James Rumford

It is the first day of school in Chad, Africa. Children are filling the road.

"Will they give us a notebook?" Thomas asks.

"Will they give us a pencil?"

"Will I learn to read?"

But when he and the other children arrive at the schoolyard, they find no classroom, no desks. Just a teacher. "We will build our school," she says. "This is our first lesson."

James Rumford, who lived in Chad as a Peace Corps volunteer, fills these pages with

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While walking through a forest of sequoias, a father tells his family the story of the tree's namesake. Sequoyah was a Cherokee man who invented a system of writing for his people. His neighbors feared the symbols he wrote and burned down his home. All of his work was lost, but, still determined, he tried another approach. The Cherokee people finally accepted the written language after Sequoyah taught his six-year-old daughter to read.

A sheriff in the Old West fights crime with the help of his lucky ten-gallon hat.

Builders, inventors, engineers, dreamers—where would we be without the clever people who came up with the amazing inventions we use every day? Who first thought of making glasses or ice? Or decided traffic lights might be a good idea? You'll meet them all in this engaging collection of favorite stories of inventors and their inventions from the pages of Ask magazine. Brimming with colorful characters, clever devices, cartoons, and big ideas,

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