“Drawing the Fire Watch” Veteran’s Day 2015 It’s dark-thirty on a May morning and I dutifully take my scheduled post at the front–the bow–of the barracks to watch my shipmates sleeping fast. I’ve drawn the fire watch. Dedication is not celebrated in the dark. The moon signs songs to the romantic; the dutiful stands […]

For a number of years, we would pass this property while vacationing in northern Michigan. And each year, I would turn to Kristie and say, “I’m going to get some snapshots of this place while we are here this week, okay?” And I never got those snapshots. Until this week. These are snapshots. While this […]

Any good reading autobiography should start at the beginning, I suppose. But does this really make sense? At this age, I could barely hold a book let alone read one. . .so let’s flash forward a bit. This might be a good place to pause. I recently lost my grandmother. She was important figure in […]

Last year, I thought about the “tension of opposites” (Tuesdays with Morrie) that comes of trusting the process of award committees and quietly celebrating–as a reader myself not on a committee–those titles that I knew–without a doubt that I could and would carry, in hand, to a classroom teacher from elementary to young adult for […]

What do you do when every story: you might have heard you might have known you might have shared is no longer here?   The pages thin and frail give way and loose themselves from the binding, a golden thread to the binding remains. The glue no longer holds.   This is a product of […]

  The little girl in the right-hand corner of this photograph would become my grandmother, Helen. While her life would take many turns in eighty-four years, it was when she had become “Helen Adams” that she became an anchor. A lifesaver. In as many ways an anchor can save a life. In as many ways […]

If you’ve never seen the inside of a papaya, you’ve never experienced how the seeds sit so close together. In a lump. A mass. A sticky bond so easily scooped out and left behind in the preparation of the sweet, orange flesh of the fruit. And if you’ve never seen a papaya in the first […]

SPOILER ALERTS: THIS POST IS FOR TEACHERS WHO ARE LOOKING FOR FILMS FOR THE HERO’S JOURNEY. WE WILL BE EXPLORING THESE FILMS STEP-BY-STEP. THE FEATURE FILM FOR THIS POST IS ANGUS (1995) With the start of the new school year, I thought I might explore some of the films we have used in Room 210 […]

That’s me in Room 407. This picture was taken a couple of years ago. This is when we kept all of our picture books in the big hutch you see behind me. Our collection is too big for us to do this. Now, we sort our picture books into crates based upon themes, subject matter–you […]

(Review based upon the Advanced Reader Copy of BECOMING MARIA: LOVE AND CHAOS IN THE SOUTH BRONX) After 45 years, Sonia Manzano is retiring from her role as “Maria.” She is leaving Sesame Street. And this fall. . .Sonia Manzano will tell readers. . .how she “got there.” Of any Advanced Reader Copy of any […]