Of the books highlighted here in honor of Native American Heritage Month, a number feature values common among indigenous peoples of North America. Traci Sorell’s We Are Grateful is one of these. I, in turn, am grateful for these books and their authors, who have expanded my exposure to Native American traditions and history. In…
Have you ever spent time looking at a great work of art and found yourself lost in it? Literally lost in it, wandering around a water lily pond or gallivanting through haystacks? Then maybe you are a Restorationist, who can get sucked into a painting like a portal into another world. We pre-ordered Between Flowers…
Our family loves Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. We love the original, as it appears on the page, and the audiobook read by B. J. Harrison. We love The Muppet Christmas Carol, too. With this in mind, you may understand my excitement when I opened Little Christmas Carol, envisioned and illustrated by my friend Joe…
Sitting in her bed, her large blue eyes full of joy, my daughter hugged me and said, “Mom, we’re never really alone because God is with us.” My toddler’s words weren’t just a repetition of what she has heard — if you could hear her say it today, you would know she fully believes it….
At the start of summer, we said goodbye to our friends. They moved two states away. Despite the passing of time and the start of fall, I still feel the loss of them. Our friendship began through our children. My daughter, though older than their son, was determined to become his first friend. And through…
I have never really appreciated pie the way I should. But it is not entirely my fault. I wasn’t exposed to great pie making as a kid. My mom wasn’t into pie, and my grandmother, who, I am told, was a great pie maker in her day, grew a tad lazy in her later years….
When I first read Andrew Peterson’s title, On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness, I remembered being there myself. My father was a fisherman, and it was nighttime on the Atlantic in January. The slap of gentle waves against the ship made me sleepy as we sat silently side by side, staring out…
“When you draw something, you get closer to it and know it better.” –Jim LaMarche Even before I put my colored pencils to paper, this statement resonated with me. It just made sense. It made so much sense in fact that I found myself buying notebooks and colored pencils and telling the kids we were…
Glenn is a brilliant writer, weaving tales of adventure and hilarious hijinks set in the West, in the Colorado Territory right around the time of statehood. These are stories your kids will love.
As an adolescent I skipped over the fascination-with-death phase. Horror movies repelled me, gore disgusted me. I forged on well into my twenties, thousands of miles from elderly relations and still in possession of most of my grandparents, in blithe denial of mortality. It caught up with me, of course, at times slow and furtive…
These two books called out to me as possible additions to our second-grade study of animals and habitats. Each provides beautiful illustrations, created with different mediums, which is always intriguing for me to show and talk through with students. Each provides clever prose that lends itself to enjoyable, repeatable read-alouds as we think and study…
Soren was wondering why we live in Iowa. There are no mountains, oceans, or deserts. None of the things that we travel to see. He wondered if that could be the reason: “Do we live in Iowa so we have a reason to travel to the ‘cool’ places?” “No,” I told him, “we live in…
