How We Make Stuff
Articles about how we concept ideas, write words, draw pictures and — most importantly — test our ideas! We believe that kids are driven by passion and that they learn by doing — playing. And we believe the concepts, games and activities should be evidence-based, meaning tested and proven in the real world.
Feel Your Feelings storytime and activities
Here are some pictures of all the fun activities we did at our storytime, including an emoji cutout kit, giant slide puzzle, jigsaw puzzles, T-shirts, buttons, notepads, book signing, snacks, and lots of time to share stories and smiles.
Feel Your Feelings, the braille edition
Here is a sneak peek at Feel Your Feelings, the braille edition. Not only is the book in braille, but it is also filled with tactile graphics, so you can literally feel your feelings!
My cat editors
A quick story about my cat editors with lots of pictures of them “helping” me in the office.
Kids Making the News Happen
KMNH, Kids Making the News Happen, Community Spotlight. Dr Sara and Scott talk about how to make dreams happen.
Dream It! Achieves a research publication milestone
Great news!!! Today is an exciting day for the science of dreaming (goal setting, aspiration, passions). We are proud to announce that our latest dream research study has been published in the peer-reviewed, scientific journal Child & Youth Care Forum.
Impact and feasibility of the Dream Workshop
A summary of a research study conducted by the University of Cincinnati to test the efficacy of a Dream Workshop and whether it improved children’s self-confidence as measure of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL).
How the book cover was illustrated
How the hand-drawn cover was conceived and illustrated, including descriptions of the thumbnails. And how this affected title of the book and website.
Improving social and emotional awareness using the Dream It! Playbook
Student’s using the workbook “Dream It!” had a scientifically proven, evidence-based improvement in optimistic thinking and perseverance (along with improvements in hope, growth-mindset and overall school climate) among elementary school students. Highlights from our most-important study to date, including lots of pictures and graphs.
Learning how the education system works
If you’ve been reading our website, you’ve learned that we spent a great deal of effort learning educational theory, cognitive development and psychological theory, and combining it all with our own life experiences to form a comprehensive, evidence-based process for learning how to dream and turn those dreams into reality. However, one aspect of the book that is not apparent by reading it is all the work we’ve done learning how to work within the bureaucracy of the school system, connecting with community leaders and implementing educational programs.
Curated articles on educational psychology
During the creation of our first book, we spent countless hours researching. And we also ran our own research project. During the way, we ran across a lot of great ideas that got lost, so we thought we should begin collecting the best of the best articles we have read.
Improving children’s optimistic thinking by teaching them to dream about life goals
We were honored to attend the American Psychological Associations 2018 annual conference to present the results of our study. This is a new analysis of our data that, essentially, says that young students perform better when they are taught the basics of socioemotional skills, like passion and goal setting, first before more academic subjects, such as reading, writing and arithmetic.
Interview with the authors
Learn how and why Sara and Scott do what they do. An interview with their publisher, Magination Press.
