New Releases by Miriam Cohen

At an end-of-the-year beach picnic, Anna Maria, Jim, and the other children realize they will miss First Grade and their teacher, but decide they are ready for Second Grade after all.

The first grade is getting ready to put on a play for the whole school. Everyone wants a part in "The Three Billy Goats Gruff." The teacher picks Paul to be the troll, Danny to be the biggest goat, and Jim to be one of the trees. But Jim wants to be a troll, not a tree. So Jim interrupts the rehearsals and acts bossy to his classmates. Finally it is the day of the big play. But Paul has stage fright. Can Jim find a way to help his friend and save the play?

With Thanksgiving just around the corner, Jim and his friends in the first grade are busy preparing for a special holiday, painting a mural, writing a play, and creating a giant turkey costume

The first grade is going on a trip to the museum. It''s an exciting day for everybody. The teacher says the most important thing is to stick together. So when Danny says he knows where the dinosaur is, Jim and his friends follow. The only problem is, the friends have stayed together, but somehow the teacher and the rest of the class got lost!

Second-grader Jim isn''t sure what he wants to be for Halloween but he knows he wants to be scary.

Jacob was mean to Honey, and now everyone is mad at him, in this humorous sequel to Second-Grade Friends.

Fourth-grader Emily is forced to think about her Jewish heritage when the new boy, an Orthodox Jew, refuses to participate in the school Christmas celebrations.

Cohen examines shifting patterns in the family roles, work lives, and schooling of two generations of Italian-American women, paying particular attention to the importance of these women''s pragmatic daily choices.

Jim''s anxieties on his first day of school are happily forgotten when he makes a new friend.

Second grader Jacob worries that the real live author visiting his classroom will discover that he has no imagination and that Maria, the little girl visiting from Puerto Rico, will find out that he likes her. Original.

Jim is the only one in the first grade who is scared of The Thing on television. He feels so ashamed. No one else is afraid. He won''t even play Super Heroes with the rest of the class. But when a praying mantis walks on Danny''s arm, no one wants to touch it. Only one brave first grader dares to take it off. Who could it be?

When the light in the classroom incubator burns out, two friends are brought together again as they act to save the lives of the unhatched chickens.

A first grader learns to accept himself as he is.

Alex and his classmates learn together that he doesn''t need to tell lies in order for people to like him.

When Jim was in kindergarten the art teacher said, "Dear, your man has no neck." And she showed him the right way to draw -- right on his picture. Jim knew then and there that he was no good at art. But next year the first grade got a new art teacher. And Jim found out that he wasn''t so bad after all.Once again Miriam Cohen and Lillian Hoban share their insight and empathy in a book young readers (and young artists) will respond to with unqualified enthusiasm.

A fourteen-year-old boy in Brooklyn who has grown up in the foster care system discovers respect and love with a parochial school girl and with the eccentric couple who take him in.

Presents the latest information on the physical and psychological effects of smoking, the reasons people smoke, and the treatment for quitting this drug addiction.

Discusses the scientific, social, and personal aspects of marijuana, examining its history, cultural impact, psychological and physical effects, dangers, and legal status.

At Carnival time in Brazil, a girl who has spent her life wishing to be chosen Queen must cope with the jealousy incurred by a new girl who is her only competition.

Before they ever meet her, the first graders imagine what their new teacher will be like.

The purpose of the study was to assess the effects of two methods of stimulus presentation (fading and constant) and two response contingencies (delay and no-delay) on the course of discrimination learning; and to examine the effects of response histories on various aspects of discrimination performance. In the fading procedure S- was gradually faded along the dimensions of brightness and time, and in the constant procedure S- maintained a constant value throughout training. Subjects trained with the constant procedure made significantly more S- responses in the course of acquisition than subjects trained with the fading procedure. In the constant-delay procedure, S- responses were followed by a delay in the offset of S-. In the constant-no-delay procedure S- responses were followed by an intertrial interval. Subjects trained with the constant-no-delay procedure made significantly more responses to S- than subjects trained with the constant-delay procedure. The amount of extinction which occurred during learning was highly correlated with intertrial responding and the stability of the learned discrimination. Discrimination reversal learning was also a function of original learning history. The results were discussed in terms of the differential processes which underlie discriminative performance when different training procedures are used. (Author).