JaNay Brown-Wood, PhD, is an award-winning and New York Times best-selling children’s author, poet, educator, scholar, and a former professor of early childhood education and child development. Her first children’s book, Imani’s Moon, won the NAESP Children’s Book of the Year Award and was featured on Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show, and her second book, Grandma’s Tiny House: A Counting Story!, won the CELI Read Aloud Book Award. JaNay is also the author of over 28 books, including the popular picturebook series Where in the Garden, the Harriet Tubman and Simone Biles Little Golden Book biographies, and the Scholastic chapter book series Love Puppies. Additionally, JaNay is featured in several educational web-videos, including Cooking with JaNay and Jammies with JaNay. JaNay lives in California with her husband, Catrayel, her daughter Vivian, and her turtle, Theodora.
For a full Grandma’s Tiny House lesson plan created by JaNay Brown-Wood and a handful of other lessons tying math and literacy together, see Early Elementary Mathematics Lessons to Explore, Understand, and Respond to Social Injustice by Courtney Koestler, Jennifer Ward, Maria del Rosario Zavala, Tonya Gau Bartell.
Dear Amazing Elementary Educator, Let’s start off with a visualization exercise: Imagine I am standing right in front of you with two objects in hand. In my right hand, I hold a pair of scissors, my index and middle finger slipped into the handles...