Feltopia Press

I have spent 28 years teaching advanced and gifted language arts at the middle school level. The instructional materials I offer here are informed by empiricism, experience, and research. I know what students need and what teachers want.

I am a big proponent of rigor and relevance which, unfortunately, I have found to be sorely lacking in the resources and instructional materials provided by my school district or that are commercially available. I want to employ materials that will engage students in a deeper exploration of significant literary and informational texts; I want study guides and assessments that go beyond factual recall questions and that leave students disconnected and uninspired. In short, I want to challenge my proficient, advanced, honors, and gifted students, to make them dig deep, to explore ideas, themes, and character motivations, to appreciate novel language usage, to question the author’s subtext and purpose. Frustrated at this dearth of appropriate materials, I took it as a challenge and have spent the last five years revamping many of my earlier materials that relied too heavily on lower-level, factual recall questions. By immersing myself in Florida’s state standards and now the Common Core standards, I believe that I have been able to produce instructional materials of consistently higher quality and higher cognitive expectations.

BA in English - Florida State University; MA in English - Florida Atlantic University

National Board Certified Teacher; Gifted Education Endorsement