Tomorrow’s the big day. Every year York Community High School in Elmhurst, Illinois honors a number of distinguished alumni, and six other York alumni will be honored along with me at a ceremony in York High School’s Commons tomorrow night. York is the “home of the Dukes,” so honorees are officially called Dukes of Distinction. […]

One woman at the Teaching Children About Blindness session I gave last Friday was a teacher trainer at Head Start in Tampa. That very morning she’d been told that a three-year-old who’d just enrolled is blind. “I have no idea what to tell the teachers to do with him,” she said. “I thought coming to […]

Tomorrow afternoon Whitney and I head to Orlando to give a presentation about ways to teach children about blindness for the Florida Association for the Education of Young Children. Part of my presentation includes ways to use my book Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound in the classroom, and as long as I’m gathering resources […]

I have a children’s book published, but here’s a confession: I don’t know a whole lot about children’s literature. Not modern children’s literature, at least. I read a ton of books when I was little, but after I traded my children’s library card for one that got me into the adult section of the Elmhurst […]

It’s “Disability Awareness Week” at Wilmot Elementary School in Deerfield, Illinois, and the kids there had already enjoyed a special guest before I showed up there with Whitney yesterday. Melissa Stockwell, a three-time Paratriathlon World Champion and decorated U.S. Army veteran, had been at Wilmot the day before us. Melissa was serving in Baghdad in 2004 when a roadside bomb […]