making space for creativity
Teaching your children the basics of reading, writing, and math, whether they go to school or stay at home, is one of the great joys (and frustrations!) of parenting. Now that both of my children are 7 and 10 and can happily sit and (1) read silently for an hour at a time, (2) write…
I do two main types of children’s book reading. I read to my own two children, currently ages 7 and 10. And I read to a whole classes of children, ages 3 to 11. They can be fairly different experiences. For this post, I’ll call the first one “lap-read alouds” and the second “library-time read-alouds.”…
Our daughter Lily loves fairy tales. Shiny new Disney ones or grizzly Grimm Brother originals, she loves them all. When she was three, she would laugh and laugh at the fox gobbling up the gingerbread boy or the largest Billy Goat Gruff ramming the troll into the water. This was in sharp contrast to our…
Learning to read is a wild and wonderful, frustrating and fantastic adventure for you and your child! Watching my children learn to read truly has been one of the most rewarding (and demanding!) parts of motherhood. So this year, instead of putting together the list of Lily’s favorite picture books that I would read to…
2025 Newbery winner, The First State of Being by Erin Entrada Kelly is the story of Michael, an anxiety-prone boy on the cusp of middle school. It takes place six months before Y2K. Other characters include Gibby, his high-school-age baby sitter, neighbor, friend, and secret crush, and Ridge a boy from the future who has…
This is my 10th year of doing birthday book posts! (You can see the past years here: 30 // 31 // 32 // 33 // 34 // 35 // 36 // 37 // 38 // 39). I have found that between listening to more podcasts and trying to list more books (40 is in fact 25% more than 30!) It was…
Five is such a great age for reading books! They are young enough to enjoy great short and sweet toddler books (perhaps even being able to read them for themselves!), but they also have attention spans big enough to sit through more complex books. In some ways this love of a wide range of books…
Sometimes, finding a great children’s book is easy. You remember reading Make Way For Ducklings by Robert McCloskey as a child, and then you go to the library and ask the librarian where it might be. She leads to you to the right shelf, and along the way you see a display of new books and you…
The Newbery Award has been given each year since 1922 for “The Most Distinguished Contribution to American Literature for Children.” But “children” is a pretty large category: what a 3 year old might love is not the same as what a 13 year old might. As a general rule, most Newberies are good reads for…
This is the third year I’ve written down all the books that my picky (or shall we say “possessing discerning literary tastes”) daughter has enjoyed. Lily is fun-loving and opinionated, especially about books. So here are the books that both my husband and I enjoyed reading to her (and her six year old brother Jackson.)…
After spending over 8 years reading the 100+ Newbery award winning books, I have some favorites. I love a good book list, so that was my original plan for this post: list my favorite 40 Newberies. But as I was telling my husband Evan about this, he said he wanted to know what I thought…
2022 Newbery winner, The Last Cuentista, by Donna Barba Higuera. Petra Peña wants to become a storyteller like her Abuelita, but instead she is leaving her beloved Lita (what she calls her grandmother). Together with her little brother Javier and her scientist parents, Petra is among some of the few people to escape the destruction…
We’ve made it folks! I’ve read through 100 Newberies, reviewed over eight years! This is the last set of quick recommendations and ratings for Newberies 76 through 100. (If you’d like to see the first three sets here is # 1-25, 26-50, and 51-75. For links to each individual review you can go here.) This last…
This is my 7th year of birthday reading lists! (You can see the others here: 30 // 31 // 32 // 33 // 34 // 35 // 36). My top non-fiction picks for this year are Divine Conspiracy, Try Softer, Paradox Lost, Prayer in the Night, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry and The Making of Biblical Womanhood. And my top fiction reads were A Place to Hang the Moon…
2020 Newbery winner, New Kid by Jerry Craft, is a graphic novel that follows 7th grader Jordan Banks to his new private school. He’s not thrilled about being there: he’d rather be at an art school, and he’d rather not be one of the only scholarship kids, and he’d rather not be one of the only…