My friend Nicole Dotto and I both volunteer for Sit Stay Read (SSR), a literacy organization that encourages Chicago Public School kids to love to read. SSR uses dogs and volunteers in all sorts of clever ways: children read aloud to specially trained therapy dogs, human volunteers visit as “book buddies” to help individual kids, […]

This week Judy Roth, one of the writers in my Thursday afternoon memoir-writing class, arranged for Whitney and me to visit the school where her grandson Davin goes to kindergarten. My friend Carol drove us to Francis W. Parker School and agreed to write a guest post about our morning together there. My morning at […]

Whitney and I got off the train from Milwaukee Saturday only to turn around and jump in the car with Mike to drive down to Champaign! I spoke to an animal sciences class yesterday morning at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, and Whitney stole the show, of course. My three-year-old Golden Retriever/Yellow Lab cross […]

Quick. How many people do you need for a team at a Braille Game? Six, of course. One for each dot in a Braille cell. Whitney and I learned that, among many, many other things, at our very first ever Braille Games competition in Milwaukee last Friday. A story in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel explains: Teams […]

Last Friday Whitney and I visited an elementary school in a South Side Chicago neighborhood that’s been the center of a national focus on violence and guns the past couple of weeks. That very day, President Obama was at a Chicago high school nearby giving a speech about his new antipoverty policy initiatives. Our mission […]