Kids and Poetry: Reinvention at the Kitchen Table
The first time I gave a creative writing lesson to young children was a complete accident. I was babysitting a brother and a sister in Brooklyn and one of the things I was asked to do was to help them with their homework, involving a certain poem in a...
6 Tips for Stubborn Summer Readers
It’s that time of year. The birds are chirping. The teachers are packing up their classrooms. Trees and bushes are filling out, readying themselves for roles as home base or hiding place in epic hide-and-seek battles. The structure of your child’s day is beginning to look like a late-game...
What Batman, Swearing, and Cigarettes Can Teach Us About Reading
The Batman movie came out in 1989 when I was eight-and-a-half-years old. I didn’t know who Batman was, but I saw the commercial and knew it was very important I see it. My parents were unsympathetic. It’s rated PG-13 for a reason, they said, and I cried in the...