Blog Archives
The Secret of the Magic eyePad: Novel Study, Activities, 7 STEM Projects, Bonus Audiobook Guide
This book is a hands-on, activity-packed companion to the novel The Secret of the Magic eyePad, designed to bring STEM concepts to life through fun, challenging experiments and problem-solving tasks. It’s not a storybook in the traditional sense but a full-blown interactive workbook, complete with guided science experiments, engineering design challenges, and math integration, all inspired by the characters and events in the original fiction. Readers explore everything from volcano-building and rapid prototyping to room design and physics tricks, with each section laid out in an engaging and accessible way.
I was really impressed by how approachable the writing is. Marsha Tufft clearly knows her stuff. Her engineering background shows, but she doesn’t talk down to the reader. She brings a friendly, encouraging tone that makes even more complex ideas feel doable. What really stuck out to me was how she built in failure as a natural part of the process. It didn’t feel like school. It felt like playing and building and figuring things out. That balance between structure and freedom is tough to hit, but she nails it. I found myself wanting to try some of the challenges myself, and I’m well past the target age group.
There were a few moments that felt a little too structured or worksheet-heavy, like the design evaluation charts or standards alignment bits. They’re useful though, especially for teachers or homeschoolers. Still, the overall energy of the book was high. It sparks curiosity and encourages kids to think like inventors. You don’t need fancy supplies either, just stuff around the house, some curiosity, and a bit of patience. That makes it feel empowering and realistic, which I loved.
This is a great resource for curious kids, especially those between 9 and 13, and for the adults who teach, parent, or coach them. If you’re a teacher looking to bring STEM alive or a parent trying to get your child off screens and into the world of building, this book delivers. I’d especially recommend it for girls interested in science. It subtly works to build confidence and independence without making a big deal about it. Highly recommended for anyone ready to tinker, explore, and learn by doing.
Pages: 226 | ISBN: 195825133X
Nurse Dorothea® Presents Distress Tolerance and Contentment, and Why We Need to Develop Those Skills
Distress Tolerance and Contentment and Why We Need to Develop Those Skills, by Michael Dow, frames itself as an after-school class led by Nurse Dorothea, who speaks directly to children about how big feelings work, what unhealthy coping can look like, and which practical tools can help. The first half focuses on distress tolerance, naming triggers, noticing distorted thoughts, and practicing strategies like “emotional surfing,” STOP, TIPP, ACCEPTS, and radical acceptance, while the second half turns toward problem-solving and contentment, urging kids to tell needs from wants, protect their time, and build steadier inner ground.
As a parent, I admired the book’s seriousness. It doesn’t speak to children as if they are decorative little optimists; it assumes they can confront anxiety, avoidance, shame, impulsivity, and loneliness with honesty. I found that bracing and, in places, genuinely heartening. There is a humane impulse underneath the instruction, the repeated insistence that mental health can be discussed openly, that distress is survivable, and that skills can be learned even when feelings arrive like weather fronts. This is much more didactic than lyrical. It reads less like a conventional picture book and more like a classroom script or guided workbook.
I liked the book’s practical texture. It asks children to journal, reflect, pause, observe, compare choices, and rehearse healthier responses rather than merely absorb a moral and move on. As a parent, I can see real value in that. I could imagine reading sections of it with a child who is old enough to discuss them, then stopping to talk rather than hurrying to the next page. I also think some families will need to mediate the material carefully: the examples of self-harm, binge eating, smoking, vaping, and drug use are frank, and the vocabulary lands closer to social-emotional curriculum than bedtime fare.
I would recommend Dow’s guide most strongly for older children, tweens, middle-grade readers, counselors, classrooms, and families looking for children’s mental health nonfiction, social-emotional learning, psychology for kids, or therapeutic read-alouds rather than a snug narrative picture book. In spirit, it sits closer to an educational companion than to the emotional parable of The Rabbit Listened, where that book comforts through quiet metaphor, this one teaches through direct instruction. This book is useful and earnest, less a lullaby than a toolkit, and sometimes that is exactly what a child needs.
Pages: 99
War Is Ugly
Nurse Florence®, How Bad are Health Problems from Agent Orange? follows curious students and a compassionate nurse as they unravel the history, science, and human cost of Agent Orange in a clear and accessible conversation. What inspired you to frame such a heavy historical and medical topic through a conversation between children and Nurse Florence?
