Weaving Words and Science with Typewriter Poet and Children's Book Author Megan Benedict

Welcome to another episode of the Adventures in Learning podcast! I fell in love with Megan Benedict's work at a conference this spring, when she captivated an audience of teachers armed with only a typewriter and her imagination.  I was excited to discover that she also writes nonfiction picture books, effectively blending poetry and science in a way that is entertaining and illuminating. I am so excited to share this conversation about poetry, nonfiction, and science with you!

Episode Highlights:

1:05 Megan Benedict: From Classroom to Children's Books:
Megan shares her transformative journey from a middle school English teacher to a children's nonfiction picture book author. Discover how her love for poetry and science gave rise to her creative works, all while juggling family life.  Ever hide in the. bathroom to get work done? Megan has.

2:20 The Magic of Typewriter Rodeo:
We discuss the charm of crafting impromptu poetry on vintage typewriters and the profound impact these spontaneous verses have on people from all walks of life. Learn how this unique art form creates a bridge between generations and fosters a deep sense of being seen.

7:21 The Symbiosis of Science and Poetry:
Delve into Megan's children's books, Great Gusts: Winds of the World and the Science Behind Them and Sea Wolves, Keeper of the Rainforest and uncover how meticulously researched science intertwines with the imaginative power of poetry to captivate and educate young minds.

14:33 Illustrating Imagination:
Visual storytelling takes center stage as we explore the collaborative relationship between authors and illustrators. Experience how illustrations can breathe life into stories, making scientific concepts visually engaging and more relatable for children.

18:50 Enriching Education with Poetry:
Poetry isn't just for the language arts classroom -- nor is it solely for high school and college. We share personal anecdotes and strategies on how integrating poetry into science education can ignite curiosity and enhance the learning experience for students (including preschoolers)

20:58 A Glimpse into the Future
Megan teases upcoming projects and reflects on the continued focus on nonfiction and poetry collaborations. We also reminisce about childhood books that have left an indelible mark and shaped our perspectives.

Book Recommendations:

• Great Gusts: Winds of the World and the Science Behind Them by Megan Benedict and Melanie Crowder
• Sea Wolves, Keeper of the Rainforest by Megan Benedict and Melanie Crowder (July 2024)

Connect with Megan Benedict:

• Instagram 

Chapters

• 1:05 Megan Benedict: From Classroom to Children's Books:
• 2:20 The Magic of Typewriter Rodeo
• 7:21 The Symbiosis of Science and Poetry
• 14:33 Illustrating Imagination:
• 18:50 Using Poetry to Enrich Education and STEM/STEAM
• 20:58 A Glimpse into the Future

Transcript

00:01 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
Wonder, curiosity connection. Where will your adventures take you? I'm Dr Diane, and thank you for joining me on today's episode of Adventures in Learning. Welcome to the Adventures in Learning podcast. I am so excited to introduce you to Megan Benedict today. I got to meet her a few weeks ago at a conference and she is a member of Typewriter Rodeo. They are folks who are bringing poetry to every corner of the country at this point, and even closer to my heart. She's got two books. One just came out it's called Great Gusts, and then the other one is Sea Wolves, Keepers of the Rainforest, and it's coming out in July and she writes science and poetry together and if you know me, you know I'm a geek and I'm so excited about these things, so I can't wait to talk about them. Megan, welcome to the show, hi thanks for having me. 

00:59 - Megan Benedict (Guest)
I'm so happy to be here. 

01:05 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
So I want to get to know you a little bit before we dive into the book. So I'm going to ask you the question I ask everybody Tell us a little bit about your adventures in learning. How have you gotten to where you are today? 

01:12 - Megan Benedict (Guest)
Yeah, I'm from a family of educators and so I was raised to, you know, believe that education is the key to life, and so I went to college. I became a teacher. I taught middle school English for a while and then I really wanted to write. I wanted to write since I was little, and so I decided to go back to grad school and I went to VCFA Vermont College of Fine Arts for writing for children and young adults. That was when I was about 28, maybe 10, 12 years ago, and since then I've been working at trying to get my book published, books published. So I've been writing a ton critiquing. I've also been raising babies, and so it goes a little slower when you're doing that, but that's kind of my journey here. 

