Sara Varon's My Pencil and Me is a playful picture book that’s perfect for young artists, writers, and makers—especially if they struggle with confidence or writer's block. Sara loves to draw and tell stories, but sometimes it can be difficult to get started. What if she doesn't have any good ideas or her drawings turn out terrible?! Lucky for Sara, she has a friend who is always by her side—her pencil. With a little help from Pencil, Sara learns it's okay if her story isn't perfect, as long as she's using her imagination and having fun.

The pencil is a single tool that has the power to reset mindsets, enhance thinking, improve retention, recall, and comprehension, calm us and make us smile...all this from our pencil! My Pencil Made Me Do It is a unique, hands-on, create-to-connect and doodle-to-learn book that will have readers DISCOVERING powerful moments, LEARNING the power behind visual thinking, and doodling to learn. Through honest perspective and creative insight, Carrie opens educators and students to VISUALIZING their thinking and their learning while enabling them to experience how they can bring visual thinking into our world. After reading this book, you can expect to: CONNECT with your very own visual learner and the deep power this holds. DOODLE your way through meaningful visual- and doodle-filled activities. REPEAT this creative epiphany tomorrow to bring out the best in yourself, your teaching, your children, and your students!

What if doorbells used smell instead of sound? What if watches told time more slowly on weekends? Designers at the ground-breaking firm IDEOthe most innovative design company in the worldpush themselves to ask seemingly outrageous questions like these daily as they work to construct the products that shape our lives. Following 12 design experiments conceived by designers at IDEO, I Miss My Pencil takes a voyeuristic look at what designers do daily, might get to do once, and sometimes only hope to do. Each experiment is made real through collaboration, sketching, prototyping, fabrication, and photographing to go beyond the conceptual to the curiously concrete.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. A cylinder of baked graphite and clay in a wood case, the pencil creates as it is being destroyed. To love a pencil is to use it, to sharpen it, and to essentially destroy it. Pencils were used to sketch civilization's greatest works of art. Pencils were there marking the choices in the earliest democratic elections. Even when used haphazardly to mark out where a saw's blade should make a cut, a pencil is creating. Pencil offers a deep look at this common, almost ubiquitous, object. Pencils are a simple device that are deceptively difficult to manufacture. At a time when many use cellphones as banking branches and instructors reach students online throughout the world, pencil use has not waned, with tens of millions being made and used annually. Carol Beggy sketches out how the lowly pencil is still a mighty useful tool. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

In the tradition of Goodbye, Mr. Chips; Blackboard Jungle; Up the Down Staircase; and Welcome Back, Kotter: High school English and theatre teacher Buddy Lee Walter's fictionalized autobiography, Bring Your Own Pencil! The Making of a Teacher, will keep you in stitches while satirizing frustrated teachers, bumbling administrations, stupid bureaucracies, crazy students, troubled students, cool students, and the social conditions which produced all this. Eduardo Ciannelli finds himself, unexpectedly, in front of a classroom of high school students, and finds himself. His story is one of a reluctant - accidental - teacher who has to confront his own biases and assumptions about himself, his students, and the educational system, in order to reach the understanding that the entire thing is ultimately about the human connection. It is about the teacher/student relationship ... and how sometimes these roles get reversed. Join Eduardo on his journey, as he deals with the best and worst of administrators and the most centered and most troubled of students, to discover if he even wants to be a teacher and, if so, how to become a better one.