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Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness
by Nathaniel TkaczFew virtues are as celebrated in contemporary culture as openness. Rooted in software culture and carrying more than a whiff of Silicon Valley technical utopianism, openness--of decision-making, data, and organizational structure--is seen as the cure for many problems in politics and business. But what does openness mean, and what would a political theory of openness look like? With Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness, Nathaniel Tkacz uses Wikipedia, the most prominent product of open organization, to analyze the theory and politics of openness in practice--and to break its spell. Through discussions of edit wars, article deletion policies, user access levels, and more, Tkacz enables us to see how the key concepts of openness--including collaboration, ad-hocracy, and the splitting of contested projects through "forking”--play out in reality. The resulting book is the richest critical analysis of openness to date, one that roots media theory in messy reality and thereby helps us move beyond the vaporware promises of digital utopians and take the first steps toward truly understanding what openness does, and does not, have to offer.
Wild Abandon: American Literature and the Identity Politics of Ecology (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture #185)
by Alexander MenriskyThe American wilderness narrative, which divides nature from culture, has remained remarkably persistent despite the rise of ecological science, which emphasizes interconnection between these spheres. Wild Abandon considers how ecology's interaction with radical politics of authenticity in the twentieth century has kept that narrative alive in altered form. As ecology gained political momentum in the 1960s and 1970s, many environmentalists combined it with ideas borrowed from psychoanalysis and a variety of identity-based social movements. The result was an identity politics of ecology that framed ecology itself as an authentic identity position repressed by cultural forms, including social differences and even selfhood. Through readings of texts by Edward Abbey, Simon Ortiz, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Jon Krakauer, among others, Alexander Menrisky argues that writers have both dramatized and critiqued this tendency, in the process undermining the concept of authenticity altogether and granting insight into alternative histories of identity and environment.
Wild About Literacy: Fun Activities for Preschool (Between the Lions)
by Between the Lion's StaffBetween the Lions®, the Emmy Award-winning PBS KIDS program, brings the joy of reading into millions of homes. From their home at the public library, lion cubs Lionel and Leona and their parents Theo and Cleo introduce children to basic literacy concepts and build the foundations for a lifetime love of reading. Now teachers can bring that same educational fun into the classroom with Wild About Literacy. This books more than 150 activities featureing theme connections, vocabulary, materials and preparation, and extension ideas. Each chapter focuses on one component of literacy so teachers can use a targeted approach to help children learn essential literacy skills. The activities are easy and fun, and they are appropriate for small groups or for children who need one-on-one attention.
Wild and Free Book Club: 28 Activities to Make Books Come Alive (Wild And Free Ser.)
by Ainsley ArmentFrom Wild + Free, a wonderful collection of creative activities for parents, educators, and caregivers filled with engaging and fun ideas to help kids fall in love with literature and reading.Foster a love of reading in your child with Wild + Free Book Club. An invaluable educational resource curated by Wild + Free families around the world, this full-color illustrated book offers imaginative suggestions for creating themed book clubs for kids. Here are hands-on activities, games, food, and decoration ideas inspired by a carefully chosen list of beloved classic novels, as well as discussion questions about plots and themes that engage kids minds and sparks their curiosity.Wild + Free Book Club is filled with fun ideas for each book, including:Anne of Green Gables—host a picnic tea partyThe Secret Garden—craft a terrarium, a secret garden of your ownCharlotte’s Web—host an old-time country fairThe Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe—turn your front door into a magical portal to NarniaWith step-by-step instructions, lush photography, and family-tested and kid-approved activities, Wild + Free Book Club will help parents and educators inspire children and instill a lifelong passion for literature and the joy of books.The Wild + Free Book Club reading list:The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Anne of Green Gables Around the World in 80 Days Black Beauty Charlotte’s Web The CrossoverEsperanza RisingThe Evolution of Calpurnia TateFarmer Boy From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler The Green Ember Heidi The Hobbit Island of the Blue Dolphins The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Little House in the Big Woods A Little PrincessLittle Women Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH My Side of the Mountain Peter Pan Pippi LongstockingRobin Hood Roll of Thunder, Hear My CryThe Secret GardenThe Swiss Family Robinson Treasure Island The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street
Wild Animal ABC
by P. J. HultsFrom Allen the Aardvark to Zack the Zebra, kids are introduced to the alphabet in this whimsically illustrated picture book featuring charming wild animals! With each turn of the page, discover a positive message from A to Z that encourages kindness to old friends and new, while celebrating reading, learning, and creating. The book is filled with original watercolors and simple rhymes, and 26 wild animals with distinct personalities and valuable character traits remind us that simple fun is best, silly is good, and it's important to always be yourself. Join Chester the Chipmunk, Ingrid the Ibis, Wilhelmina the Whale, and all their friends as they bring the ABCs to life. Nonfiction facts and a full spread of all the animals wearing hats add an extra touch of educational fun.