02:03 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
Well, and I saw on your when you're doing that, but that's kind of my journey here. Well, and I saw on your bio it made me laugh that you are often found hiding in bathrooms trying to get one paragraph more written. 

02:14 - Megan Benedict (Guest)
Yes, exactly, I think I've been doing that since I was a child, trying to get out of chores and have more reading time. 

02:20 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
Yeah, that's hilarious. So let's talk about Typewriter Rodeo first, since that's how I met you Great. What is it and why is it so cool? Ever since I saw you, I have seen other typewriter poets in random places, but I love what you guys did. How did you become involved with it? 

02:39 - Megan Benedict (Guest)
Oh my gosh, typewriter Rodeo is so fun. It's a collective of typewriter poets um mainly out of Austin, texas, but I'm in Colorado and there are a few in other places in the country um that get together and type poems for people on the spot, and I got involved in it because, um one of the founding members, sean Petrie, um I met him at VCFA where we both went to grad school, and so we uh got to talking and he started telling me about it and he put in a demonstration that night and I just fell in love with the idea of typewriter poetry. I'm a poet at heart and so and I've been writing poetry for a long time, and so it was lovely to like find a sort of instantaneous way to do poetry with other people. 

03:25 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
And how do people react? Like set me up, If I wanted a poem, what would I do? 

03:31 - Megan Benedict (Guest)
Oh man, you just come up to the table and tell us what to write, and sometimes people don't know what to ask for, and so we kind of prompt them like I'll ask oh, what is the word you're thinking of? Or a phrase that you've heard that's been on your mind? Or who is the word you're thinking of? Or a phrase that you've heard that's been on your mind, or who is someone that you want to tell them? Something you know? Or just like a big transition in your life, and so anything works. 

03:57 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
A phrase a word, anything and what. How do people react to your poems Like what is that like when you give them your work right there and then on the spot? 

04:06 - Megan Benedict (Guest)
Yeah, that's really fun. Usually they're kind of blown away because I think a lot of people don't really know what to expect. They kind of think it's not going to be something that's super meaningful. It's I mean, you're doing it in two to three minutes but then it actually is, because it is sort of like this moment where we're taking our time to really see the other person and that's so rare in our world that someone gets to like feel fully seen for a few moments and so I do think it's actually very meaningful for people. 

04:38 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
You know, I actually stopped in Central Park and had a poem done this week while I was up in New York, because I was thinking about you and I thought, yeah, I got to do it and yeah, it was so meaningful. 

04:51
It connected to Jane Goodall's 90th birthday, which is what I was up there for. But what was even cooler for me than the poem for me was watching the kids who gathered around while I was talking to the poet and they were fascinated by the typewriter and the process and for me that was equally as valuable as the poem I got was sort of that engagement level and seeing kids connect to poetry. 

05:18 - Megan Benedict (Guest)
Yeah, that's totally true. I think the two kind of groups that get so excited about it just from hearing the sound of it are kids, because they've never experienced this technology in their lives. They're used to digital technology. And then people who grew up on typewriters they like have this bodily memory of this sound, and so they're often just like drawn to it immediately and they like to tell us their stories like oh man, I haven't, I haven't seen one of these since you know, 19, whatever, and when I was like practicing typing for school and writing essays in college, and so that's always so fun to see that kind of like generational excitement. 

06:01 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
And it really is. You know, I was that transitional generation where I remember my mother typing my father's dissertation on a typewriter and I shudder, having done my own on computers, to think about what that would have been like. But I remember sort of that transition from learning to use a typewriter to learning to use a computer. And you're right, there is just something satisfying about the clickety click of the keys and to hear that it's cool. 

06:33 - Megan Benedict (Guest)
It's so cool, they're so fun and they're having a resurgence, which is great. 

06:37 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
We love typewriters, I'm so glad, and has there been an encounter like sort of a greatest hits or a favorite encounter that you've had, as you've been doing, typewriter rodeo? 

06:50 - Megan Benedict (Guest)
That's a great question. I think my it wasn't like a single encounter but my favorite was that an artist collective asked me to come well, asked me for some of my own poems and to inspire their collective. And then they invited me to come as the typewriter poet to their opening night for a couple nights and that was really cool to see the art based on my poetry be able to write poetry for other people and that, like that sort of melding of lots of modalities, was very neat. 

