Newbery Medalist Paul Fleischman reflects on his childhood with his award-winning father, Sid Fleischman, and details his own path to becoming a writer in this memorable book that is part memoir, part travelogue, and part reflection on craft and creativity.No Map, Great Trip is an excellent choice for aspiring authors, language arts classrooms, and fans of Gail Carson Levine's Writing Magic. Acclaimed author Paul Fleischman considers how growing up with a father who was an award-winning author helped to shape and inspire his own career. Paul and Sid Fleischman are the only father-son Newbery medalists in history, and life in the Fleischman home was extraordinary. Readers will feel like part of the family in this humorous and aspirational chronicle. Paul Fleischman is the author of the Newbery Award-winning Joyful Noise and the classroom classic Seedfolks, as well as many other acclaimed and beloved titles. His books are taught and performed...

Common GroundA vacant lot, rat-infested and filled with garbage, looked like no place for a garden. Especially to a neighborhood of strangers where no one seems to care. Until one day, a young girl clears a small space and digs into the hard-packed soil to plant her precious bean seeds. Suddenly, the soil holds promise: To Curtis, who believes he can win back Lateesha's heart with a harvest of tomatoes; to Virgil's dad, who seems a fortune to be made from growing lettuce; and even to Mariclea, sixteen and pregnant, wishing she were dead.Thirteen very different voices--old, young, Haitian, Hispanic, tough, haunted, and hopeful tell one amazing story about a garden that transforms a neighborhood.An old man seeking renewal, a young girl connecting to a father she never knew, a pregnant teenager dreading motherhood.Thirteen voices tell one story of the flowering of a vacant city lot into a neighborhood garden. Old, young, Jamaican, Korean, Hispanic, tough,...

Written to be read aloud by two voices--sometimes alternating, sometimes simultaneous--here is a collection of irresistible poems that celebrate the insect world, from the short life of the mayfly to the love song of the book louse. Funny, sad, loud, and quiet, each of these poems resounds with a booming, boisterous, joyful noise. In this remarkable volume of poetry for two voices, Paul Fleischman verbally re-creates the "Booming/boisterious/joyful noise" of insects. The poems resound with the pulse of the cicada and the drone of the honeybee. Eric Beddows′s vibrant drawings send each insect soaring, spinning, or creeping off the page in its own unique way.A clear and fascinating guide to the insect world--from chrysalid butterflies to whirligig beetles-- and an exultant celebration of life.Ages 6+

Aaron has never left alone before. He is mute, and depends on his mother for everything. But tomorrow Aaron will be twelve years old, old enough to stay home by himself while his mother goes to town. Everything will be fine, as long as he stays close to the house. And if there's trouble, Aaron can write what he needs to say.Trouble there is aplenty. When a terrible blizzard keeps his mother from returning home, Aaron sets out to search for her--but he stumbles upon the mysterious Half-a-Moon Inn, where the crafty Miss Grackle forces him to work for her. How can Aaron stop her from carrying out her devilish schemes--before it's too late?

Seventeen-year-old Olivia hasn't seen her father since she was eight months old. But when he summons her out of the blue, Olivia travels cross country to New Hampshire to meet him. That summer, she learns to adapt to rural life and to try to understand her reclusive father. The next summer, following high school graduation, she returns to recreate her father's seventy-mile annual bike ride – reflecting on her own personal journey to understand the true meaning of love and kinship.

It is December 1681, and the words of Mr. Baggot, the tithingman, terrify young William. William is living a strange double life. By day he is a printer's apprentice living in a white man's house. By night, he is Weetasket of the Narraganset tribe who must risk Baggot's wrath to search for his lost brother. Then comes the winter celebration of the Saturnalia—the ancient Roman holiday on which masters and slaves trade roles. Will William's secrets be revealed? And what dark deeds of others will be brought to light on this fateful night?

Aimed at a generation of short attention spans and a taste for razor-sharp comedy, the rapid-fire ZAP is a smart, farcical play for high-school students that's ready to bring the house down. When they're not dusting off the old classics—over and over—high-school drama departments are constantly in search of new material. But what play could possibly suit the point-and-click attention spans of kids born with remote controls in their cribs? Cue the lights for ZAP, a nonstop farce that juxtaposes seven different plays—performed simultaneously—with a comic genius reminiscent of masters from Monty Python to the Marx Brothers. Combining spot-on parodies of Anton Chekhov, Agatha Christie, Tennessee Williams, Samuel Beckett, Neil Simon and performance art and throwing in scenes from RICHARD III for good measure, ZAP flicks rapidly back and forth from play to play, with hilarious results. As characters from one play end up on the set of another, their...

Welcome to Cliffside High, the school of your nightmares. It's run by the Huns, a ruthless clique of rich students—and, as poor Charity Chase discovers, messing with them can be murder. From the Newbery Award-winning author, Paul Fleischman.

Paul Fleischman spins three engrossing stories about the unexpected ways an artist's creations reveal truths—tales whose intriguing plots and many moods will entertain readers and inspire future writers. Can wood, copper, or marble communicate? They can if they are the graven images in Newbery Medalist Paul Fleischman's trio of eerie, beguiling short stories. If you whisper a secret into a wooden statue's ear, will anyone find out? Can a wobbly weathervane bearing the image of Saint Crispin, the patron saint of shoemakers, steer a love-struck apprentice toward the girl of his dreams? And if a ghost hires a sculptor to carve a likeness of him holding a drink to a baby's lips, what ghastly crime might lie behind his request? And, in a brand-new afterword, the acclaimed storyteller reveals how he found his own author's voice.

When sixteen-year-old Brent Bishop inadvertently causes the death of a young woman, he is sent on an unusual journey of repentance, building wind toys across the land.In his most ambitious novel to date, Newbery winner Paul Fleischman traces Brent's healing pilgrimage from Washington State to California, Florida, and Maine, and describes the many lives set into new motion by the ingenious creations Brent leaves behind.Paul Fleischman is the master of multivoiced books for younger readers. In Whirligig he has created a novel about hidden connections that is itself a wonder of spinning hearts and grand surprises.

Newbery Medalist Paul Fleischman's fictional treatment of this Civil War battle is an intimate and sweeping portrait of this period in human history.Northerners, Southerners, generals, couriers, dreaming boys, and worried sisters describe the glory, the horror, the thrill, and the disillusionment of the first battle of the Civil War.Supports the Common Core State Standards.