One of my previous careers was helping Veterans with their benefits. I met people during that time who were affected by Agent Orange and thought their grandkids would be interested in knowing more about the condition.
How did you decide which Agent Orange–related illnesses to include, and how did you balance scientific accuracy with accessibility for young readers?
I used a VA education website to decide on the topics to include and tried to simplify each health condition.
What was the most challenging aspect of presenting emotionally difficult material in a calm, age-appropriate way?
Because science teaches people to observe their environment, it helps a person be less emotional through observation. I choose to focus on science facts and avoid long discussions about why there was a Vietnam War.
What do you hope young readers, educators, and families take away from this book about history, health, and the human impact of war?
War is ugly, and we should use all diplomatic channels to avoid it.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Essay Contest | YouTube | Dow Creative Enterprises®
| Nurse Florence Project | LinkedIn | Amazon
Live a Healthy Life
Nurse Florence®, What Are Eosinophils? follows students and a knowledgeable nurse as they explore what eosinophils are, how they work, and why understanding them helps kids make healthy choices. What inspired you to focus an entire children’s book on a lesser-known type of white blood cell?
Since we plan to publish over 700 Nurse Florence® books, we will need to explore the lesser-known things about the body to get to that number.
How did you approach balancing scientific accuracy with accessibility for young readers?
I have both as coequal goals or objectives, so I do my best to make both happen with each page.
Were there particular health topics that you found especially challenging to simplify without losing nuance?
Trying to explain what doctors may want to do if the cell count is too high or too low.
How do you decide which practical health habits to include when connecting science to everyday life?
I try to promote eating a healthy and balanced diet, exercising regularly, and sleeping well into every book if possible, as well as not smoking cigarettes. These are things that show up in the literature over and over again to help people live a healthy life.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Essay Contest | YouTube | Dow Creative Enterprises® | Nurse Florence Project | LinkedIn | Amazon
Curious Questions
Nurse Florence, Tell Me About Adipose Tissue follows three girls talking with the school nurse at lunch, who want to learn what purpose body fat serves in keeping the body working. Why was this an important book for you to write?
The Nurse Florence® series explores the curious questions that people have about the body, so this book serves to answer the questions some may have about adipose or fat tissue.
With the human body being so complex, and some areas doing many jobs, how do you determine what medical facts to include in your books?
Sometimes, it’s just intuition about what should be included and what should be left out. All of the books can’t be 100 pages long, so we just have to choose to cover different concepts in multiple books.
What were some ideas that were important for you to share in this book?
I was surprised to learn myself that adipose tissue produces some hormones, so if I thought that was interesting, then I thought others would find that interesting as well.
What is one thing that you hope readers take away from Nurse Florence, Tell Me About Adipose Tissue?
The human body is complicated, and it’s ok to learn new things about the body for all our lives.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Essay Contest | YouTube | Dow Creative Enterprises® | Nurse Florence Series | LinkedIn | Amazon
Too Many Teachers Are Struggling
Class Is In Session: Teaching Through the Chaos is a plainspoken and deeply felt account of what it means to teach in conditions that are equal parts absurd, exhausting, and sacred. Why was this an important book for you to write?
This book was important for me to write because too many teachers are struggling in silence. What happens inside classrooms every day is often misunderstood or overlooked, and I wanted to tell the truth about it. Not just the challenges, but the heart behind the work—the reason we keep showing up even when it’s hard. This book isn’t about me; it’s about giving a voice to educators who feel unseen and reminding them that what they do still matters.
You describe teaching as work that goes far beyond instruction. How do you define the emotional and moral responsibilities of a teacher?
Teaching goes far beyond delivering content. Teachers are carrying the emotional weight of their students—meeting them where they are, supporting them through challenges, and creating a safe space for them to grow. There’s a moral responsibility to show up with patience, consistency, and care, even on the hard days. It’s about doing what’s right for kids, not just what’s required on paper. That kind of work takes heart, and it takes a toll.
The book emphasizes understanding behavior as communication. When did that shift in perspective happen for you?
That shift happened when I started looking beyond the behavior and asking, “What is this student trying to tell me?” I realized that many behaviors weren’t about defiance—they were about unmet needs, frustration, or things students didn’t have the words to express. Once I saw behavior as communication, it changed how I responded. It didn’t make things easier, but it made them more meaningful and helped me lead with more empathy and intention.
