Exploring Diverse Holidays with The House Without Lights
Holiday lights are a staple of many winter traditions. Solstice candles, Hanukkah menorahs, colorful Christmas strings,…
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Stories for Cooking Together
The winter holidays offer many opportunities for families to cook together. What might sometimes seem like drudgery -…
MoreFinding Comfort in I Am Not Afraid
Bedtime fears are a common childhood experience. Monsters under the bed or in the closet. Strange noises and shadows.…
MoreConnecting with A River of Dust
Scientists who study the environment made an amazing discovery in the 1960s: the health of the Amazon forests depend in…
MoreLooking Beneath with Kids
Everyone - young or old - have bad days. Days when it’s hard to get out of bed. Days when we don’t feel like…
MoreExploring Cicada Symphony with Kids
Every year, cicadas awaken from a long dormant period and dig their way out of the ground. The noisy clicking of the…
MoreCommunity-Building with Our Pool
Growing up in Oklahoma and Texas, summers were hot. My siblings and I loved nothing more than to head to our local…
MoreExploring Self Image with What in the World is Wrong with Gisbert?
With the 2024 Summer Games about to kick off in Paris, children and adults are hyper-aware of how athletes look and…
MoreGender Identity & The Dress in the Window
“Paint my fingers and toes, too, mommy!” pleaded my four year old son. “I want to be sparkly like the girls!”…
MoreJitter Stick Spirituality
My kids have always been pretty good about settling down to do their homework. But after a half hour or so, first one…
MoreBooks for Women’s History Month
I have a bumper sticker on my car that reads, ‘Well-behaved women rarely make history’. It’s a reminder to myself…
MoreWhen Kids See Life as a Quest
My son jumped excitedly from foot to foot as he waited impatiently for the clock to strike midnight. Our local…
MoreWinter Solstice Stories
For the Northern Hemisphere, winter officially begins on December 21st with the marking of the winter solstice. It’s…
MoreCreating a Calming Corner
December can be an overwhelming month for kids. Seasonal changes prompt a shift in clothing and outdoor activities.…
MoreExploring Change with Where is Home, Daddy Bear?
My family moved when I was a child. For the first 6 months, I refused to call the new house ‘home’. I did not want…
MoreResisting Bias with Brian the Brave
Children begin learning about differences at a young age. Figuring out how to categorize things is one of the ways they…
MoreMaking Kindness a Goal
My social media feeds have been flooded with ‘first day of school’ photos. Children stand holding signs proclaiming…
MoreExploring Identity with Loujain Dreams of Sunflowers
Sexism, racism, and classism are hard concepts for children to understand. Kids have a strong bias toward fairness and…
MoreCounting Kindness with Kids
Countless families and children become refugees when extreme poverty or violence force them to leave their homes. The…
MoreSeeing Differences through Eyes that Speak to the Stars
Children are often curious about differences. They wonder why someone has red hair instead of brown like them, or…
MoreExploring Diversity & Community with Luli and the Language of Tea
Children from several nations gather in a playroom while their parents learn English as a Second Language next door.…
MoreDreaming with Dreamers
Dreamers, by Yuyi Morales, follows a mother and her young child as they immigrate to the United States and begin to…
MoreExploring The Coquíes Still Sing
I grew up in Oklahoma, where tornadoes are a common summer occurrence. My family would huddle in the basement as sirens…
MoreExploring The Little Wooden Robot and the Log Princess
Fairy tales can play a powerful role in children’s lives. Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen has morphed into…
MoreExploring Every Little Kindness with Kids
Sometimes a story doesn’t need words to be powerful. That’s the case with Marta Bartolj’s Every Little Kindness,…
MoreExploring the Goodness of Most People
Stranger danger lessons, active shooter drills - these experiences can teach children that others are to be feared.…
MoreExploring Values with The Good for Nothing Tree
I have a peach tree in my front yard. Some years, there are lots of peaches and we scramble to pick our share before…
MoreConnecting with Nature through My Friend Earth
Learning about the seasons of the year is a common focus in many preschool and elementary programs. My Friend Earth,…
MoreGoing on a Rainforest Adventure with Forest
Brendan Kearney’s Forest is part of a series that chronicles the adventures of fisher Finn and his dog, Skip. In this…
MoreExploring the Gift of Rain with Sidney the Lonely Cloud
Like generations of children before them, my kids would chant, “Rain, rain, go away,” whenever raindrops threatened…
MoreExploring Care for the Ocean with I Love You, Blue
My family lives close enough to the ocean that we can visit frequently. My children enjoy walking on the beach, playing…
MoreExploring Bad Days with Everything Will Be OK
Some days are just yucky. Things happen that children can’t control and don’t like. They might be little things,…
MoreExploring Fears with Bright Star
Fears are a part of childhood. Whether it’s worries about monsters under the bed, big dogs, loud noises, or parents…
MoreBooks for Earth Day
Americans have celebrated Earth Day since 1970, with other nations joining in beginning in 1990. The theme for 2023 is…
MoreTalking about Lockdown Drills with One Thursday Afternoon
