Writing
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Grownups: You Can Read YA, and Why Not Read It With Your Kids?
Read Article: Grownups: You Can Read YA, and Why Not Read It With Your Kids?Ever since Ruth Graham wrote “Against YA” for the Slate Book Review last month — the article that launched a thousand blog posts — I’ve been reading the scathing responses as they roll in one by one. The Barnes and Noble Book Blog calls it the best debate on the internet. Indeed. Read more…
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The Story of Ferdinand: Talking With Kids About the First Children’s Book on Gender Nonconformity
Read Article: The Story of Ferdinand: Talking With Kids About the First Children’s Book on Gender NonconformityThe Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf was published in 1936, just before the Spanish Civil War. Because it was widely viewed as pacifist propaganda, it was banned in many countries. Despite its rough start, it became popular around the world, has been translated into over sixty languages, and won several awards. This book has…
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5 must-see movies for tween girls
Read Article: 5 must-see movies for tween girlsThe recent success of Brave and Frozen demonstrates that movies starring girls can not only succeed, but can also dominate at the box office. For much too long, the common belief among producers has been that female protagonists dooms a movie to commercial failure because boys won’t go see it. But, good news! This idea…
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The Amazing Impact of Mother-Daughter Book Clubs
Read Article: The Amazing Impact of Mother-Daughter Book ClubsOne of the most fulfilling and most memorable undertakings of my parenting journey was the formation of a mother-daughter book club, a collaboration with my then-eight-year-old daughter and four other mother-daughter pairs that would last for six years. We all discussed the need to counteract stereotyped and sexualized girl culture with positive messages about who…
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Eight Favorite Books Starring Interesting, Exciting, Daring, Adventurous Girls!
Read Article: Eight Favorite Books Starring Interesting, Exciting, Daring, Adventurous Girls!Google is full of girl-empowering book lists. Favorite female protagonists from the classics, like Pippi Longstocking, to more recent heroines, like Katniss Everdeen, abound on these lists, but I wanted to make my own after reading so many children and YA books to curate for recommendations to mother-daughter book clubs. Here are eight of my…
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Reading Captain Underpants
Read Article: Reading Captain UnderpantsI used to hear a lot about Captain Underpants during lunch in the schools where I worked. You learn a lot about the lives of your students at lunch table duty! But I have not read Captain Underpants myself in years, so I stopped by the Concord Bookshop the other day and picked up a copy…
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How Do We Fix The Male Achievement Gap?
Read Article: How Do We Fix The Male Achievement Gap?This is a segment I did as a panelist on HuffPost Live. Watch…
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Redshirting in the Age of Academic Kindergarten
Read Article: Redshirting in the Age of Academic KindergartenEvery September, the incoming group of kindergarteners becomes ever so slightly older. When I had my daughter almost twenty years ago, I remember a friend of mine exclaiming, “Oh, you’re so lucky, she’s birthday-blessed!” The term referred to her fall birth date, and the fact that she would automatically be one of the oldest students…
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Bridging the New Digital Divide
Read Article: Bridging the New Digital DivideAt the highest performing urban school in the city of Providence, Rhode Island, the mantra when it comes to education is “children always come first. ” And it isn’t easy. Like most public charter schools, the Paul Cuffee School strives to provide the same excellence in educational technology as nearby public schools, but because resources…
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When Children Die and It’s Incomprehensible, How We Move Forward as a Society
Read Article: When Children Die and It’s Incomprehensible, How We Move Forward as a SocietyAlmost twenty years ago, in February of 1993, my daughter was a toddler and sometimes hard to keep track of in stores if I took my eyes off her for a second, as all parents occasionally do. Around that time I lost her in Gymboree at the mall for perhaps 10 minutes because she was…