Welcome to my Homepage
  

My website is really about writing: writing about children and writing for children.

   • If you are interested in how children think and feel about the their
      life experiences, you will feel welcome here;
   • If you like to attend to children's voices, you will feel enriched here;
   • If you like to read with children, and talk with them, about the ideas
      that a book suggests, you will feel welcome here. 

 
I will

   • share with you to some of what I have learned from asking and from listening;
   • tell you a little about my background and how I came to write about children and for them;
   • introduce you to three books about twenty-four New York Puerto Rican children and another about children, schools, and politics in Northern Ireland.

Belonging to Puerto Rico and America: Puerto Rican Children's Developing Conceptualization of Their Own Cultural Group – A Research Study

and

Being Puerto Rican and American: Nuyorican Children's Voices – A Chapter Book for Children

   • The first book focuses on children's  thinking about "Puerto Ricanness";
   • The second book focuses on children's stories about themselves as Puerto Rican children living in New York while maintaining strong ties to Puerto Rico.  

A third book is a new edition of Being Puerto Rican and American: Nuyorican Children's Voices with Suggestions for Discussion with Child Readers.

A fourth book focuses on Northern Ireland, Breathing the Same Air:  Children, Schools, and Politics in Northern Ireland - A study of integrated education (Protestant and Catholic children together), set in its many contexts,  in Northern Ireland.

Before too long my daughter, Jennifer Pitkin, and I hope to introduce a series of picture books that we have written which focus on the daily experiences of four family children . . . daily experiences that will seem charming in their own right, and very familiar to other young children who will be able to identify with them.