Blogs
Packing and unpacking. Those were the governing actions of my Army brat childhood. I learned how to size up the fashion, the accents, the special vocabulary, and the social climate of every place I lived. I learned the bike and walking routes around all the Army bases and was a...
In a book called Zero to Lazy Eight: The Romance of Numbers, the chapter on the number seven includes this paragraph:In both the Roman Catholic Church and the Islamic faith, seven is the age of reason. Muslims below that age are not expected to observe the rituals of prayer and...
I used to be afraid my daughter would never learn to walk. Every time she tried to take a step, she immediately came sliding back down on one of the board books invariably littered around her like so many banana peels. She had better success remaining upright once I began...
“Call him Voldemort, Harry. Always use the proper name for things. Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.” (Dumbledore, Hogwarts headmaster, page 298, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone)“For I was my father’s son, tender and only beloved in the sight of my mother. He taught me...
By Nancy SheridanIt was December of 1979, and Susan Cooper, Margaret Hodges, David McCord, Erik Haugaard, Jill Paton Walsh, and Norma Farber were contributors to the Horn Book. Not a bad line-up. And I was continuing an editorial internship that would eventually lead to the job of editorial assistant and,...
By Karen KlocknerI recently discovered a paper I wrote in fourth grade about the history of the alphabet. I loved the letter forms, the symbols, the idea of historical change reflected in the characters. So it amused me to think that years later, as a graduate student in Boston, the...
I expect we can all agree that historical fiction should be good fiction and good history. If we leap over the first briar patch by calling good fiction an “interesting narrative with well-developed characters,” we are still left with the question of what is good history. Alas, there are nearly...
By Mary M. Burns and Ann A. FlowersSuddenly, literacy is a hot topic. While definitions may vary, there is general agreement that it’s a good thing, and the more of it, the better. The problem seems to be discovering how to nurture it. Because Americans incline toward Puritanism when faced...
by Lois LowryMy oldest child, a daughter, remembers that when she was three, and we lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while her father was a law student, she often walked with me to a nearby grocery store. She tells me that there were letters painted in the street at the corner...
5,645 articles
ALREADY A SUBSCRIBER? LOG IN
We are currently offering this content for free. Sign up now to activate your personal profile, where you can save articles for future viewing.
ALREADY A SUBSCRIBER? LOG IN
Thank you for visiting.
We’ve noticed you are using a private browser. To continue, please log in or create an account.