Lockdown (Active Shooter) Drills have become a staple of children’s lives. Schools and organizations build them into…
MoreExploring A Million Views
My daughter loves creating videos. Lego movies inspire stop-action Lego shorts. Super Bowl halftime shows prompt…
MoreExploring Emotion with Crying is Like the Rain
Children’s feelings can shift and change rapidly. One minute a toddler is happily playing and the next they’re…
MoreUsing Books as Spiritual Mirrors & Windows
As a preschooler, my daughter loved Don and Audrey Wood’s The Little Mouse, The Red Ripe Strawberry, and The Big…
MoreExploring Loteria with Children
Daniel* wasn’t having much success lighting his campfire. Everything seemed stacked against him: too much wind, a…
MoreExploring People Are Wild with Children
“Do they bite?” asked Marcus* when we spotted a family of mule deer during a camping trip. Our group was excited…
MoreSpiritual Themes in The Door of No Return
Lessons about slavery in the United States typically begin with life on a plantation in the American South. This…
MoreExploring Emotions with The Coat
Hand-me-downs can be a dreaded necessity or longed-for acquisition. I remember being crestfallen when a neighbor passed…
MoreExploring Just Help! with Kids
How can children learn to build a better world? According to Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the answer is in…
MoreExploring Community Justice with Unfadeable
In Unfadeable, Bella Fades is a fierce tween girl who loves her community and wants to see it thrive. Her strong belief…
MoreReading Small Town Pride With Kids
Small Town Pride stars a tween working to understand himself, change his community and gain autonomy over his own…
MoreExploring Miss Quinces
Summer can often be a time of celebrations and reunions as family members and friends travel to see one another. In Kat…
MoreTalking about Ukraine with I Hate Borsch
Earlier this month, UNESCO added borsch, the national soup of Ukraine, to its list of endangered cultural heritage…
MoreReading What Do You Do with a Chance?
Taking chances is risky. Some children can’t wait to explore the unknown. Others prefer familiar structures and…
MoreIdentity Discussions with Alice Austen Lived Here
Sam and TJ have learned a lot about ‘Dead Straight Cisgender White Men’ in history. So when they have to research a…
MoreExploring Magic Candies with Children
Imagine a bag of candies with the power to bring your sofa to life and give voice to falling leaves. Would you want to…
MoreReading Simon and the Big, Bad, Angry Beasts
Disney’s popular movie, Turning Red, has called attention to how children struggle with big emotions, especially…
MoreTaking Flight with The Year We Learned to Fly
Cultural and spiritual heritages are often passed on to new generations through stories and teachings by elders.…
MoreReading A Duet for Home
What can children do about a situation that seems unfair or unjust? How can they be allies? These are two of the…
MoreBooks for Earth Day
Every year on April 22, more than a billion people take time to reflect on the earth and its importance for human…
MoreExploring Ellen Outside the Lines
In their latest book, author A.J. Sass creates a neurodivergent main character (Ellen) who is negotiating changes in…
MoreChapter Book Spirituality with Preschoolers
When my children were babies, I would read aloud from whatever book I had at hand to sooth them when they were fussy.…
MoreExploring For Beautiful Black Boys Who Believe in a Better World
Like many parents, Michael W. Waters looked at his newborn son and thought him the most beautiful baby on earth. He…
MoreSpiritual ‘projects’ with Operation Sisterhood
Bo’s summer plans completely change when her mother moves into a Harlem brownstone with her fiance and another…
MoreBooks Celebrating Black Identity
Children’s spiritual well-being depends, in part, on strong self-esteem. They need to see themselves as individuals…
MoreSpiritual Storytelling with The Last Cuentista
For a book lover like me, one bedtime story often turned into two or three as I tucked my young children in. But I…
MoreExploring Where Wonder Grows
My dad collected rocks his whole life. He particularly liked geodes: rocks that - when broken open - contained a hidden…
MoreReading Fauja Singh Keeps Going
Celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr. Day on the 3rd Monday in January reminds us that society needs strong leaders:…
MoreEnvironmental Justice for Preschoolers
As global leaders gather in Glasgow to discuss climate change, one message is clear: environmental justice isn’t just…
MoreReading The Proudest Blue
Wearing hijab is a spiritual statement for Muslim girls and women. It is a sign of faith and a practice of…
MoreChapter Books about Refugees & Asylum Seekers
Older children often wonder about the reasons refugees and asylum seekers have left their homelands. They are able to…
MoreChange Sings
Social change can be scary for children (and adults). Much of parenting young children involves teaching them to obey…
MorePicture Books about Refugees
With stories about refugees and immigrants frequently in the news, children are certain to wonder about why they’ve…
MoreWelcoming Afghan Refugees
Many of the refugees airlifted to the U.S. out of Afghanistan last month are currently housed at Fort Lee in Virginia,…
MoreSpiritual Story Books
My children love to read. From a young age, they knew that I would rarely deny their request to buy a book that caught…
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