Sort It Out!

This sequel to the award-winning Water Beds: Sleeping in the Ocean (2007 Teacher’s Choice & 2005 Mom’s Choice) takes readers on an around-the-world boat ride to learn how mammals sleep in or around ten major rivers of the world on all continents except Antarctica. Row down the Mississippi and watch two river otters slip into a hollow tree or look to the bank of the Brisbane River as a platypus pops into a hole and disappears into a narrow tunnel. Told in a soothing style, this book serves as a bedtime/naptime story for younger children or an animal geography book for older children. Adults may learn something, too!

Barbara Mariconda (Sort it Out!) is one of those people who ôhas done it all!ö An educator (K-6), a mentor teacher, an adjunct professor of Children's Literature and Process Writing, Barbara has also written a wide variety of musicals, songs, and books. She has worked with Children's Television Workshop and Cherry Lane music on the creative staff of the Sesame Street Music Magazine. In addition to writing workbooks and beginning readers, her middle grade novel, Turn the Cup Around, was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award for best children's mystery. She has also published numerous professional books for teachers, frequently speaks on the topic of writing for and with children, and provides professional development for teachers at seminars across the country. She is a partner in the educational seminar/consulting firm, Empowering Writers, LLC., and is a member of SCBWI. Barbara recognized that sorting and categorizing, so clearly recognized as a math and science skill, also powerfully relates to writing. In order to write in an organized fashion, to group like details with broader main ideas, to recognize the ways in which main ideas in a piece of writing may overlap and therefore encourage redundancy, it all comes down to the writer's ability to think critically and sort things out. Barbara's huge collections of sea glass, pottery shards, glass paperweights, nutcrackers, wine bottle corks, and cowboy boots, all artfully sorted and arranged, served as the inspiration for this book.Sherry Rogers- spent twelve years as a corporate graphic designer and artist before ôleaving it all behindö for the freelance world. Sherry has developed a unique style of painting digitally on her computer. Just like a ôtraditional artist,ö Sherry sketches by hand. When happy with the composition, she scans it into the computer. Just as she would use a ônormalö paint brush, she paints her illustrations stroke for stroke on her computer in her program of choice, Photoshop. She laughs that the paint clean up is much easier than it used to be! Sherry has illustrated Kersplatypus, Burro's Tortillas and If You Were a Parrot for Sylvan Dell and her first book, Counting Little Geckos was published in the summer of 2005. Sherry, her husband and two children live in Northern California. To visit her website, click here.