Wild Animal Babies: An Alphabet Book
by Katie T. ChristiansenLearn the alphabet with wild baby animals!—an alphabet book for ages 3 to 5 From sticky-tongued Anteater pups to striped Zebra foals, introduce your 3- to 5-year-old to the alphabet the fun way with some of the most adorable wild animal babies from around the world. Did you know baby Jackrabbits use their jumbo-sized ears to cool off in the hot desert? Or that Rhinoceros calves roll in the mud to protect their skin? Kids will have a blast discovering cool facts on the homes, habits, and family relationships of these lovable wild animals while getting up close and personal with cute and colorful illustrations. This animal-themed alphabet book includes: A is for animal—Your little one will learn the alphabet with one animal for each letter from A-Z plus the name for each baby animal. Adorable artwork—Engaging illustrations invite your child on a memorable journey into the wild world of 26 baby animals. Wildlife facts—From the scrublands of Australia to the rain forests of South America to the savannas of Africa, tiny explorers get to see how each baby animal lives, loves, and grows. Bring the alphabet to life in the wild with the cute and colorful creatures in Wild Animal Babies.
Wild Animal Skins in Victorian Britain: Zoos, Collections, Portraits, and Maps
by Ann C. ColleyWhat did the 13th Earl of Derby, his twenty-two-year-old niece, Manchester’s Belle Vue Zoo, and even some ordinary laborers all have in common? All were avid collectors and exhibitors of exotic, and frequently unruly, specimens. In her study of Britain’s craze for natural history collecting, Ann C. Colley makes extensive use of archival materials to examine the challenges, preoccupations, and disordered circumstances that attended the amassing of specimens from faraway places only vaguely known to the British public. As scientific institutions sent collectors to bring back exotic animals and birds for study and classification by anatomists and zoologist, it soon became apparent that collecting skins rather than live animals or birds was a relatively more manageable endeavor. Colley looks at the collecting, exhibiting, and portraying of animal skins to show their importance as trophies of empire and representations of identity. While a zoo might display skins to promote and glorify Britain’s colonial achievements, Colley suggests that the reality of collecting was characterized more by chaos than imperial order. For example, Edward Lear’s commissioned illustrations of the Earl of Derby’s extensive collection challenge the colonial’s or collector’s commanding gaze, while the Victorian public demonstrated a yearning to connect with their own wildness by touching the skins of animals. Colley concludes with a discussion of the metaphorical uses of wild skins by Gerard Manley Hopkins and other writers, exploring the idea of skin as a locus of memory and touch where one’s past can be traced in the same way that nineteenth-century mapmakers charted a landscape. Throughout the book Colley calls upon recent theories about the nature and function of skin and touch to structure her discussion of the Victorian fascination with wild animal skins.
