About Me

Page by Page

A tutor, a teacher, a mom who never really stopped being a student of reading.

I have always loved to read, finding comfort, adventure and courage in the characters of a book. As a teacher, I found read-alouds provided so much more than a calming space for my students. As a mother, I wanted to share all that I had experienced, through books and teaching, with my own children. My mother is a voracious reader and a lifelong teacher, and for years I resisted following in her footsteps. In my twenties I bounced from job to job, restless, trying to answer the question everyone asks and nobody quite knows how to answer: what do I want to be when I grow up? Eventually I landed at a school, and within a year I was a 1st grade teacher — just like Mom. If I hadn't been so reluctant to be "just like my mother," I could have saved myself a lot of time. My daughter didn't make that mistake. She knew early that she wanted to follow in her grandmother's footsteps, and mine. She started teaching last year after college graduation, and begins her Master's this fall. I bring both a teacher's training and a mother's experience to this site. I was a 1st grade and 3rd grade teacher in New York City and Boston. I have a Master's Degree from Bank Street College of Education. I am trained in the Preventing Academic Failure (PAF) method, an Orton-Gillingham–based approach to literacy instruction, and I currently work as an Educational Consultant focused on early childhood reading development and as a private Literacy Tutor for students in Pre-K through fifth grade. Helping a child fall in love with reading, and keeping that love alive, is harder than it looks, whether it's a student in my tutoring room or my own kids at bedtime. But that's never been a reason not to do it. This site is the record of one way I tried: reading aloud with my own children, every night, for years longer than anyone expected. My children and I created The Happy Readers to share what we learned about books, reading, and the simple magic of reading together. My children have grown up and gone out into the world — better people, I believe, because we read together. Now, The Happy Readers is all mine to share with you.