Shirley Parenteau

Four chairs. Four adorable bears. All is well until Big Brown Bear shows up -- what a stare -- and wants a seat. Can these clever bears put their heads together (among other things) and make space for one more?

Four little bears covered in mud don't want to take a bath.

CLANG! CLANG! TOOTLEY-TOOO! The impossibly cute bears are back and this time they have musical instruments at the ready. The little bears pick up their instruments and play a noisy song. They don t care if the notes are wrong! But uh-oh, Big Brown Bear is fast asleep. Will their lively music wake him up? A small moment of trepidation segues into a jubilant performance in a story that will be sweet music to little ears.

The little bears are ready to play in the snow. But, uh-oh, their sled is too small! It's not as fun sledding when they can only go two at a time. What can they use to carry them all? Luckily, Big Brown Bear has an idea.

Big Brown bear and the four little bears enjoy a picnic under blossoming trees, but a blustery wind makes flying kites an adventure.

It's 1926, and the one thing eleven-year-old Lexie Lewis wants more than anything is to leave Portland, where she is living with her strict grandparents, and rejoin her mother, a carefree singer in San Francisco. But Mama's new husband doesn't think a little girl should live with parents who work all night and sleep all day. Lexie's class has been raising money to ship a doll to the children of Japan in a friendship exchange, and when Lexie learns...

"When eleven-year-old Chiyo Tamura is sent from her home in a small Japanese mountain village to a girls' school in the city of Tsuchiura, she never imagines that she will soon be in Tokyo helping to welcome more than twelve thousand Friendship Dolls from America--including Emily Grace, a gift to her own school. Nor could she dream that she'd have an important role in the crafting of Miss Tokyo, one of fifty-eight Japanese dolls to be sent to America...