What would it take for systems to better support the realities you describe?
It would take honesty, first. Systems have to acknowledge what teachers are really dealing with instead of minimizing it. Beyond that, we need smaller class sizes, more support staff, and policies that reflect the realities of today’s classrooms. Teachers need time, resources, and emotional support—not just expectations. Most importantly, they need to feel trusted and valued, not just evaluated. When teachers are supported, students benefit. It’s that simple.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website
In Class Is In Session: Teaching Through the Chaos, educator and author Shantel N. Patt returns with unfiltered truth straight from inside the classroom walls. Drawing on more than fourteen years of teaching experience, she shares the highs, the heartbreaks, and the hilarious in between moments that only educators truly understand.
From navigating burnout and difficult parent relationships to rediscovering purpose beyond lesson plans and paperwork, this book explores what it really means to teach with passion when the system and sometimes life itself feels like it is working against you.
Honest, relatable, and uplifting, this second installment in the Class Is In Session series is for every teacher who has questioned their calling but still showed up anyway. It is a reminder that while the chaos may be loud, the impact you make is louder.
Class is officially back in session and this time, we are teaching through it all.
Capturing the Experience
In Encounter, you share with readers your incredible experiences coping with culture shock, natural disaster, and classroom struggles while teaching at Leulumoega Fou College in Samoa in 1990. What did you most want to preserve about your time in Samoa?
I most wanted to capture the experience, what it taught me, and how it impacted my life following the experience. In capturing the experience, I sought to make the story as immersive as possible for the reader. I want them to feel what I felt when they step on a cockroach in bare feet first thing in the morning, the sweat on their face, tears in their eyes, and how the constant confusion and uncertainty of cultural collision drags us down emotionally. I want my readers to be as confused and uncertain as I was. I want them to face the hard moral choices I faced, and leave them to make their own decisions – what would they do in that time and place? What would they do now? Most of all, I want to preserve the search for wisdom, understanding, meaning and purpose to all the hardship and suffering. The reflective passages are there to help the reader reflect on the bigger picture, but with humility, acknowledging just how limited our knowledge and experience actually are or can be. To make the book immersive, I re-read and studied authors who I thought had done that well – like Steinbeck, Dickens, Hemingway, Frank McCourt, and contemporary thriller writers John Le Carre, John Grisham, and Lee Child. To help make scenes vivid, I returned to poets Shakespeare, TS Eliot, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Tolkien. For reflection, I turned to the way CS Lewis and Jennifer Worth (Call the Midwife) wrote their reflective pieces.
How did you decide what to include versus what to leave out, especially in more vulnerable or unflattering moments?
My guiding principle was to be honest with whatever I put in, but the need to keep the word count to under 100,000 meant I had to cut a lot out. I approached judgment of others by honestly sharing what they said and what they did so the reader could make their own judgment. Unflattering moments and vulnerability are a necessary part of learning, but also necessary to show contrast. The climb out of the valley of “badness” is only meaningful if we first know how bad that valley was for us.
In the case where I did provide judgement (characters Helen, Tammy, and some others) I did so because it was necessary to show my changing understanding of them – how my initial judgement changed from unflattering to gaining wisdom. This is most important, and most difficult for me to write about, in the case of my relationship with Helen, where my initial assessment slowly changes from someone I’m wary of, to someone I loved and cared for deeply. (The “real” Helen passed away from breast cancer in 2007 as a young mother with two young boys; Tammy passed away in 2021 after a life of overseas service as a teacher and nurse.) However, for many people working overseas as volunteers, aid workers or missionaries, it’s often our fellow workers and those we live with that are the most difficult, not those we go to serve. I wanted to share that experience in the hope that it would help others going through a similar struggle when thrown together with colleagues and co-workers they may not like. I want them to know that even if your negative assessments of difficult people turn out to be true, in true community, you still need to care for them, love them, and recognize you will need to depend on them.
How did your Christian faith shape the way you interpreted your experiences at the time?
We would not have gone to Samoa if we did not at least hold a Christian worldview. And we would probably not have persevered without having the challenge of Jesus words, and the example of both his life, and the lives of many Christians since that time. I mention St Francis and Mother Teresa, but there are many others. This is why each chapter starts with a quote from the words of Jesus, because it was those actual words that challenged me personally each step of the way.
