making space for creativity
2007 Newbery winner, The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron (2007) is the tale of Lucky and her search for a family. After Lucky’s mother dies, her father contacts his first wife, beautiful French Brigitte (who had divorced him when he refused to have children), to come look after Lucky in the middle of…
2006 Newbery winner, Criss Cross, by Lynne Rae Perkins, tells the story of four teenagers on the verge of high school who have crisscrossed paths, switching narrators each chapter as they tell and retell the story of their summer. Incorporating illustrations, poetry, and connected small vignettes, the book is loosely based on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer…
1995 Newbery winner, Walk Two Moons, by Sharon Creech is part road trip tale of a girl and her grandparents, part mystery story told along the way. In both, main character Sal goes looking for answers about why her mother left and comes to terms with what happened the year before. Since this book has…
This is my fourth year doing that fun social media challenge #onedayhh where you take a picture of your ordinary life every hour and post it on social media. (Two years ago I made the pictures in a blog post as well.) Except that this year our Thursday wasn’t particularly ordinary with my husband Evan…
1993 Newbery winner, Missing May, by Cynthia Rylant is about 12 year old Summer and her remaining guardian, Uncle Ob, who are mourning the recent death of his beloved wife, Aunt May. I first read this book in fourth grade (when evidently I was reading a lot of Newberies like Shiloh and A Bridge to…
1992 Newbery winner, Shiloh, by Phyllis Renolds Naylor is about a 11 year-old-boy named Marty Preston who discovers an abused beagle in the woods near the old Shiloh schoolhouse. Marty names the beagle Shiloh, although he knows his poor West Virginia family can’t afford to keep and feed a dog. When Shiloh escapes a second…
“Do you mind if we open this bottle of red wine for our anniversary?” Evan asks me as I set the kids’ soup bowls on their trays. I think he is asking me in part since I’ve been going on and on about how I read that alcohol suppresses the immune system and increases the…
Most years, Holy Week means going to many, many church services. To be forced to miss all those service this year because of COVID-19 was so sad and hard. But it was also a special opportunity. The sheer amount of energy and work to bring toddlers to Holy Week services (not even all of the…
Lois Lowry’s 1990 Newbery winning book, Number the Stars, centers on ten-year-old Annemarie Johansen and her Jewish friend Ellen Rosen in 1943 Copenhagen, after the Nazis have taken over Denmark. It’s a beautiful book that manages to be suspenseful and authentic for such an intense topic, while still being a good first book gentle enough…
A few weeks ago, when my husband Evan, a middle school social studies teacher, was getting ready to start e-learning, I mentioned that I’d seen a couple compelling suggestions by people I admire online to keep a journal of this time. I thought it’d be great to have his students write down their experiences. He…
Paul Fleischman’s 1989 Newbery winning book, Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices, is a short book of poetry that conjures up the noise of summertime insects. Each page has two columns of text, one for each voice, mostly alternative and unison parts, although there are some parts where the two voices are saying different things…
Russel Freedman’s 1988 Newbery winning book, Lincoln: A Photobiography is a great biography (with lots of photographs) of Abraham Lincoln. Even though one of my first quasi-dates with my husband Evan in the spring of 2006 was to the Lincoln museum in Springfield Illinois, I don’t think of myself as having an above average interest…
Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan is told from the perspective of ten-year-old Anna as she and her younger brother Caleb await and meet the woman who answered the advertisement for a mail-order bride their father had placed. Set in 19th century American Prairie, the book is short and sweet, honest and compelling. I’ve…
Last week we came home from our third trip of the year with two little kids. Our first one in March ushered in Spring with a road trip out to Durham, North Carolina and this last one we headed up to Northfield and Minneapolis, Minnesota. In between I took the kids down to Wheaton, Illinois…
For a long time I thought that having such a small house and such small children meant that we couldn’t have a sweet little altar space to put our crosses and icons and prayer books, but having it at the kitchen table has ended up being so great. It truly is the heart of our…