I am an author-mother in a predicament: I need to ask my son to stop reading. That’s right, to stop reading.
My son wasn’t one of those very early or very precocious readers, and there were moments when I wondered if he’d take to it at all. Well into first grade, he was happy to be [...]

All of Your Messages Have Been Erased. Miss Fox’s Class Earns a Field Trip. Incomparable treasure, gifts from beloved friends, these books on my desktop inspire me to write. And intimidate me to silence: peering down at the covers hovering on the ledge above my keyboard, words seem inadequate.
Vivian Shipley arrives for dinner with her [...]

I’m sorry that these photos don’t show every step in our creation of George, the Scribble, at the  Zigler Head Start Center, in New Haven, Connecticut last month. Because he is quite a character: he wears a hat, plays the trumpet, and rides a motorcycle. A dozen different preschoolers helped draw him, beginning with one scribble. [...]

Waiting for the print-publishing world to settle down and start buying again a a real downer. You can start to spend way too much time trying to read the minds of editors and publishers. You wonder if you should change your style. Switch subjects? Do a complete rewrite of the [...]

I love to write poetry with children. At a super fun after-school workshop with K-5th graders at Tabor Community Center, I chose spiders as a topic. I took the children on a spider walk (hunt) outside.  We came inside and did a group warm up by building a yarn/string spider web between us. As each [...]