Parents, Teachers & Friends
By Laura Matanah
After spending a few hours together at a wedding three children threw their arms around each other and cried, “We’re cousins!” In a sense, they were; in a sense, they weren’t. Their story illustrates the importance children place on defining their families, and the role adults play in the process. This month’s issue is all about the complexity of our family structures, and we provide literature, interviews, alternative family tree activities, and discussion questions to spark conversations about family with children and teens.
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By Amy Brandt
Izzy and Tiffany do everything together. What will happen to their friendship when one friend can do something the other cannot?
Click here for the printable book!
Families come in all shapes and sizes, but sometimes family trees have a hard time showing it. This month’s activity shows off some fun options for making an alternative family tree with your kids!
This month we are exploring ideas around family and looking at families that include LGBT adults that are not parents, like aunts and uncles and grandmas and grandpas. We have decided to highlight a previously published story in which a young girl’s aunt comes out to her family and her family reacts.
Click here to read Extra Plate for Dinner, and visit the Kids’ section for some great discussion questions on the book and the many forms of family!
By Peter S. Scholtes
The Okee Dokee Brothers are unusual, even for guys who sound like The Jayhawks covering They Might Be Giants’ kids songs in a bluegrass style. For starters, singer/guitarist Joe Mailander and singer/banjo-player Justin Lansing met when they were young children themselves in Denver, Colorado, when Mailander was living on a farm and Lansing was living in the mountains. Outdoor life provided the inspiration for the duo's second, wonderful album Take It Outside (on their own Okee Dokee Music), which features songs about water balloons, nature, extraterrestrials, nudity, auctioneering, and the word "antidisestablishmentarianism"—all the good stuff in life.
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A Book Review by Hannah Crawford
It starts off innocently enough. A salt shaker goes missing, but someone might have just misplaced it. Then other things start disappearing—things that can’t be explained away so easily. When their favorite pictures get stolen right out of their rooms, Nikki and Travis know that it’s time to start investigating.
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