Lauri Meyers .

Ho, ho, ho! It's time for another fun year of Susanna Hill's Christmas Story Contest . She's come up with a doozy this year. The Contest :  Write a  children's story  (children here defined as approximately age 12 and under) in which  wild weather impacts the holidays!   Your story may be poetry or prose, silly or serious or sweet, religious or not, based on Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or whatever you celebrate, but is  not to exceed 350 words. Stories must be posted by  Friday December 12 at 11:59 PM EST. Here is my entry in 348 words. The original idea was ReindeerNado...but then the toys got mixed in, and here's where we ended up.  (Note: This story is fictional and any resemblance to persons living or not is purely coincidental!)   :D Jimmy Cantore Steals Christmas By Lauri Meyers Jimmy Cantore tightened the last nut on the Weatherstation 2000 Wind Turbine. His plan was simple. The machine would create enough win...

My 6yo and I GEEKED OUT last week.  Over 2 days, we leveled our personal library following the Fountas & Pinnell system her teacher uses. In her first grade classroom, books are in tubs with a letter on them. Kids know their letter levels, and they get to pick from the book boxes for independent reading.  The Fountas & Pinnell system creates a gradient of text levels, assigning a letter to the text difficulty from A to Z. The system uses word count, vocabulary, grammar, sentence structure, content, etc. to assess how accessible books are to young readers.   Image by Anissat via freeimages.com I started wanting to help my new reader. It turns out I learned quite a lot about picture books in the process. I also discovered my daughter (who can be a handful at homework time) loves doing analytical things as much as I do! When I was pooping out, she would bring down "just one more" stack of books. Now, most of our books have a lovely hot pink post ...