New Activities and KNIGHTS

In the past couple weeks, the world has been turned upside down. The coronavirus pandemic has ground pretty much all our lives to a halt. As of this morning, a third of the population of the United States was told to stay in their homes and only leave in the case of an emergency, and the same is true for countries and communities all over the world. The schooling of hundreds of millions of children was put on hold, and is now being conducted virtually or being done by parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, siblings, or neighbors.

Thinking about those kids — especially those who may not have access to the sorts of resources that their schools, teachers, and librarians would usually provide them with — I ramped up production of my free activity sheets. I’ve been posting a brand new batch of them every morning for the past week or so, and plan to continue doing so for as long as I can. You can find all those sheets be clicking the ACTIVITIES tab up in the menu bar, or by clicking here.

And now, starting Monday, I will be doing something else — something to help out any kids who want or need access to more reading materials. I will be releasing one of my unpublished novels, Knights of the Kids’ Table. I plan to post a few chapters every Monday and Thursday morning, and then archive the posts on a new page at this site (you’ll be able to find a link to that page up in the menu bar as soon as it’s ready). It’ll probably take a couple months to get the end of the book.

I am far from the only children’s book maker who is sharing resources at this time. Here are just a few of the lists going around sharing more of the wonderful stuff being shared by members of the kid lit community: Today.com’s “How to homeschool during the coronavirus crisis with free resources”; Fast Company’s “Stuck at home? Take free drawing classes from famous illustrators”; and We Are Teachers’ “The Big List of Children’s Authors Doing Online Read Alouds & Activities”.