Born with one brown and one blue eye, Taffy is a very different little girl who discovers how she can become other interesting things using rhymes she makes up and special words. As a door in her new neighbor's house, a weather vane up on her roof, a brown bulb growing under ground and an eagle flying high above, her imagination and curiosity wrap the reader in a cocoon of delight. Learning other words from the big dictionary fills her life with new understanding. Every child will want Taffy for a friend! This is a story for elementary and early middle school children to be shared with them by grown-ups who realize what rich excitement and breadth can be added to the lives of youngsters by expanding their thinking through imaginative rhymes and innovative words. Every new word learned is a significant gift which is theirs forever. Taffy's adventures developed through my replying to the request, "Tell me a story," and have been tested in library story hours and sessions in the shade of a backyard tree with groups of neighborhood little ones. Today's children have so much enrichment because of television and the internet that they are more than ready to develop vocabularies far beyond those of yesterday's young learners. To limit their opportunities to use and understand useful and descriptive words is not fair to them. Reading or listening to Taffy's adventures will fill this learning need for them.
About the Author: Oleta Stewart Toliver lives with her husband, Coke, in a small Texas town where her primary interest in life has been children-her own, community story groups, and gifted and talented elementary classes. She served as District Director of Children's Work for the United Methodist Church, and was women's editor and columnist for two local newspapers. A public school teacher for 20 years, she was Director of Publications, and the secondary school newspaper and yearbooks she sponsored won national awards. She chaired the Spanish Department and established a state pilot program for Latin American Studies. She also directed volunteer programs in elementary Spanish for grades K-12 in surrounding communities. Toliver's degree in Journalism and Mass Communications is from Texas Tech University. Her graduate work in understanding children is from Scarritt College in Nashville, Tenn. Her first major publication was An Artist at War, based on the WWII Journal of John Gaitha Browning, and was a part of the Southwest at War Series of the University of North Texas Press. Santa Apache, a novel about an 18th century Indian medicine woman, is an emotion filled adventure of a Native American Apache girl whose actions changed the history of the Southwest. Taffy Tussles with Words is this writer's first novel for the elementary age child. She classifies her favorite children's stories as those written for her two grandsons. Her post university jobs included continuity writer for Radio Station KFYO and columnist, photographer and staff feature writer for the Lubbock Avalanche Journal, as well as feature writer for the Associated Press. At Amistad Productions, a public relations firm she owned, she published articles in medical journals, was editor for Patient Medical Records, and did national work with school nurse programs. Toliver produced the DNA Update for Alzheimer's research for Texas Tech University and the Medical College of Georgia Institute of Molecular Medicine and Genetics.