Category: Uncategorized

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…

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…

Our 59th Newbery is historical fiction written as the diary of one Catherine Cabot Hall age 13: A Gathering of Days: A New England Girl’s Journal 1830-1832 by Joan W. Blos. In her diary entries, Catherine chronicles two years of going to school, tending the house, caring for her little sister, dealing with her father’s…