Georges Bright Idea

Part of the dynamic reading programme Project X, this book is truly boy-friendly. Project X is a reading programme that has been developed based on research into what will really hook boys into reading and make them love books. Project X includes fiction and non-fiction, exciting adventure stories, lots of gadgets, and 21st-century illustrations. Each book comes with notes for parent/teaching assistants thathighlight tricky words or concepts in the books, prompt questions and suggest a range of follow-up activities.

In George's Bright Idea, business for George's parents' fish and chip shop is not good. Luckily, when George decides to clean the house to help his parents, he comes up with a super idea that will make everything a lot better. This book is part of Project X Origins, a ground-breaking guided reading programme for the whole school.

Even though they're dead, the great inventors in this book are still full of surprises! Everybody thinks that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb and that John Logie Baird's TV took the world by storm. But in this Horribly Famous title, readers will discover that Edison didn't invent the first light bulb (although he invented a thousand other things) and that Baird's TV was useless.

Lydia Smith, a clerk at the Bright Ideas bookstore, calls the lonely regulars who spend every day marauding the store's overwhelmed shelves "BookFrogs." When Joey Molina, a young BookFrog, kills himself in the bookstore's upper room, he bequeaths his meager worldly possessions to her. Trinkets and books; the detritus of a lonely, uncared for man. But they seem to contain a hidden message. As Lydia untangles the mystery of Joey's suicide, she unearths a long buried memory from her own violent childhood.

Retells, in tall-tale fashion, how Levi Strauss went to California during the Gold Rush, saw the need for a sturdier kind of trouser, and invented jeans.

Twelve-year-old George Stable wants to be a rock star someday, but he gets horrible stage fright—unless he has his old teddy bear with him. Hiding the teddy in his guitar seems like a brilliant idea. Then George discovers that someone has hidden stolen jewels in the stuffing of his beloved bear. George's embarrassing "teddy bear habit" becomes the center of a life-and-death chase through Manhattan. Can George survive long enough to make his first television appearance?

Relates the special friendship between a rascally plover bird and a patient crocodile.

This nonfiction reader shines a light on Thomas Edison and his greatest invention—the lightbulb! As a curious child who was always asking questions, it's no wonder Thomas Edison grew up to become a famous, prolific inventor. This easy-to-read nonfiction story follows Edison from his time in school to his career as a full-time inventor. While it focuses on his groundbreaking creation of the lightbulb, this illuminating account also details other important innovations of his, like the phonograph and the microphone. Edison's discoveries will fascinate and inspire all curious young minds!

In the 1930s, Américo Paredes, the renowned folklorist, wrote a novel set to the background of the struggles of Texas Mexicans to preserve their property, culture and identity in the face of Anglo-American migration to and growing dominance over the Rio Grande Valley. Episodes of guerilla warfare, land grabs, racism, jingoism, and abuses by the Texas Rangers make this an adventure novel as well as one of reflection on the making of modern day Texas. George Washington GÑmez is a true precursor of the modern Chicano novel.