Sample and savor
Every year around this time my grandfather would give my grandmother a box of chocolates. I quickly learned that not every chocolate in the sampler box thrilled me. One year, my sister taught me the trick of picking out a…
Diaries — er, I mean, journals — and kids
When I visited my 11-year-old niece during last week’s holiday, I learned that she had recently purchased and donated a copy of Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid to her previous 5th grade classroom. My niece’s former teacher had…
On tollbooths, kitchen windows, and inspiration
You, educators and users of TeachingBooks.net, often inspire the new resources on the site. For example, educators we met at a conference in Portland, Oregon mentioned how much they would love to see us create new original resources for the…
The sound of poetry
A few weeks ago I spoke with the author and poet, Naomi Shihab Nye, to record her introducing and reading from some of her poems and her novel Habibi. It was fascinating and exciting to hear Naomi read her…
And you thought Chrysanthemum was hard!
If you’ve ever read Kevin Henkes’ book Chrysanthemum, then you know about the importance of names.
The power and pride that comes with names is part of what motivated TeachingBooks to create a collection of brief recordings of author…
See the real Keeping Quilt…
When I was in elementary school, my mom (a K-12 art teacher) came home from a conference with new picture books for my sister and me. At the conference my mom met Patricia Polacco and received signed copies of The …