New York Times bestselling author Carl Hiaasen is this week’s featured guest. Carl’s many bestsellers include the Newberry Award-winning book Hoot, which was adapted into a movie starring Luke Wilson, Logan Lerman and Brie Larson.

In my conversation with Carl, we talk about how his newspaper background influences his writing, why he began writing young-adult books after a successful career writing books for adults and how responsive kids are to stories about the environment.

The post Ep. 52 Interview with Carl Hiaasen, author of many NYT bestsellers including the Newberry Award-winning book Hoot appeared first on The ParentNormal.

Pulitzer Prize winning columnist and author Dave Barry, who happens to be one of the funniest writers alive, is my featured guest this week. Dave has written more than 30 books and even had a CBS sitcom called Dave’s World based on his books. But if you ask him, his most enduring achievement is that one of his columns is largely responsible for the movement to observe International Talk Like a Pirate Day every year.

It's episode 50 of the podcast! In this milestone episode, I return to the ParentNormal Mailbag that I used to answer questions from on a regular basis when the show debuted. Since the school year is back in full swing, I answer your school-related questions.

Scholastic Classroom Magazines Editor Stephanie Smith is this week's featured guest. On occasion, I report the ParentNormal News, but I’ve never talked about real news on the show…until now.

Stephanie and I talk about what kinds of news kids are actually interested in reading about and how Scholastic writes their news differently based on their readers’ ages. And if you talk about the news now, you have to talk about the election. So we also discuss how to talk to kids about the election without leading them into a political argument with their friends. And finally, we talk about how Scholastic chooses their kid reporters.