Deciding who and what to write about can be daunting for students…and adults as well. (An aside: I’m married to a writer and I hear him muttering a lot in his office.) Various graphic organizers can be a big help for students when planning narratives—and we have tons of them on our website! After a…
My work desk is right next to a window that faces our backyard. I generally have a view of squirrels, birds, and the occasional neighbor—but the other day a very round groundhog waddled into view. I squealed like a fool and went to get my husband so we could stare out the sliding door at…
I suspect that in every living situation you will experience a thermostat war at least once. My most heated experience (heated—do you see what I did there?) occurred during college when living with two other women off campus. We had noisy baseboard heat and two-thirds of us, including myself, preferred it to be cold in…
We all like to have options—different potato chip flavors, different ice cream choices, and paint colors in every shade and hue. After all, we’re all different and have different needs, likes, and dislikes. That’s why I’m tickled that our Make and Print tools have new borders. It’s great to have lots of options! What are…
Somewhere in another dimension are all the mittens and gloves I’ve lost throughout the years. I’m convinced they’ve shacked up with the lost socks, container lids, and one particularly mysterious Allen wrench that disappeared after a fight with a garbage disposal. I think losing items in your own house is one of the most frustrating…
You can take the teacher out of the classroom, but you can’t take the classroom out of the teacher…or something like that. Let me explain. I spent this past weekend at the beach to celebrate the new year. I LOVE to walk on the beach. The sound of the waves crashing has to be the…
How are you ringing in the new year? I’m hitting the beach. Don’t start picturing palm trees and tropical drinks…I’ll actually be on the coast of North Carolina, which at this time of year is more about sweatshirts than bathing suits. But hey, the beach is still the beach! As for the rest of 2023,…
I must caution you. This is a tale so disturbing it may haunt you in the wee hours of the morning. It concerns the very first Christmas I spent with the man who is now my husband. When it came time to sit down in the living room and open gifts with his family, I…
When I was little, I was pretty iffy on the whole “Santa and his flying reindeer” thing. My parents never dissuaded me from believing, so I guess I was a natural-born skeptic. To be clear, none of this was due to a lack of imagination on my part—I had plenty of that! But that imagination…
The life cycle of a gingerbread man is a tragic but yummy tale. I don’t care if you’re a child or an adult, there’s always a debate about which part to eat first. I tend to go for the head because then he won’t stare at me when I go for the limbs. The first…