I have some book news to share…. Turtle Tube: An Erutuf National Park Novel won three Honorable Mention Awards for the Middle Grade Fiction, New Author: Fiction, and Green Books/Environmental categories in the Story Monsters 2022 Purple Dragonfly Book Awards Contest! 🏅 Yay!! 🎉 So honored and grateful! ❤️ Click here for more information on my book.
Exciting Book News! Read More »
A couple of weeks ago, I received an e-mail thanking me for my information about national parks virtual tours as it helped out Amanda and Grace for their “Exploring the World from Home” workshop at the Rutland County Library in Vermont. In their research, Amanda found a couple of great online resources that I wanted to share: Take a virtual trip and see some amazing architecture throughout the world through by clicking here. I really like how you can scroll to a particular place and click to check it out. Take a virtual reality trip by clicking here. On this page, you can time travel through virtual reality. For example, you can step onto the Titanic as it looked like when it left Great Britain. Thank you to Amanda and Grace for sharing these really interesting online resources! Good luck with your workshop! I also just received an e-mail from the Harrison Park Community and Recreation Center in Illinois. Brendan found another great website that I wanted to add here and share. Check out this website by clicking here. I appreciate all the environmental education and conversation links in it. For example, you can go to Paris and visit the gardens of Versailles! Thank you so much, Brendan! I’m going to take a virtual tour now to check out Claude Monet’s gardens! Happy online traveling!
Happy Juneteenth National Independence Day! Today celebrates the date of June 19, 1865, when enslaved people of African descent located in Galveston, Texas, finally learned of their freedom from the slavery system in the United States. While the Emancipation Proclamation granted freedom and was signed on January 1, 1863, by President Abraham Lincoln. Texas was the farthest of the Confederate states, and slaveholders there made no attempt to free the enslaved African Americans they held in bondage. President Lincoln’s proclamation was unenforceable without military intervention, which eventually came nearly two and a half years later. Juneteenth is an important date on the timeline of slavery history in the United States and now a federal holiday just signed into law last year. Take a moment today and reflect on the importance of this holiday.
“Bless them, normal people will go to any lengths to ignore magic, even if it’s staring them in the face.”— Arthur Weasley, Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets In a group of great fathers in literature, you have to think about Arthur Weasley from The Harry Potter Series. Arthur truly loves his family and takes on Harry like his own child. He’s a great family guy and also a hard worker. I love his curiosity and awe of the world that he demonstrates to his children. Cheers to all the dad out there today! Hopefully you get some time to read a great book today!
Happy Flag Day! This holiday commemorates the date in 1777 when the United States approved the design for its first national flag. Did you know that the designer of our current flag was a 17-year-old Boy Scout named Robert Heft? What grade do you think he received for this look? A grade of B-minus. His Ohio teacher said the design was unoriginal, but offered to raise it to an A if the design was accepted nationally. So, the boy wrote to his congressman and the rest is history. And yes, he ended up with an A. Happy Flag Day! 🇺🇸
Cheers to another lap around the sun! As I enter a new decade in my life, I can’t help but reflect on the past ten years (and beyond). If you don’t know or really want to know which decade, ask my children or ask my older friends welcoming me to this club. I plan on answering that I’m 36 years old again. 😉 The previous decade flew by! People always warn you how fast the time with your children goes and these last 10 years really did go fast! Our children are both double digits now with one entering high school and the other only has one more year of elementary school left. I blinked and it flew by! I’m pretty proud of our two kiddos and the adults they’re becoming! When I think back over these last 10 years, I really think about a time of growth as a family and adventures together. I even wrote and published a children’s book! 😊 I feel very lucky! Over the last ten years, I made a number of new friendships; watch older friendships grow; reconnected with past ones; and said good bye to those whom we lost. In these last ten years, I have seen three very, very, very different men get elected and serve as Presidents. Kamala Harris became the first woman, first African American, and first Asian American to be Vice President. The United States legalized same-sex marriage across all 50 states. The #MeToo movement went viral. Fidget spinners were a craze. The Paris Agreement, an international treaty, was created to focus on climate change. We experienced a total eclipse. Space-X launched astronauts to the space station. The Black Lives Matter movement started. Astronomers were able to capture the first-ever image of a black hole. The U.S. established June 19th as Juneteenth National Independence Day, a federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. COVID-19 spread around the world. And of course, the Chicago Cubs broke the curse and won the World Series in 2016! While I enter this next decade with some angst, I also welcome the next ten years of adventures and life. In fact, I feel very, very grateful! “This a wonderful day. I’ve never seen this one before.” Maya Angelou
Happy World Turtle Day®! It’s time to shellebrate (as Dean might say)! 😉 American Tortoise Rescue, a nonprofit organization, created this day over 20 years ago to help people celebrate and protect turtles and tortoises and their disappearing habitats around the world. For more than 100 million years sea turtles have covered vast distances across the world’s oceans, filling a vital role in the balance of wildlife. We need to continue to protect these important animals. Here are a few small things you can do to help saves turtles: Adopt a turtle instead of buying one from the pet shops. Never remove or touch a turtle in the wild (unless they are sick or injured). If a tortoise is crossing a busy street, pick it up, and send it in the same direction it was going – if you try to make it go back, it will turn right around again. Report any illegal sales of turtles or tortoises to animal control. You can also consider supporting of one the many nonprofit organizations out there working to protect these important animals to our world. Happy World Turtle Day®! 🐢 P.S. Emma thanks you!
World Turtle Day®! Read More »
To help keep your kids reading this summer, I created a fun summer reading challenge. One of the main characters in Turtle Tube: An Erutuf National Park Novel, Dean, loves to read. He needs help to read more books this summer! Click here for the challenge. Complete the list, e-mail me, and you will receive a fun sticker in the mail. Emma will be proud!
Summer Reading Challenge Read More »
“All the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust.”― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan Happy Peter Pan Day or really, J.M. Barrie’s birthday! J. M. Barrie authored “Peter Pan” as a play first in 1904 and then as a novel in 1911. Cheers to this Scottish author and playwright for creating such a memorable set of characters and story! To celebrate, make some pixie dust, go on an adventure, tell a good story, battle a pirate, and act like a kid! Or pick up the original book and read it today! “To live will be an awfully big adventure.”― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan Happy Peter Pan Day!
“A Kanga is generally regarded as one of the fiercer animals. I am not frightened of fierce animals in the ordinary way, but it is well known that, if one of the fiercer animals is deprived of its young, it becomes as fierce as two of the fiercer animals.” ~ A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh The fictional character of Kanga is the mother to Roo and a great friend to the others in the Hundred Acre Woods in Winnie-the-Pooh. I love her sweet and caring nature to Roo and all the rest of these characters. I love how she calls them “dears” and enjoy her sense of humor too. She’s a pretty cool mother character! Cheers to all the moms out there today! Hopefully you get some time to read a great book today! I’m looking forward to reading and spending some time with my Roo’s! 🙂 Happy Mother’s Day!
