Science Imagination

Experts highly recommend keeping your child awake for a little longer than their usual bedtime using calm, pre-sleep activities. Bedtime stories help your child’s brain create a new association, one that connects bedtime with an easy, more positive, and calming transition to sleep. This is why Bedtime Stories for Kids by renowned child development expert Katie Miller, and seasoned teacher Sarah J. Young is perfect for you and your child!

As parents, we all go through a mini mutiny in the ranks once it’s time to get ready for bed. If you’re lucky, you could get your kids in bed by eight o’clock...but not without a fight! And definitely not without creating a stressful environment that negatively affects your child’s sleep quality. This is why bedtime meditation practices come in handy because they help create a warm, loving environment that lowers stress hormone levels.

When Ellie inherits a mysterious map from her grandmother, she embarks on a quest that takes her across the seas to a hidden island steeped in mystery. Guided by the whimsical Captain Jonas, she discovers a world unlike any other—a place where talking trees share ancient secrets, rivers sparkle with all the colors of the rainbow, and forgotten dreams take on a life of their own.

No one has failed to notice that the current generation of youth is deeply - some would say totally - involved with digital media. Professors Howard Gardner and Katie Davis name today’s young people The App Generation, and in this spellbinding book they explore what it means to be “app-dependent” versus “app-enabled” and how life for this generation differs from life before the digital era.

Not since Terry Goodkind unsheathed the Sword of Truth has there been such an epic tale of heroism and magic that so captures the imagination as this monumental new work by a master storyteller. In The Fifth Sorceress, Robert Newcomb conjures a time and place wrought with exquisite detail, characters vividly drawn and deeply felt, and a history rich in glory and horror, splendor and secrets.

For more than 200 often turbulent years, Americans have imagined and described Cuba and its relationship to the United States by conjuring up a variety of striking images - Cuba as a woman, a neighbor, a ripe fruit, a child learning to ride a bicycle. One of the foremost historians of Cuba, Louis A. Perez Jr. offers a revealing history of these metaphorical and depictive motifs and discovers the powerful motives behind such characterizations of the island.

Phantasmagoria...where all the forgotten dreams go, where all the imagined things, both good and bad, make their home. Join Tom, Katie, Chad, Melissa, and Sharice as they adventure through Phantasmagoria, encountering everything from long-winded trolls to upside-down rivers, on their search for three artifacts...before time runs out.

The legislative attack on public sector unionism that gave rise to the uproar in Wisconsin and other union strongholds in 2011 was not just a reaction to the contemporary economic difficulties faced by the government. Rather, it was the result of a longstanding political and ideological hostility to the very idea of trade unionism put forward by a conservative movement whose roots go as far back as the Haymarket Riot of 1886. The controversy in Madison and other state capitals reveals that labor's status and power has always been at the core of American conservatism.

Oswald doesn’t want a new friend either, especially not a book-loving, bed-making, broccoli-eating boy. But when an imaginary friend gets a new assignment, they’re stuck there until the kid no longer needs them. And with Oswald’s home world of Imagination mysteriously crumbling away into nothing, befriending Reggie seems like a safer bet than disappearing with it. But when Oswald forgets Reggie’s birthday, Reggie runs away to Imagination.

Adam Childers is a 17-year-old closeted gay high school student in middle America. When Jara, a mysterious little girl from another world, reveals to Adam that he was born a Gatemaker, one of very few in all creation able to open doorways from one world to another, everything changes. Jara's world suffers at the hands of a mighty warlord, and when she makes her way to Adam's world she sees in him potential that he could never see in himself. Together, Jara, Adam, and Adam's friends must travel to Onus and confront both danger and their own fears if they are to set Jara's world free.

Our social conversation has gone awry. We are surrounded by noise and are retreating to social media bubbles. As conversations across ideological divides become increasingly difficult, we as a society need to rethink what it means to listen, to think, to create, and to be democratically engaged citizens. Fifteen Paths documents the journey of a disillusioned business professor who came to realize that in order to transcend the noise, we need more imaginative expressions and fewer argumentative ones.

Meghan, a 14-year-old girl, arrives on Parachute Island, a place for deceased children who can live out their dreams in the afterlife, thanks to a magical wishing tree. There, she befriends several teens, including the lovable Ham. But Meghan harbors a secret, one that eats her up in the inside. David is the only adult on the island, and sole caretaker of all the children. He arrived under mysterious circumstances, and slowly the mystery unravels. Soon, he wakes from a coma, paralyzed. Were his adventures on the island just a dream, or something else?

Years have passed since Kevin first read the diary of Oliver Lee in book one of the series. The used bookstore still stands where he was given the diary by an eccentric sales clerk who then vanished, and now a little girl named Alex has wandered through its doors. Mystified by tales her grandmother told her of her best friend, Kevin, who vanished after reading about Oliver Lee, Alex enters the abandoned bookstore and finds the same journal. After taking it home, her grandmother, GG, is furious that she broke into the store.

Mordicai Gerstein's portrayal of Philippe Petit's high-wire walk between the towers of the World Trade Center, The Man Who Walked Between the Towers, won the 2004 Caldecott Medal and was among the most admired books of the year. Now comes a memorable new work, a novel of singular insight and imagination that transports readers to the Old Country.

The book is a rich cocktail of short stories that include macabre murders, fraud, love, self-improvement, hate, and laughter. These tongue-in-cheek tales have been created for enjoyment, entertainment, and pleasure.

Dr. Peter Andresen is a broken man. Once a highly respected psychiatrist, he lives alone, suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder that he steadfastly denies. As the story begins, Peter walks alone on a deserted beach. He doesn't know where he is or what he's doing until he encounters a beautiful young woman named Holly Be. She knows his story and it is her assigned mission to restore meaning to his life. But she fails to maintain the emotional distance required to prevent them from falling in love.

Congressman and Chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, Michael McCaul, has spent years in Washington watching the administration turn a blind eye to the most pressing possible threats to the country. Now, in Failures of Imagination, McCaul turns away from the over-sensationalized, unrealistic fears circulated through the media in order to expose the most legitimate and looming national security threats, which have long been swept under the rug by the administration.

There is a magical land just beyond our imaginations called Jirvania, where stories grow. Muse faeries harvest these 'pearls' and bring them to our world. In the heart of Jirvania stands The Great Library, home of every book ever written, and a portal to other times and places where one can step into stories and experience them firsthand. Homework has never been such fun.

Vollis Simpson was a man with a curious mind—always eager to know how things worked and how to fix them. Growing up on a farm in North Carolina, he loved to tinker with machines. And when he served in the Army Air Corps during WWII, Vollis kept right on tinkering. His ingenuity allowed him to build things no one would have thought to create from scraps—a washing machine out of airplane parts and a motorcycle out of a bike. After the war, his passion for metal creations picked up speed—turning into a whirlwind of windmills as far as the eye could see.

The 21st century is a world in constant change. In A New Culture of Learning, Doug Thomas and John Seely Brown pursue an understanding of how the forces of change, and emerging waves of interest associated with these forces, inspire and invite us to imagine a future of learning that is as powerful as it is optimistic.