So excited to share this! 🏛️ I’ll be heading to Washington, DC this December to present at the 105th National Council for the Social Studies conference—together with the incredible teacher-librarian Dr. Melaney Sanchez. 🇺🇸 This year’s theme—BECAUSE DEMOCRACY DEPENDS ON IT—gets to the heart of why we teach social studies in public schools. (Quick history dip here: In the late 1800s and early 1900s, America was undergoing massive industrialization, urbanization, and immigrat

What a thrill! I'm very grateful to the  Massachusetts Center for the Book  for recognizing THE NOISY PUDDLE as the Best Picture Book of the year, calling it “a book which dazzles children while educating them about the remarkable ecology of the vernal pool.” "Why write a book about a puddle that disappears? I got that question a lot, or at least I saw it in people’s faces when I told them what I was working on. But what I discovered is that the so-called puddle—a vernal poo