Wild Blessings: The Poetry of Lucille Clifton (Southern Literary Studies)
by Hilary HolladayWidely acclaimed for her powerful explorations of race, womanhood, spirituality, and mortality, poet Lucille Clifton has published thirteen volumes of poems since 1969 and has received numerous accolades for her work, including the 2000 National Book Award for Blessing the Boats. Her verse is featured in almost every anthology of contemporary poetry, and her readings draw large and enthusiastic audiences. Although Clifton's poetry is a pleasure to read, it is neither as simple nor as blithely celebratory as readers sometimes assume. The bursts of joy found in her polished, elegant lines are frequently set against a backdrop of regret and sorrow. Alternately consoling, stimulating, and emotionally devastating, Clifton's poems are unforgettable. In Wild Blessings, Hilary Holladay offers the first full-length study of Clifton's poetry, drawing on a broad knowledge of the American poetic tradition and African American poetry in particular. Holladay places Clifton's poems in multiple contexts -- personal, political, and literary -- as she explicates major themes and analyzes specific works: Clifton's poems about womanhood, a central concern throughout her career; her fertility poems, which are provocatively compared with Sylvia Plath's poems on the same subject; her relation to the Black Arts Movement and to other black female poets, such as Gwendolyn Brooks and Sonia Sanchez; her biblical poems; her elegies; and her poignant family history, Generations, an extended prose poem. In addition to a new preface written after Clifton's death in 2010, this updated edition includes an epilogue that discusses the poetry collections she published after 2004.Readers encountering Lucille Clifton's poems for the first time and those long familiar with her distinctive voice will benefit from Hilary Holladay's striking insights and her illuminating interview with the influential American poet.
The Wild Book
by Margarita EngleFefa struggles with words. She has word blindness, or dyslexia, and the doctor says she will never read or write. Every time she tries, the letters jumble and spill off the page, leaping and hopping away like bullfrogs. How will she ever understand them? But her mother has an idea. She gives Fefa a blank book filled with clean white pages. "Think of it as a garden," she says. Soon Fefa starts to sprinkle words across the pages of her wild book. She lets her words sprout like seedlings, shaky at first, then growing stronger and surer with each new day. And when her family is threatened, it is what Fefa has learned from her wild book that saves them.
Wild Cat Falling
by MudroorooThis was the first novel by a writer of Aboriginal blood to be published in Australia and in 1965 marked a unique literary event. Wild Cat Falling is the story of an Australian Aboriginal youth who grows up on the ragged outskirts of a country town. He falls into petty crime, goes to gaol and comes out to do battle once more with the society that put him there. Mudrooroo is active in Aboriginal cultural affairs and is a prolific writer.
Wild Child: Intensive Parenting and Posthumanist Ethics
by Naomi MorgensternExploring how the figure of the “wild child” in contemporary fiction grapples with contemporary cultural anxieties about reproductive ethics and the future of humanity In the eighteenth century, Western philosophy positioned the figure of “the child” at the border between untamed nature and rational adulthood. Contemporary cultural anxieties about the ethics and politics of reproductive choice and the crisis of parental responsibility have freighted this liminal figure with new meaning in twenty-first-century narratives.In Wild Child, Naomi Morgenstern explores depictions of children and their adult caregivers in extreme situations—ranging from the violence of slavery and sexual captivity to accidental death, mass murder, torture, and global apocalypse—in such works as Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin, Emma Donoghue’s Room, and Denis Villeneuve’s film Prisoners. Morgenstern shows how, in such narratives, “wild” children function as symptoms of new ethical crises and existential fears raised by transformations in the technology and politics of reproduction and by increased ethical questions about the very decision to reproduce. In the face of an uncertain future that no longer confirms the confidence of patriarchal humanism, such narratives displace or project present-day apprehensions about maternal sacrifice and paternal protection onto the wildness of children in a series of hyperbolically violent scenes.Urgent and engaging, Wild Child offers the only extended consideration of how twenty-first-century fiction has begun to imagine the decision to reproduce and the ethical challenges of posthumanist parenting.
