Hopscotch

Depending upon where you travel in the Sunshine State, you find different aspects of Florida. Let's hopscotch the state and look at offerings from various parts: Everyone, it seems, has a favorite beach area for coastal Florida. Among the most popular, certainly, are the beaches of Sanibel/Fort Myers. West Wind, a casual Gulf-front resort in Sanibel, is featuring through Dec. 20 a three-night Sunlovers' Special that includes a guest room with refrigerator for $423 or a kitchenette for $483.

With a hop, a skip and a couple of jumps, the students of Timonium Elementary School are crossing the United States these days, following the Mississippi River from St. Paul to New Orleans and tracking the travels of westward-bound pioneers.Thanks to a group of retired telephone company employees, the youngsters have a multicolored, 20-foot by 30-foot map of the United States (35 feet if you include Alaska and Hawaii) on their playground.They can hopscotch across the states, toss bean bags around the Plains and even learn a little geography along the way.The map is a gift of the AT&T Corp.

Title: "Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution: Selected Essays, 1977-1992"Editor: E. L. DoctorowPublisher: Random HouseLength, price: 206 pages, $20 It shouldn't surprise that E. L. Doctorow, writing nonfiction, is at his best discussing novelists such as Jack London, Theodore Dreiser and George Orwell; they, too, were sociopolitical writers, interested in the hypocrisies and duplicities of modern civilization. It is a surprise, though, that straightforward political writing should bring out the worst in this estimable novelist.

IT'S SPRING and I haven't seen a single kid playing marbles. Yo-yos, yes. The kids still swing through the neighborhood "rocking the cradle" and "walking the dog." Some of the girls are even playing hopscotch out in front of the house.But marbles? As far as I can tell, there isn't a kid within eyeshot hunkering down with a favorite aggie to play "potsies," "chasies," "ringer," "poison" or "shoot and stick," to name just a few of the most popular marbles games when I was a kid.What killed it for today's kids?

American Masala By Suvir Saran with Raquel Pelzel Tangy Tart Hot & Sweet By Padma Lakshmi Weinstein Books / 2007 / $34.95 Although Padma Lakshmi also hails from India, Tangy Tart Hot & Sweet is less an homage to the author's ethnic roots than a tasting tour of her favorite international flavors. In fact, it's fair to say that the book, whose recipes hopscotch the globe, is really a celebration of Lakshmi, the model, author and actress best known as the host of Bravo's Top Chef. The 265-page book is liberally seasoned with her pictures.

"Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir,"by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Simon & Schuster. 238 pages. $25.Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin's new memoir "Wait Till Next Year" began as an account of her coming of age as a Brooklyn Dodger fan - which she gradually realized was inextricable from the story of her childhood.In this, she found out she was not alone: Everywhere "I encountered people less anxious to hear my tales of Lyndon Johnson, the Kennedys, or the Roosevelts than they were to share memories of those wondrous days when baseball almost ruled the world."

In Shannon O'Dair's crayon-drawn blueprint, Hampstead Hill Academy's new playground comes with a hot tub, pool, locker room, tennis court, climbing rope topped with a never-ending supply of candy and - lastly - a sandbox. "The sandbox would only be for the little kids though," said the third-grader. O'Dair and 19 other pupils at the Baltimore public elementary school were given the chance to design their dream playground yesterday. What they designed - or at least the more reasonable parts of what they designed - will be built in early May. The $70,000 playground will be funded primarily by Home Depot through the nonprofit organization KaBOOM.

More than 20 Southeast Baltimore schools got badly needed face lifts yesterday thanks to nearly 1,000 volunteers from some of Baltimore's biggest corporations, including Cellular One and T. Rowe Price.Sponsored by Hands On Baltimore, a 2-year-old city group that coordinates volunteer activities in the community, the event attracted volunteers from across the region who painted buildings, spruced up playgrounds and reorganized school libraries.The 21 volunteer sites included Sinclair Lane Elementary, Highlandtown Middle and Lake Clifton-Eastern High School, where a fire in January gutted the school library and damaged the cafeteria and offices.

If you want something done right, you've got to do it yourself. Four residents of the Lexington Terrace public housing development are out to prove that the popular saying is correct.For the last six weeks, Barbara McKinney, a tenant and outspoken community leader, has worked with her two sisters and another friend to upgrade their West Baltimore housing complex.Frustrated that the city and many of their neighbors didn't seem interested in refining the buildings at Lexington Terrace, they formed their own cleanup crew.

Tricia Penner and her classmates at Robert Poole Middle School spent mornings, lunch periods and afternoons selling pink paper hearts to raise money for kids in a far-away African country. The Baltimore pupils collected enough funds that they filled a 50-gallon crate with 500 pencils, 300 pens, 20 spiral notebooks, 640 crayons, 140 erasers -- and other supplies most Americans don't think twice about. "We ball up paper that other people would love to have just because we made one mistake," said Penner, a 13-year-old eighth- grader.