New and Fabulous Chanukah Lights by Michael Rosen illustrated by Robert Sabuda is a stunningly beautiful, just the right mood book for this season of festivals of light. It’s a pop-up book with gorgeous white pop-ups and a beautiful poetic musing about candlelighting through time around the world Pegged for K-4th grade but it’s really […]
Tis the season for festivals of light. Indians mark Diwali with the lighting of thousands of lamps. In Sweden, girls wreath their heads with candles as they celebrate St. Lucia. Jews around the world light the menorah. Christians light advent candles. In Thailand, candle bedecked boats drift on the waters. Light and Hope In the […]
Today’s shout out is to all of you thousands (maybe millions) who will spend some time this holiday season in your kitchen concocting a fabulous mouth-watering baked good for your favorite charity bake sale. The bake sale has been around for centuries (true fact!) This warms my heart – a tradition that binds us together […]
New and Fabulous Bake Sale by Sarah Varon is a warm fuzzy of a baking book. It tells the story of Cupcake who loves to bake – so much so that he owns his very own bakeshop. Life is good. He bakes. He plays in a band. He has great friends. Then Cupcake’s best friend […]
My inbox has been inundated this week with mouthwatering pictures of peppermint fudge, dreidel cookies, gingerbread men, etc. – the staples of holiday month. Which makes me think of my daughter’s “blue” cookies that will forever be part of family legend. You Ask: What are Blue Cookies?!!! When my daughter was three, she had already […]
As a “parent of a varsity college athlete” I am very tuned in to the concern about athletic vs academics. Do college administrators and professors wink at the academic side of college for athletes? Do athletes devalue going to class, writing papers, participating fully in college intellectual life? I have lots of anecdotal evidence that […]
New and Fabulous Fast Break by Mike Lupica is a good read for middle school athletes – especially if you have a soft spot for basketball. Fast Break is hot off the press, the latest from a popular author who knows his sports. This one has a twist – the hero is in foster care. […]
OK all you sports fans out there. The annual late November long-weekend football marathon –accompanied by ginormous helpings of turkey and apple pie –is over. For me, there’s an even bigger watershed moment here. After 22 years of watching my children play soccer, I’m hanging up my parental cleats. So, as I ride into the […]
Hana Dansky has done a lot of digging to find out the general landscape when it comes to food production and consumption. She is not happy with what she’s found. She states it succinctly: we put “10 percent of our national energy budget, 50 percent of our land use, and 80 percent of our freshwater […]
New and Fabulous (2012) The Thankful Book by Todd Parr takes the idea of being thankful down to the level a small child can understand. It reminds me of all the times I’ve squatted down when I am talking to a tiny tike so that I can look into their eyes and see what they’re […]