07:21 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
I love that synergy and that feels like that's a really good transition into your books. So you've got two books that are science-based but they connect poetry and illustrations as well. Can you tell us about your new books? Yeah? 

07:41 - Megan Benedict (Guest)
I'll show you Great Gusts. I have it here. This is Great Gusts winds of the world and the science behind them. And so it's a collection of 14 poems about different local winds that are named around the world. And then what goes into the winds, how are they sort of created in our world and what like affects how they blow. And then the second one is Sea Wolves, Keepers of the Rainforest, and it's one longer length, like book length poem about these really cool swimming wolves off the coast of British Columbia. And then there's back matter that explains more about the wolves. So they're both research-based. All of the information is scientifically accurate. We put a lot of time into the research. 

08:30 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
Okay, so that was a really good segue into your books, and so you've had this experience with Typewriter Rodeo and you now have these two amazing picture books that are out that are connecting science and poetry and illustrations. Can you tell us a little bit about each of these books? 

08:52 - Megan Benedict (Guest)
Yeah, my books and I wrote them both with my friend Melanie Crowder. She's an amazing middle grade and young adult novelist and a poet also like myself. These are our first two picture books both of us. So the books are called Great Gusts, winds of the World and the Science Behind them, which is a collection of 14 different poems of local winds around the world, and they're named winds, so all the poems are named after the wind. 

09:22
And then the Seawolves Keepers of the Rainforest is our second book out in July, which is a book length poem about these wolves with an afterword on the science behind them. And all of it, all the poetry and the science is, you know, um, based in lots of research and lots of academic research on our part, um, to make sure that it's all accurate and scientifically correct, which is really fun, um, and you know they're really interesting because they're not. There's nothing quite like it on the market right now. So it is a little bit like we're sort of dipping our toe in trying to figure out where this goes with your work when you were talking about the conference is. 

10:16 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
For me it resonates strongly with the kind of work that I'm doing myself right now. I love the idea of weaving poetry and nonfiction together. I think it makes it accessible and it adds just a layer of understanding. And you're really making it easy for reluctant readers to engage and dip their toes in as well making it easy for reluctant readers to engage and dip their toes in as well. And I was fascinated by Great Gusts and I was looking at sort of you had all the different named winds and I was going to put you on the spot and ask, because I love Antarctica so much, would you read the poem about the Antarctic winds? Because I wanted to know more about? 

10:48 - Megan Benedict (Guest)
it. Yes, yeah, this one is called Catabatic and the poem goes floating above the polar plateau is the coldest air you'll ever know. It spills across the frozen plain but squeezed, then squished and squeezed again the catabatic winds. They roar, picking up speed, nearing the shore, blustering over wave and flow, the strongest winds you'll ever know. And here's the picture for that one. 

11:15 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
I love it and you can see all the penguin colonies. So what kind of research went into writing about these winds? What gave you the idea in the first place? I mean to think about naming 14 different types of winds and then writing an individual poem for each. Yeah, you know you come from. 

11:33 - Megan Benedict (Guest)
You know we my friend Melanie and I, who ended up writing the book with me and some other writing friends we decided we wanted to learn how to write picture books because none of us really focused on that in grad school. And so we did a picture book idea month where we took, we came up with one idea every day for a different picture book for a month. We didn't write any of them, we just came up with the ideas. So when we got back together at the end of the month, um, we were kind of talking about our favorite ideas and I said, oh, I had the idea for a like a wind mythology book, because I was thinking of the movie um, the holiday and Jack Black's character says something like anything can happen when the Santa Anas blow, and the Santa Anas are local winds in California and I thought, oh, I wonder what people believe about the winds all around the world. This would be so interesting to come up with like wind mythology. And at the same time I told my friends this. My friend Melanie said, oh my gosh, I wanted to write a book about the wind. She was thinking of the Chinook winds in Colorado, where we live, and so we kind of put it aside because we were both working on other projects. 

12:39
And a couple of years later we came back. It was during the pandemic and we were both stuck at home and we had little kids with us and so we couldn't necessarily commit to longer form writing at the time. And we decided to write that book together, since we had both come up with the wind idea we're both poets so we it like naturally took the form of poetry, um, and she found an article that was said something like um, you know, look at the cool names of the wind. And so that was the first time we were introduced to the fact that winds actually can be named. Um, winds actually can be named. And so we kind of jumped off from there. We started writing a bunch of drafts of poetry. 