In going to Samoa in 1990, the risk of death was very real since the previous year a field worker had died of Dengue fever, and there were other threats to safety and security we could not control. We believed then, as we do now, that if we died our death would not be an accident – that God would work this for good, for His purpose, and God’s purpose is what gave us purpose in whatever we did. I don’t think we would have willingly engaged in suffering and risked our security, peace, happiness, or life for something that we do not believe to be true. I have looked at atheism, and it is a selfish, meaningless, and purposeless wasteland.
What is one thing you hope readers take away from Encounter?
I hope they gain a window into what a life lived with purpose can look like, that such a life can be found following Jesus on the narrow road, that such a life may be hard, and involve suffering, but it will at least be very rich and will lead to an abundant life.
Author links: GoodReads | X | Facebook | Website
When Ian and Heather leave Australia to teach in Samoa they expect hardship. They don’t expect a devastating cyclone followed by the slow dismantling of everything they thought they understood about the world.
Why are they being laughed at? Why is introducing someone offensive? What does respect look like? Navigating traditional Polynesian culture amid disaster, poverty and political tension, exposes their own cultural blind spots, assumptions and questions their deeply held beliefs. Good intentions are not enough. Join with them as they seek purpose and explore what justice, identity, faith and community mean in a radically different culture.
Raw, honest and unexpectedly funny, Encounter immerses you in the lived reality of being an outsider — the exhaustion, the mistakes, the fear, the beauty and resilience of Pacific Island life and community. Moving with the pace of a thriller, Encounter’s true story also wrestles with uncomfortable questions immigrants, travellers, and truth seekers know well: Where do I belong? Why am I here? Who am I when everything familiar is stripped away?
Perfect for readers who love biographies and memoirs that transport you into another world, want to be challenged or need a page turner they can’t put down.
Trauma-Informed Teaching: From Reaction to Restoration
Reading Trauma-Informed Teaching: From Reaction to Restoration felt less like moving through a conventional education manual and more like sitting across from someone who has paid dearly for what she knows and is determined to make that knowledge useful to other people. Author Dr. Annise Mabry’s central argument is clear from the start: children who’ve been shaped by trauma cannot be reached through punishment, rigid compliance, or sterile notions of rigor, and homeschool cooperatives, microschools, and other alternative learning spaces have a real chance to become places of safety, repair, and restored dignity instead. She builds that case through a framework of trauma awareness, restorative discipline, emotional safety, family partnership, crisis response, and educator sustainability, always returning to the same moral center: behavior is communication, regulation has to come before instruction, and restoration has to matter more than control.
I was moved by the book’s emotional honesty. Mabry is not writing from a polite professional distance. She’s writing out of lived stakes, and you can feel that in the pages about her daughter being treated as a problem to be removed rather than a child to be understood, and in the prologue, where she describes losing major grant funding while still carrying the needs of an entire community. That urgency gives the book its pulse. I was especially moved by the recurring insistence that so-called misbehavior often masks fear, shame, dissociation, or a learned survival strategy. The examples are concrete enough to land, from Nia’s transformation after adults stopped escalating consequences and started offering choice and reflection, to the small but piercing image of a child finally being able to say, “I do not understand. Can you help me?” Those moments keep the book from floating off into abstraction.
The book is strongest when Mabry lets her convictions sharpen into testimony. She has a gift for phrases that are blunt without being cold, memorable without sounding manufactured. The best lines have a kind of pastoral clarity. Even when the prose circles familiar points, the ideas underneath remain persuasive because they’re grounded in practice. Her distinction between trauma-informed and healing-centered learning is particularly strong, and the chapters on restorative language, community care, and educator burnout broaden the book beyond classroom management into something closer to an ethic of presence. I appreciated that she doesn’t just ask teachers to be gentler. She asks them to be steadier, more self-aware, and more willing to repair their own harm, too.
I found Trauma-Informed Teaching affecting, useful, and morally serious. It has the kind of conviction that’s infectious and makes the book compelling. What stays is not just the framework, but the feeling of being asked to imagine education as a site of restoration rather than sorting, punishment, or quiet abandonment. I’d recommend it especially to homeschool leaders, microschool founders, counselors, parents of trauma-impacted children, and classroom educators who are ready to think more deeply about what safety really means in a learning environment. This is a book for people who still believe school can be a place where someone’s life bends back toward hope.
Pages: 109 | ASIN : B0GH3H9Z76
