With A Little Help From Our Friends

Celebrate friendship with this lyrical picture book that beautifully illustrates John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s world-renowned words from “With a Little Help from My Friends.” I get by with a little help from my friends… In this gorgeously illustrated picture book, the universally loved words to “With a Little Help from My Friends” come vividly to life, showing that sometimes, all you need is a little help from your friends!

In this book, an award-winning journalist tells the story of people devising innovative ways to live as they approach retirement, options that ensure they are surrounded by a circle of friends, family, and neighbors. Based on visits and interviews at many communities around the country, Beth Baker weaves a rich tapestry of grassroots alternatives, some of them surprisingly affordable: • a mobile home cooperative in small-town Oregon • a senior artists colony in Los Angeles • neighbors helping neighbors in "Villages" or "naturally occurring retirement communities" • intentional cohousing communities • best friends moving in together • multigenerational families that balance togetherness and privacy • niche communities including such diverse groups as retired postal workers, gays and lesbians, and Zen Buddhists Drawing on new research showing the importance of social support to healthy aging and the risks associated with loneliness and isolation, the author encourages the reader to plan for a future with strong connections. Baker explores whether individuals in declining health can really stay rooted in their communities through the end of life and concludes by examining the challenge of expanding the home-care workforce and the potential of new technologies like webcams and assistive robots. This book is the recipient of the annual Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize for the best project in the area of medicine.

Friendship is remembering all of those precious girlhood moments we spent with our dearest pals, a variety of shared experiences that helped mold us into who we are today. Heidi Wozniak's friendship-inspired gift book is the perfect token of gratitude for those friends who've been by your side all of these years, through so many ages and stages. Heidi's delicate watercolors blend beautifully with nostalgic prose, creating a perfect gift for the friends who've been there through thick and thin. Because as any good pal knows, the days would be much bleaker if it weren't for a little help from our friends!

This conversation-based approach accelerates language acquisition for EL students and advances academics and social–emotional learning for all. The authors present a research-based pedagogical model to help K–12 teachers modify the way they plan and implement their lessons to better support the linguistic, cognitive, and social–emotional development of culturally and linguistically diverse students. “The authors remind us that we are working too hard in our roles as providers of knowledge and literacy. Rather, a focus on collaborative interactions among students better enables their autonomy, mutual learning, and self-directed paths to meaning and knowledge. The teacher onus is reduced, yet students’ ownership and confidence are bolstered in more socioconstructive and effectual ways. This work is a must read for all educators!” —Socorro G. Herrera, Kansas State University and author of Accelerating Literacy for Diverse Learners “Describes a system of classroom practice that centers on discourse-rich pedagogies. This book makes an important contribution to the growing field of culturally and linguistically sustaining instructional strategies.” —Cory Buxton, College of Education, Oregon State University “The authors’ detailed model for achieving ‘joint productive activity’ transforms the mysterious alchemy of ‘great teaching’ into a thoughtful, collaborative, and mindful process all teachers can use to engage students in learning.” —Betsy R. Rymes, Penn Graduate School of Education

In this book, an award-winning journalist tells the story of people devising innovative ways to live as they approach retirement, options that ensure they are surrounded by a circle of friends, family, and neighbors. Based on visits and interviews at many communities around the country, Beth Baker weaves a rich tapestry of grassroots alternatives, some of them surprisingly affordable: • a mobile home cooperative in small-town Oregon • a senior artists colony in Los Angeles • neighbors helping neighbors in "Villages" or "naturally occurring retirement communities" • intentional cohousing communities • best friends moving in together • multigenerational families that balance togetherness and privacy • niche communities including such diverse groups as retired postal workers, gays and lesbians, and Zen Buddhists Drawing on new research showing the importance of social support to healthy aging and the risks associated with loneliness and isolation, the author encourages the reader to plan for a future with strong connections. Baker explores whether individuals in declining health can really stay rooted in their communities through the end of life and concludes by examining the challenge of expanding the home-care workforce and the potential of new technologies like webcams and assistive robots. This book is the recipient of the annual Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize for the best project in the area of medicine.

Jim Gillespie and his wife Judy are the parents of six grown children. He has been a resident of Park Ridge, Illinois for the past 65 years. Jim’s hobbies consist of family vacations, playing jazz music, and of course creative writing. For seventeen years Jim has published a Family Anthology consisting of family vignettes, poems, short stories, thought pieces and family works. Jim currently is the President of the Union League Civic and Arts Foundation, an organization that supports youth in the arts and civics.

Are you ready to rock? Join the Beat Bugs and play guitar along with 10 songs from the hit TV show inspired by songs made famous by the Beatles. Use the whammy bar and sound buttons to add rockin' effects to each song, including "All You Need Is Love," "Ticket To Ride," "Hello Goodbye," and more! Lyrics printed right in the book make it easy for children to join the band and sing along. Music and singing build literacy skills, and hands-on guitar promotes learning through play!

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Finalist for the PEN/USA Award in Creative Nonfiction, the Thurber Prize for American Humor, and the Audie Award in Biography/Memoir This Random House Reader’s Circle edition includes a reading group guide and a conversation between Firoozeh Dumas and Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner! “Remarkable . . . told with wry humor shorn of sentimentality . . . In the end, what sticks with the reader is an exuberant immigrant embrace of America.”—San Francisco Chronicle In 1972, when she was seven, Firoozeh Dumas and her family moved from Iran to Southern California, arriving with no firsthand knowledge of this country beyond her father’s glowing memories of his graduate school years here. More family soon followed, and the clan has been here ever since. Funny in Farsi chronicles the American journey of Dumas’s wonderfully engaging family: her engineer father, a sweetly quixotic dreamer who first sought riches on Bowling for Dollars and in Las Vegas, and later lost his job during the Iranian revolution; her elegant mother, who never fully mastered English (nor cared to); her uncle, who combated the effects of American fast food with an army of miraculous American weight-loss gadgets; and Firoozeh herself, who as a girl changed her name to Julie, and who encountered a second wave of culture shock when she met and married a Frenchman, becoming part of a one-couple melting pot. In a series of deftly drawn scenes, we watch the family grapple with American English (hot dogs and hush puppies?—a complete mystery), American traditions (Thanksgiving turkey?—an even greater mystery, since it tastes like nothing), and American culture (Firoozeh’s parents laugh uproariously at Bob Hope on television, although they don’t get the jokes even when she translates them into Farsi). Above all, this is an unforgettable story of identity, discovery, and the power of family love. It is a book that will leave us all laughing—without an accent. Praise for Funny in Farsi “Heartfelt and hilarious—in any language.”—Glamour “A joyful success.”—Newsday “What’s charming beyond the humor of this memoir is that it remains affectionate even in the weakest, most tenuous moments for the culture. It’s the brilliance of true sophistication at work.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review “Often hilarious, always interesting . . . Like the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding, this book describes with humor the intersection and overlapping of two cultures.”—The Providence Journal “A humorous and introspective chronicle of a life filled with love—of family, country, and heritage.”—Jimmy Carter “Delightfully refreshing.”—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel “[Funny in Farsi] brings us closer to discovering what it means to be an American.”—San Jose Mercury News