Wild Ducks Flying Backward
by Tom RobbinsKnown for his meaty seriocomic novels, Tom Robbins's shorter work has appeared in publications ranging from Esquire to Harper's, from Playboy to the New York Times. Collected here for the first time in paperback, the essays, articles, observations--and even some untypical country-music lyrics--offer a rare overview of the eclectic sensibility of an American original. Whether rocking with the Doors, depoliticizing Picasso's Guernica, lamenting the angst-ridden state of contemporary literature, or drooling over tomato sandwiches and a species of womanhood he calls "the genius waitress," Tom Robbins's briefer writings exhibit the five traits that perhaps best characterize his novels: an imaginative wit, a cheerfully brash disregard for convention, a sweetly nasty eroticism, a mystical but keenly observant eye, and an irrepressible love of language. Embedded in this primarily journalistic compilation are brand-new short stories, a sheaf of largely unpublished poems, and an offbeat assessment of our divided nation. herever you open Wild Ducks Flying Backward, you'll encounter the serious playfulness that percolates from the mind of a self-described "romantic Zen hedonist" and "stray dog in the banquet halls of culture. "
The Wild Goose (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies #14)
by Mori Ogai Ogai MoriMori Ogai (1862–1922), one of the giants of modern Japanese literature, wrote The Wild Goose at the turn of the century. Set in the early 1880s, it was, for contemporary readers, a nostalgic return to a time when the nation was embarking on an era of dramatic change. Ogai’s narrator is a middle-aged man reminiscing about an unconsummated affair, dating to his student days, between his classmate and a young woman kept by a moneylender. At a time when writers tended to depict modern, alienated male intellectuals, the characters of The Wild Goose are diverse, including not only students preparing for a privileged intellectual life and members of the plebeian classes who provide services to them, but also a pair of highly developed female characters. The author’s sympathetic and penetrating portrayal of the dilemmas and frustrations faced by women in this early period of Japan’s modernization makes the story of particular interest to readers today. Ogai was not only a prolific and popular writer, but also a protean figure in early modern Japan: critic, translator, physician, military officer, and eventually Japan’s Surgeon General. His rigorous and broad education included the Chinese classics as well as Dutch and German; he gained admittance to the Medical School of Tokyo Imperial University at the age of only fifteen. Once established as a military physician, he was sent to Germany for four years to study aspects of European medicine still unfamiliar to the Japanese. Upon his return, he produced his first works of fiction and translations of English and European literature. Ogai’s writing is extolled for its unparalleled style and psychological insight, nowhere better demonstrated than in The Wild Goose.
Wild Grass and Morning Blossoms Gathered at Dusk
by Xun LuA brilliant new translation of the short improvisational fiction and memoirs of Lu Xun, the father of modern Chinese literature.This captivating translation assembles two volumes by Lu Xun, the founder of modern Chinese literature and one of East Asia’s most important thinkers at the turn of the twentieth century. Wild Grass and Morning Blossoms Gathered at Dusk represent a pinnacle of achievement alongside Lu Xun’s famed short stories.In Wild Grass, a collection of twenty-three experimental pieces, surreal scenes come alive through haunting language and vivid imagery. These are landscapes populated by ghosts, talking animals, and sentient plants, where a protagonist might come face-to-face with their own corpse. By depicting the common struggle of real and imagined creatures to survive in an inhospitable world, Lu Xun asks the deceptively simple question, “What does it mean to be human?”Alongside Wild Grass is Morning Blossoms Gathered at Dusk, a memoir in eight essays capturing the literary master’s formative years and featuring a motley cast of dislocated characters—children, servants, outcasts, the dead and the dying. Giving voice to vulnerable subjects and depicting their hopes and despair as they negotiate an unforgiving existence, Morning Blossoms affirms the value of all beings and elucidates a central predicament of the human condition: feeling without a home in the world.Beautifully translated and introduced by Eileen J. Cheng, these lyrical texts blur the line between autobiography and literary fiction. Together the two collections provide a new window into Lu Xun’s mind and his quest to find beauty and meaning in a cruel and unjust world.
The Wild Irish Girl (Pickering Women's Classics)
by Stephen Copley Claire ConnollyThis novel intervenes in many of the literary and philosophical debates of the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, forging a connection between the eighteenth-century discourse of sentiment and the emergent nineteenth-century concept of the nation. Lady Morgan's Introductory Letters are included.
