from which you have an unobstructed view of huge bucks drinking from the moonlit river. Nicky has no idea what he's getting into when his father drops him off for the summer at his grandmother's cottage in the woods. And he's not especially pleased at the prospect. "There's nobody to play with ... She doesn't even have a TV." But this "river rat" is not the normal kind of grandma. Without pushing, she quietly allows Nicky to discover for himself the wonders of river life. Gradually, Nicky's interest in drawing the wildlife he sees brings him closer to his artist grandmother, and to an inner peace that looks as though it will last for a lifetime. Jim LaMarche draws on his own childhood summer experiences for this lovely, serene story. As the light and weather change through the summer, the river reflects all the beauty of the season.

By Cornelia Meigs

Barred from his family home- stead by his mean-spirited uncle, eighteen-year-old Chris weathers a Minnesota winter in a small cabin with his grandfather. Poverty and the tempting stories of a wandering Easterner convince Chris to harvest the trees on his grandfather’s land and float the logs down the spring floodwaters of the Mississippi to the lumber mills in Saint Louis. Filled with stories of raft hands and river pilots, this fast-paced novel has all the momentum of the great Mississippi.