Collection of skits, readings, poems & information for holidays.

Each year, the first Monday in September marks the celebration of Labor Day. This special holiday has been around since the 19th century, when the labor movement pushed for better workers' rights. Labor Day is also a way to honor and thank all the hard work that the American people put into their jobs every day. This book explores the history of the holiday and the different ways families celebrate Labor Day. Accessible text and closely correlating photographs make this book perfect for young readers. A picture glossary helps readers expand their vocabulary.

In 1934, hundreds of jobless World War I veterans were sent to the remote Florida Keys to build a highway from Miami to Key West. The Roosevelt Administration was making a genuine effort to help these down-and-out vets, many of whom suffered from what is known today as post-traumatic stress disorder. But the attempt to help them turned into a tragedy. The supervisors in charge of the veterans misunderstood the danger posed by hurricanes in the low-lying Florida Keys. In late August 1935, a small, stealthy tropical storm crossed the Bahamas, causing little damage. When it entered the Straits of Florida, however, it exploded into one of the most powerful hurricanes on record. But US Weather Bureau forecasters could only guess at its exact position, and their calculations were well off the mark. The hurricane that struck the Upper Florida Keys on the evening of September 2, 1935 is still the most powerful hurricane to make landfall in the US. Supervisors waited too long to call for an evacuation train from Miami to move the vets out of harm’s way. The train was slammed by the storm surge soon after it reached Islamorada. Only the 160-ton locomotive was left upright on the tracks. About 400 veterans were left unprotected in flimsy work camps. Around 260 of them were killed. This is their story, with newly discovered photos and stories of some of the heroes of the Labor Day 1935 calamity.

Poetry. In LABOR DAY--a long serial poem in fifty-six parts--Rebecca Kosick pursues a series of movements in and out of the natural and economic landscapes of the postindustrial Midwest at the turn of the twenty-first century, attempting to incarnate a language adequate to memory, a memory adequate to place. Kosick's verse modulates from auratic to frank, stately to aching, its presiding recollective mood accumulating like a mist over a warming landscape: scattered homophones peer up through layers of sediment, once-familiar terrain is eroded by diluvial, counterintuitive etymologies. The rhetorical layering of LABOR DAY is memory's residue, a "paused emptiness of season" that freezes an instant only to watch it dissolve under charged scrutiny. There is something here of the animistic sociability and glancing observation of Dorothy Wordsworth's journals, offset by a strain of Hopkins's providential empiricism, a tender attunement to inscape whose materiality can take a sudden Steinian swerve into resonant disaggregation. While formally hovering on this threshold between lyric excavation and sonic concreteness, the poems unfold in a georgic, postindustrial reality in which haleness retires each day only an arms-length from hardship. Held in counterpoise by disrupted cycles of care, riven efforts against forgetting, LABOR DAY becomes the genius loci it sets out to summon, constructing--not unambivalently--a sonic space to stand for those places that memory can't reconstruct.

The popular Rookie Books expand their horizons - to all corners of the globe! With this series all about geography, emergent readers will take off on adventures to cities, nations, waterways, and habitats around the world...and right in their own backyards.

With the end of summer closing in and a steamy Labor Day weekend looming in the town of Holton Mills, New Hampshire, thirteen-year-old Henry—lonely, friendless, not too good at sports—spends most of his time watching television, reading, and daydreaming about the soft skin and budding bodies of his female classmates. For company Henry has his long-divorced mother, Adele—a onetime dancer whose summer project was to teach him how to foxtrot; his hamster, Joe; and awkward Saturday-night outings to Friendly's with his estranged father and new stepfamily. As much as he tries, Henry knows that even with his jokes and his "Husband for a Day" coupon, he still can't make his emotionally fragile mother happy. Adele has a secret that makes it hard for her to leave their house, and seems to possess an irreparably broken heart. But all that changes on the Thursday before Labor Day, when a mysterious bleeding man named Frank approaches Henry and asks for a hand. Over the next five days, Henry will learn some of life's most valuable lessons: how to throw a baseball, the secret to perfect piecrust, the breathless pain of jealousy, the power of betrayal, and the importance of putting others—especially those we love—above ourselves. And the knowledge that real love is worth waiting for. In a manner evoking Ian McEwan's Atonement and Nick Hornby's About a Boy, acclaimed author Joyce Maynard weaves a beautiful, poignant tale of love, sex, adolescence, and devastating treachery as seen through the eyes of a young teenage boy—and the man he later becomes—looking back at an unexpected encounter that begins one single long, hot, life-altering weekend.

Brief introduction of the history of Labor Day and the way people observe the holiday.