James Rumford

The children arrive on the first day of school and build a mud structure to be their classroom for the next nine months until the rainy season comes and washes it all away.

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.

Five brothers, each with a special skill, sail across the vast Pacific Ocean to the islands now known as Hawaii.

As bombs and missiles fall on Baghdad in 2003, a young boy uses the art of calligraphy to distance himself from the horror of war.

Manu, one of five brothers who are the first humans to set foot on Hawaii, is unhappy until he saves the life of a strange creature he calls Dog-of-the-Sea-Waves, and they become fast friends.

An alphabet book which relates the legend of Cadmus, the Phoenician hero who brought the alphabet to Greece and slew a dragon there.