You might have noticed this new widget I have on my sidebar, courtesy of JacketFlap and the Children’s Book Council. It is announcing several nominees for the Children’s Choice Book Awards. In case you didn’t know, the Children’s Choice Book Award nominees have been announced in each category: Kindergarten to second grade, third to [...]

photo by librarianjill www.flickr.com
Tomorrow is Dr. Seuss’s birthday, and children across the United States will be involved in Read Across America activities. But before I get into this, I want to announce the winner of the book giveaway contest I held on this blog last week. The winner is. . .Clara Gillow Clark. Thank [...]

photo by zipckr www.flickr.com
The 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver is on everybody’s minds, and it seems like on everybody’s TVs. If you log on to Twitter or Facebook, tweets and status updates about the Winter Olympics are inevitable, and so we know our children and teens are watching and listening, too. As [...]

washing hands photo by edenpictures www.flickr.com
I am happy to announce that the winner of Hate List by Jennifer Brown is Sara L. Congratulations, Sara! Enjoy the book. It’s a great read!
So, on Maniac Monday today, we’re talking germs! This winter everyone has had germs on their mind with the H1N1 scare, and [...]

photo by d3 Dan www.flickr.com
Recently, my stepson who is in third grade completed a unit on rounding and estimating that I thought might get the better of his dad, his mom, me, and Logan, but we made it through! One of the first things I said to my husband when we were [...]

photo by Tetsumo www.flickr.com
On today’s Maniac Monday post, I am writing from a prompt I received from JuiceBoxJungle. First I’m going to answer the question as a parent and then as a teacher. Then I’m going to talk about how you could use this same writing journal prompt with your students and/or children [...]

photo by zitona www.flickr.com
How many of our children or students feel like the boy in the picture? Frustrated!!! I decided to dedicate this Maniac Monday post to the topic of differentiated instruction and modifications because 1) it’s something I’ve always been interested in as an educator 2) I had a recent conversation with [...]

Photo by United Nations Development Programme www.flickr.com
Yesterday, I was watching Cartoon Network (a Pokemon movie even! Egads!) with my stepson, and three teens (I have no idea who they were) came on and told the kids that they could grab their parents, go to the American Red Cross website, and donate to help [...]

photo by edenpictures www.flickr.com
JuiceBox Jungle is a fun website for moms and mommy bloggers. I am part of their network, which you can see more about by looking at the cool graphic to the right of this post. You can watch short clips about parenting, answer polls, tweet certain topics, and now listen to [...]

photo by adamsofen www.flickr.com
If you have elementary- or middle school-aged children (or teach them), they are probably hearing a lot of jokes right now about New Year’s resolutions. That’s kind of what New Year’s resolutions have become–a joke. How long until we break our resolutions? Have we even made it to January 4th? But [...]