My husband and I have a new entertainment: I read out loud to him from books about scientific subjects that I’ve checked out of the public library. We do this at the ends of meals mostly — I have always eaten much faster than he does — in my opinion because I grew [...]
I’ve written this answer twice to a LinkedIn question and had the connection be reset when I tried to save it. So I think I’ll do a third brain dump here where I know I can save it! (If you can’t see the question and other answers, I suspect you need to register [...]
My children loved The Great Brain books by John D. Fitzgerald starting in the 2nd or 3rd grade. I enjoyed reading them out loud immensely.
There’s a good Wikipedia article about this series, so I’ll only give a brief summary here. Each book is a series of episodes about a Catholic family living in southern [...]
When I was growing up, I was attracted to books about children facing very difficult times and finding a way to thrive. There was a fair amount of change and insecurity in my growing up — my father died when I was two, my mother moved her three preschool children to New York City [...]
When I was going through the MAPP program, one of our assignments was to watch the Wizard of Oz movie — Judy Garland, Somewhere over the rainbow, and all — and to write an essay exploring character strengths based on what we saw.
I suspect that Sherri Fisher’s article in Positive Psychology News Daily, Professor Marvel: [...]
One of my friends saw the posting about a Positive Canon of Children’s Books and said she’d love to have ideas for reading to her son, who just latched on to the Mrs. Piggle Wiggle books. So this first one is for her - with a series that is great for just-about readers or [...]
Since Christmas day, I’ve been re-reading Tamora Pierce’s young-adult fantasy series, Protector of the Small. The story, which takes place in a fantasy kingdom, describes the adventures of a young girl, Keladry, going through knight training, from page to squire to ordeal to knighthood to first quest, against the opposition of many people who [...]
The Values-in-Action character strengths include one called Humility and Modesty, a strength that people at least in America find somewhat offputting. How can that be a strength? What a boring strength! What good is that? I think people often associate the word humility with humiliation, which certainly doesn’t contribute to its [...]
I came home from my mother’s house with some of the coins she’d picked up over the years.
One was privately minted coin from the administration of Van Buren, a coin known as a ‘Hard Times’ token. On one side it has strongbox riding on the back of a turtle, on the other [...]