Wild Kids: Two Novels About Growing Up (Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan)
by Ta-Chun ChangThese two searingly funny and unsettling portraits of teenagers beyond the control and largely beneath the notice of adults in 1980s Taiwan are the first English translations of works by Taiwan's most famous and best-selling literary cult figure. Chang Ta-chun's intricate narrative and keen, ironic sense of humor poignantly and piercingly convey the disillusionment and cynicism of modern Taiwanese youth.Interweaving the events between the birth of the narrator's younger sister and her abortion at the age of nineteen, the first novel, My Kid Sister, evokes the complex emotional impressions of youth and the often bizarre social dilemmas of adolescence. Combining discussions of fate, existentialism, sexual awakening, and everyday "absurdities" in a typically dysfunctional household, it documents the loss of innocence and the deconstruction of a family.In Wild Child, fourteen-year-old Hou Shichun drops out of school, runs away from home, and descends into the Taiwanese underworld, where he encounters an oddball assortment of similarly lost adolescents in desperate circumstances. This novel will inevitably invite comparisons with the classic The Catcher in the Rye, but unlike Holden Caulfield, Hou isn't given any second chances. With characteristic frankness and irony, Chang's teenagers bear witness to a new form of cultural and spiritual bankruptcy.
Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life
by Natalie GoldbergNatalie Goldberg, who has published a novel, a book of poetry and books on how to be a writer, has written 62 3 to four page chapters, each focuses on elements of writing or the experiences shared by many writers in this book which is part memoir and part instruction manual. She is a practitioner of Zen Buddhism which influences her manner of appreciating everything in her life from her friends, family and acquaintances, to the taste of hot chocolate, the vastness of the sky and the energy you gain as you keep your pencil moving and write with truth and details. She provides many gentle suggestions for exercises meant to expand a writer's understanding of the vast possibilities writing can elucidate. Her tone is generous, humorous, nonthreatening, nonjudgmental, encouraging and down to earth. She shares a writer's moments of exquisite pleasure as new heights of self expression are reached and as the moments of self doubt, fear and frustration are borne. Most of all she welcomes anyone with the will to take time, on a regular basis, to write to proudly call themselves writers believing that as each person adopts the title of writer and writes with persistence and concentration through the rapture and pain of truth as they perceive it, they become practicing writers of worth.
Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life
by Natalie GoldbergSet your creativity free with a writing guide that &“wakes you up like a cross between morning coffee and a friendly Zen master&” (Jack Kornfield). Natalie Goldberg, author of the bestselling Writing Down the Bones, shares her invaluable insight into writing as a source of creative power, and the daily ins and outs of the writer&’s task. Topics include balancing mundane responsibilities with a commitment to writing; knowing when to take risks as a writer and a human being; coming to terms with success, failure, and loss; and learning self-acceptance—both in life and art. Thought-provoking and practical, Wild Mind provides an abundance of suggestions for keeping the writing life vital and active, and includes more than thirty provocative &“try this&” exercises as jump-starters to get your pen moving. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Natalie Goldberg, including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author&’s personal collection.
Wild Mind, Wild Earth: Our Place in the Sixth Extinction
by David HintonExploring the confluence of ancient Chinese spirituality and modern Western environmental thought, Wild Mind, Wild Earth reveals the unrecognized kinship of mind and nature that must be reanimated if we are to end our destruction of the planet.Earth is embroiled in its sixth major extinction event—this time caused not by asteroids or volcanos, but by us. At bottom, preventing this sixth extinction is a spiritual/philosophical problem, for it is the assumptions defining us and our relation to earth that are driving the devastation. Those assumptions insist on a fundamental separation of human and earth that devalues earth and enables our exploitative relation to it.In Wild Mind, Wild Earth, David Hinton explores modes of seeing and being that could save the planet by reestablishing a deep kinship between human and earth: the insights of primal cultures and the Ch&’an (Zen) Buddhism of ancient China. He also shows how these insights have become well-established in the West over the last two hundred years, through the work of poets and philosophers and scientists. This offers marvelous hope and beauty—but like so many of us, Hinton recognizes the sixth extinction is now an inexorable and perhaps unstoppable tragedy. And he reveals how those primal/Zen insights enable us to inhabit even the unfurling catastrophe as a profound kind of liberation. Wild Mind, Wild Earth is a remarkable and revitalizing journey.
Wild Mother Dancing: Maternal Narrative in Canadian Literature
by Di BrandtWild Mother Dancing challenges the historical absence of the mother, who, as subject and character, has been repeatedly suppressed and edited out of the literary canon. In her search for sources for telling the new (or old, forbidden story) against a tradition of narrative absence, Brandt turns to Canadian fiction representing a varety of cultural traditions - Margaret Laurence, Daphne Marlatt, Jovette Marchessault, Joy Kogawa, Sky Lee - and a collection of oral interviews about childbirth told by Mennonite women. The results broaden, enrich, and finally recover the motherstory in ways that have revolutionary implications for our institutions and imaginations.
