Why is reading important for children? Guest Blog from Readmio Do you sometimes wonder how to get your children to read? Are you all at sea when trying to find something they might like? And is it even worth it? After all, reading seems a waste of time nowadays… isn’t it? Modern life…
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When I write middle-grade novels, like my CURIOUS CAT SPY CLUB series, I have a routine of sitting at my computer in the morning and working until words spill across the screen. I challenge myself to write a few pages every day—until the first draft is done. ` But there’s no routine for writing…
“Mom, what’s a gay person?” When my child asked me this question, some years ago, when she was about eight, my first response was to give her examples of gay couples who are our friends. “You know, like ___ and ___, or ___ and ___,” I said. She knitted her brows for a while, and then…
We just finished our nonfiction book walks, and my students are more excited about reading than ever. Wait! What’s a book walk? I first learned about book walks on Twitter in the fall of 2019 from Maryland school librarian, Karina Hirschorn. She posted pictures book piles on her library tables and students rotating, exploring the…
When A Boy Called BAT was published five years ago, I hoped for the same things I hope for all my books—that readers would find it, and that it would have a big and beautiful life. And in the time between then and now, my hopes for BAT have come true. More than any of…
I arrived in Mr. P’s kindergarten classroom not knowing how to read and not knowing that by patiently sitting with me, he would be the key to unlock my ability to parse words and sentences and the worlds they contain. But he was. I arrived in Mrs. A’s fourth grade classroom not knowing that by…
As a writer, you get to be in charge. You decide a character’s name. What they look like. Are they liars? Do they swear a lot? Are they good or bad or somewhere in between? You get to decide what happens to those characters. You get to choose the words that make a story. This…
There is something special about a read-aloud that captures the attention of our young learners. Taking a picture book and transforming it into an engaging lesson can make learning even more meaningful. We can introduce a new topic in science or maybe help our learners solve the mystery of dividing fractions. Picture books can also…
My coming out began joyfully: I fell in love my sophomore year of college, it was springtime, and everything about it was warm and beautiful and thrilling. At long last I had what many of my straight peers had already begun, in some cases for many years: a relationship! But aside from the person I…
Last year, I overheard a conversation between my twelve-year-old son and his close male friends that alarmed me. They were talking about Tiktok challenges and how each of them had been pressured into doing something they knew was wrong by their peers. They liked the attention they got from doing these social media challenges, but…