When I was a child I resented the stories I read about the ugly mean older sisters. Why did the youngest have to be the kind beautiful one? And why did the eldest always seem to possess the worst flaws? I remember thinking, if I were a writer, I'd never bow down to that storytelling tradition. I'd write a story about the gorgeous gentle-spirited oldest daughter with the two dreadful younger sisters. If you haven't already figured it out, I'm a first born.
I recently spoke with Ingrid Law to record her reading from her fantastically creative book, Savvy. When recording a Book Reading, I ask authors to share a little extra special information about how they came to write the book…
When I was a kid, my dad was involved in a project to help retain and transmit Anansi the Spider stories of Liberia, where my parents had served in the Peace Corps. I remember him having a pile of type-written…
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…
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…
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…