Callie Feyen

“Mommy, did you know Taylor Swift recorded ‘Fearless’ two days after I was born?” This is Harper, reading facts to me from the book, Taylor Swift: When I Grow Up. “She wrote ‘Mean’ because a music critic was being mean to her,” Harper explains. “He was giving her, like, bad grades or something.” Harper picked this book out at the Scholastic… View Post

Anyone who spent more than five minutes with me from age 9 to about 14 knows that my three greatest fears were dogs, bees, and Freddy Krueger. In fact, the movie “Nightmare on Elm Street” left such a dent in me that I cannot think of any memory of my Longfellow days after fourth grade without thinking of him. Back… View Post

My favorite part in To Kill a Mockingbird happens in Chapter 17, when Scout gives readers a picture of the Ewell residence: “the plot of ground around the cabin look[ed] like the playhouse of an insane child,” she tells us. It’s a dreary paragraph with a grocery list of descriptions that support Scout’s observation. I’m not of the haunted house type,… View Post

Hadley and I are walking into her orthodontist appointment: the one where she’ll get a metal bridge—I guess that’s what it’s called—attached to the roof of her mouth. It’s going to straighten out her very unstraight jaw. It’s going to make her drool. It’s going to cause her pain, and Hadley’s going to have to learn how to chew and… View Post

I don’t think I could pick my favorite part in Gary Schmidt’s The Wednesday Wars, but my  7th graders and I had a pretty fantastic time reading the scene where two rats fall from the ceiling in Mrs. Baker’s classroom while she’s being observed by BIG IMPORTANT PEOPLE. That’s just the beginning of what happens on the Ides of March.  There’s a… View Post