Just took a look at the list of finalists for the 2016 National Book Award for Young People's Literature, and was delighted to find these books on the list. They are great books to consider for your middle school sons! "Booked" by Kwame Alexander (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt): This novel-in-verse tells the story of 12 year old Nick, a soccer-loving middle [...]
After stepping away from regular GCP blogging for a while to begin work on a parenting book, I am returning to posting regularly--GCP is back! While the posts will still primarily focus on raising boys, many posts already on the site can be helpful for parenting girls as well. A lovely young friend with twins (a boy and a girl) recently told [...]
Our hearts break for the families of Alton Sterling, Philando Castle, the slain and injured Dallas policemen and their families. I used to take solace in thinking that no matter how tough/scary it may seem to parent a black child these days, it can't compare to the unsettling times of 60's and 70's when I was young, with the [...]
Hello GCP Parents! Long time. Been working quite a bit on an exciting project that continues where this blog began (think a comprehensive collection of GCPblog posts and lots more--stay tuned) so there has not been much posting this year. Hope you have been combing through the archives for interesting and relevant articles. But today I came across this [...]
It is Black History Month! We all know what this means: Lots of tributes to and images of President Obama, Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, and a host of Black "paving the way" entertainers and athletes will be floating around our children at school this month. While we at GCP believe our sons and daughters and [...]
Season's Greetings!! With Christmas but a week away, today's Thoughtful Thursday brings you some holiday cheer in the form of poetry from two of the great ones. Here are two Christmas poems by Langston Hughes and one from Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Enjoy! Christmas Eve: Nearing Midnight In New York The Christmas trees are almost all sold And the ones [...]
It's that time of year when students everywhere face tests and papers before the holiday break. Today's Thoughtful Thursday brings quotes to inspire your sons as they hunker down and get this job done. The will to succeed is important, but what's more important is the will to prepare. -Bobby Knight Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated [...]
In the aftermath of the recent killings in Lebanon and Paris, today's Thoughtful Thursdays offers poems about grieving after catastrophic events. "Facing It", by Yusef Komunyakaa, the only African American man to win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry, details his experience of loss and remembrance when he visits the Vietnam Memorial. In "Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100" by [...]
Over the years that GCP has been around, we have had to write an alarming number of posts with the same basic message: how do we talk to our sons about unimaginably horrible and senseless killings that they can see footage of over and over on CNN? This time it is Paris. It has been Lebanon, it has been [...]
Happy Fall! Today's Thoughtful Thursday celebrates fall with the poem "Merry Autumn" from Paul Laurence Dunbar. Enjoy. Merry Autumn It's all a farce, — these tales they tell About the breezes sighing, And moans astir o'er field and dell, Because the year is dying. Such principles are most absurd, — I care not who first taught 'em; There's nothing [...]