A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright
by James WrightThe life and work of a major American poet described in his own words."There is something about the very form and occasion of a letter--the possibility it offers, the chance to be as open and tentative and uncertain as one likes and also the chance to formulate certain ideas, very precisely--if one is lucky in one's thoughts," wrote James Wright, one of the great lyric poets of the last century, in a letter to a friend. A Wild Perfection is a compelling collection that captures the exhilarating and moving correspondence between Wright and his many friends. In letters to fellow poets Donald Hall, Theodore Roethke, Galway Kinnell, James Dickey, Mary Oliver, and Robert Bly, Wright explored subjects from his creative process to his struggles with depression and illness.A bright thread of wit, gallantry, and passion for describing his travels and his beloved natural world runs through these letters, which begin in 1946 in Martin's Ferry, Ohio, the hometown he would memorialize in verse, and end in New York City, where he lived for the last fourteen years of his life. Selected Letters is no less than an epistolary chronicle of a significant part of the midcentury American poetry renaissance, as well as the clearest biographical picture now available of a major American poet.
Wild Rivers, Wild Rose (The Alaska Literary Series)
by Sarah BirdsallIn 1941, Anna Harker is attacked by an ax-wielding assailant in the gold-bearing ridges bordering the Alaska Range. It is this moment of savagery that propels the people of Wild Rivers, Wild Rose. Anna’s lover, Wade Daniels, learns of the deaths of Anna’s husband and their worker, and he rushes to the hills to look for Anna and hunt the murderer. As she lies dying on the tundra, Anna relives the major events of her Alaska life while searching her memories for what could have led to the violence. And, decades later, an outsider named Billie Sutherland steps into a community still haunted by the murders. Plagued by her own ghosts, Billie delves into the past, opening old wounds. In this gripping novel by Sarah Birdsall, lives are laid bare and secrets ring out in the resonant Alaska Range foothills.
Wild Romanticism (Routledge Environmental Literature, Culture and Media)
by Markus Poetzsch Cassandra FalkeWild Romanticism consolidates contemporary thinking about conceptions of the wild in British and European Romanticism, clarifying the emergence of wilderness as a cultural, symbolic, and ecological idea. This volume brings together the work of twelve scholars, who examine representations of wildness in canonical texts such as Frankenstein, Northanger Abbey, "Kubla Khan," "Expostulation and Reply," and Childe Harold´s Pilgrimage, as well as lesser-known works by Radcliffe, Clare, Hölderlin, P.B. Shelley, and Hogg. Celebrating the wild provided Romantic-period authors with a way of thinking about nature that resists instrumentalization and anthropocentricism, but writing about wilderness also engaged them in debates about the sublime and picturesque as aesthetic categories, about gender and the cultivation of independence as natural, and about the ability of natural forces to resist categorical or literal enclosure. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Romanticism, environmental literature, environmental history, and the environmental humanities more broadly.
The Wild Side: Angry Animals
by Henry Billings Melissa BillingsThe articles in this book spotlight the awesome powers of animals, powers that are unleashed when animals are angry or frightened or simply acting from instinct.
The Wild Side: Bizarre Endings (The\wild Side)
by Henry Billings Melissa BillingsStimulate reading excitement with nonfiction crafted for middle-level readability <li>This best-selling series motivates with high-interest selections at middle-level readability <li>Emphasis is on reading nonfiction <li>Critical thinking questions prepare students for state and national tests <P><P>The Wild Side, a perennial favorite among struggling readers, mesmerizes with astonishing tales of true-life adventures. One appreciative teacher notes: "I have difficulty removing the books from their hands at the end of the period!" Comprehension questions reinforce literal understanding, while critical thinking questions encourage students to consider the author's purpose, make inferences, identify cause and effect, and make predictions. With all this excitement, students won't realize how well designed this series is for reinforcing state reading standards. <li>Reading Level 4-6 <li>Interest Level 6-12