"'Never,' shrieked Miss Breakbone, 'have I been asked to teach such a scraping-together of such fiddling, twiddling, time-squandering, mind-wandering, doodling, dozing, don't know dunderheads!'" If the Trunchbull (the terrifying headmistress from Roald Dahl's Matilda) ever had a younger redheaded sister, Miss Breakbone would be the one. She stands... Read More

"Happy birthday to me," sings the jovial little toddler, clad in a white diaper and a striped birthday hat. "Look! I got a present!" he announces. It's a box as big as he is, wrapped in polka dotted paper and ribbon. What's inside? A big brown box! What's inside? It's... Read More

"There once was a boy named Milo who didn't know what to do with himself - not just sometimes, but always." So begins my number one favorite children's fiction book of all times. I first read it when I was in seventh grade and have revisited it scores of times... Read More

"Higher! Higher!" a little brown-pigtailed girl calls to her grinning dad as he pushes her on a swing at the playground. Holding on to the steel chains on either side, higher and higher she flies with each push, above the head of a giraffe, above the tall building where children... Read More

Want your kids to ace the SATs? Or at least learn some ace new words they'll never forget? You've come to the right book. Share one of these quirky short stories each day, and by the end of the month, your test-takers will become winsome or maybe  Read More

It's 1939, and in London, it seems as if war with Hitler is imminent. Dr. James Hamilton, a dedicated, low-paid London doctor and a widower, is reluctantly sending away his only child, eleven-year-old Tally, on scholarship to Delderton, a boarding school in the south of England, to escape the expected... Read More