read this - STORY TIME
Factory Girl
(pictured above)
By Barbara Greenwood
Next time you’re about to complain about having to make your bed, think about what it was like for kids who lived a hundred years ago, many of whom had to work for a living. Factory Girl tells the story of 12-year-old Emily Watson who makes four dollars a week working in a garment factory. It’s the early 1900s, and Emily needs the money to help her poor family survive. Emily’s story is fiction, made up by author Barbara Greenwood, but it’s based on fact, and the book also contains lots of real-life photographs of children no older than you earning their wages in hot, dangerous factories, in coal mines or as street vendors.
The Invention of Hugo Cabret
By Brian Selznick
Imagine a regular novel and a graphic novel wrapped into one and tied together with a whole lot of mystery, and you’ll have some idea of where this imaginative book begins. The story of young orphan Hugo gets going not with words, but with page after page of black and white pencil drawings that draw you in as you follow Hugo through the streets of Paris and to the train station where he lives alone. Then the text begins, telling the story of Hugo’s strange life. Hugo lives quietly and anonymously within the walls of that train station, where he finds an odd mechanical toy and gets wrapped up with a strange young girl and an angry old man.
One Well: The Story of Water on Earth
By Rochelle Strauss
April 22nd is Earth Day, and this book is a great way to celebrate and learn tons of mind-blowing facts. For instance, did you know that the amount of water on Earth has been the same for billions of years? That’s right, no matter how much evaporates, how much you drink or how much it rains, there is always the same amount of H2O on our planet. It just cycles through different forms, like lakes, food (tomatoes are 95% water), animals (just like dogs and elephants, people are 70% water) and clouds. Speaking of clouds, did you know that the average puffy white cloud weighs more than two blue whales, most of which of course is water? So you can see why it’s so important to keep that water clean and usable, which brings us back to Earth Day…