DISPLAY: Get Carried Away with Reading

Vernon the toad takes the silent Bird on a journey in hopes of finding Bird's home.

Because You Are My Teacher
By: Sherry North

In illustrations and verse, lists some of the places a teacher would take her students if she had the means, from a hot-air balloon trip over China's Great Wall to an airboat ride in the Everglades to observe alligators.

Up and Away!: How Two Brothers Invented the Hot Air Balloon
By: Jason Henry

"Back in 1782, in Annonay, France, lived Joseph Montgolfier, a dreamer and an inventor who was curious about how everything worked. When one day a gust of wind blew his papers into the fireplace, he noticed that something lifted the pages into the air--and he realized that heat could make things rise. With the help of his brother Étienne, he began to experiment ... and created the world's first flying machine, sparking the birth of flight. This beautifully illustrated picture book tells the story of how his hot-air balloon came to be, King Louis XVI's visit to see it fly, and the three animals--a rooster, a duck, and a sheep--who became its very first passengers"--Jacket.

A Voyage in the Clouds : The (Mostly) True Story of the First International Flight by Balloon in 1785
By: Matthew Olshan

Dr. John Jeffries and his pilot, Jean-Pierre Blanchard, each want to be the first man to fly from one country to another, across the English Channel. There's only one problem: they can't stand each other! Inspired by the true story of the first international flight.

Hot- Air Henry
By: Mary Calhoun

A sassy Siamese cat stows away on a hot air balloon and ends up taking a fur-raising flight across the mountains.

The Secret Circus
By: Johanna Wright

Mice carefully dress for an evening out, journey across Paris in a hot air balloon, and finally arrive at a secret place to see the circus.

The Hot Air Balloon Book : Build and Launch Kongming Lanterns, Solar Tetroons, and More
By: Clive Catterall

Author and inventor Clive Catterall provides illustrated, step-by-step instructions for building eight different homemade models of hot air balloons, as well as the science and history behind them.

The Amazing Air Balloon
By: Jean Van Leeuwen

In this story based on true events, a thirteen-year-old apprentice takes the first manned hot air balloon flight in America and gains new insight into life's possibilities.

Comments

Review: The Factory

The Factory By Catherine Egan New York, NY : Scholastic Inc., 2025. Fiction. 306 pages. Thirteen-year-old Asher Doyle has been invited to join the Factory, a secretive research facility in the desert which ostensibly extracts renewable energy from the electromagnetic fields of its young recruits. But Asher soon realizes something sinister is going on. Kids are getting sick. The adults who run the Factory seem to be keeping secrets. And the extraction process is not only painful and exhausting, but existentially troubling. Asher makes a handful of new friends who help him with an investigation that turns into a resistance, which turns into...a cliffhanger! The Factory is a page-turning sci-fi with multidimensional characters, an intriguing plot, and refreshingly straight-forward writing. Egan weaves in detail about climate crises and social unrest, making the story's dystopian setting feel rich and plausible. With its sophisticated themes and accessible storytelling, I would recomm...

Review: Blood in the Water

Blood in the Water By Tiffany D. Jackson New York: Scholastic, 2025. Fiction. 255 pages. 12-year-old Kaylani McKinnon can't help but feel like a fish out of water. She's a Brooklyn girl spending her summer on Martha's Vineyard surrounded by wealthy family friends in their mansion. All she really wants is to stay home all summer where she her incarcerated father can easily reach her, and she can keep working to find ways to prove him innocent of fraud and embezzlement. Despite her protests, she finds herself on the island with the snooty granddaughters of her host. Soon after Kaylani's arrival, a popular teen boy is found murdered and she decides to conduct her own investigation. As she tries to discover what happened to Chadwick Cooper, Kaylani finds that not everything on Martha's Vineyard is as perfect as it appears. Thrillers for middle grade readers can be hard to find, but Tiffany D. Jackson succeeds in her first middle grade novel. A quick moving plot, tight d...

National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry

National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry Edited by J. Patrick Lewis National Geographic, 2012, 183 p. Poetry In this beautiful poetry collection, the National Children's Poet Laureate, J. Patrick Lewis, has teamed up with the amazing photographers at National Geographic. The result is 200 poems about animals, all illustrated with stunning nature photography. The poems are well chosen and include rhyming, free verse, and shape poetry. Some of the poems are funny, many are contemplative and all are nicely typeset on top of the full color photographs. One of my favorites is a shape poem about flamingos, with a photograph of a flock of flamingos which seem to be standing the the shape of a flamingo (how did they do that?). Lewis ends the collection with a brief but interesting section about writing animal poetry. This selection is sure to turn any animal lover into a poetry lover.

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