13:20
We weren't planning on it being nonfiction at the beginning. Actually it was just going to be a book of poems about the wind. And then when we sold it to MIT Kids Press, they wanted it to be nonfiction, and so at that point we went back and we did all the research. We were looking at academic papers on all the different types of wind and historical records of them and try it like geographic, like geographical maps to figure out how they blow and where exactly the you know, the meteorological maps where the wind is actually like, the low pressure systems and the high pressure systems are actually going. 

13:55
Um, to make sure all the details were absolutely accurate. Um, and and then seawolves came quickly after that with kind of the similar uh feeling, but with just one long poem, but with the wind poems, um, we did a lot of back and forth with the artists, even on the information. She would send the sketches with wind lines and we would have to then go back to our research and tweak how the wind lines were, because they weren't quite accurate, and then tweak how we wrote about them too, because if it wasn't clear to her then it wasn't necessarily clear. 

14:33 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
Oh, I love that. So that's really. That's really cool, because often the illustrator doesn't work with the authors in that level of closeness. The editor is the one managing that process and I love the fact that, because it was nonfiction and scientific, you really had to put in the time and the effort to make sure everybody was on the same page so that it's represented appropriately. So you get the poetry, you get the visual and you get the facts in the back and you know as well as the sidebars. I think that's really cool. 

15:08 - Megan Benedict (Guest)
Yeah. 

15:09 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
Yeah, so Seawolves is a little bit different than the Winds. How did you guys arrive on that as a topic? 

15:16 - Megan Benedict (Guest)
Yeah, Well, my friend Melanie read an article about it and she said I'm so fascinated by these. She grew up in the Pacific Northwest, in Oregon, and so she was reading an article about these really interestingly genetic wolves that developed differently than other wolves, interior wolves or mainland wolves and so she was like what do you think about doing this? Could we do this book? And so it took a different form because it's one long book about the wolves, but we did the same process where we that one. We started with research because we needed to have that one be scientifically accurate, but it doesn't have little like call outs little nonfiction call outs on every page. 

16:00 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
So it's more ingrained in the long term or in the long form poetry. You've got the nonfiction more ingrained. That's really cool. What were the challenges of working on that compared to the Wind book? 

16:14 - Megan Benedict (Guest)
Oh yeah, you know. The wind book because there were so many winds the research was a little bit overwhelming From neither one of us having a meteorological background. That was an amazing amount of research that we had to do for each wind and learning just like how does the wind blow, what goes into it, and understanding all those really technical things. That was very intense amount of research. The wolf book we still did a ton of research but because it was one subject it felt much less overwhelming. 

16:49
And you know, we wanted to capture like the feeling of the wolves in the woods and that surprise and sort of how they're like sneaking between and they're hard to capture. But we had to. I'm trying to think about how to say this best. In Great Gusts we have short little poems and so we captured sort of the feeling of the wind in this little tiny thing. But with the wolves we had to pull that through an entire book-length poem and so we had to include how the waves moved and think about how are we going to indent this to make it feel like the coast and how are we going to incorporate things like logging? That's a big problem for their habitat. And so the challenges were just completely different, because one was just about research and one was about more like sustaining poetry for a book-length project. 

17:44 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
Well, and I love the fact that you're writing with a collaborator as well. That again is highly unusual to have two poets working so closely together to create something. How do you come up with a unified voice in the writing? 

18:01 - Megan Benedict (Guest)
Yeah, we start by drafting individually actually. So with Gus, we picked certain wind names that we liked and we did a little research and we started drafting them all. But then we revised everything together and so it saw both of our eyes and every time one person was like, oh, this doesn't feel quite right to me. The other person could say I actually like it and here's why. Or you're right, I was feeling the same way, and especially when we both felt that niggling little, something's not right here, when we had that feeling it was very clear oh, we need to like, push further here, we need to keep going. Yeah, it was really. It's really a special process and it's. I think a lot of people don't understand how poets can write a poem together, but for us it just is like clicks and it's magic sort of. 

18:50 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
Well, and I see as I'm looking at your books, I'm putting my STEM hat on now, sort of as the STEM STEAM teacher and working with teachers, and they both feel like they would be such incredible additions to the work that you're doing. You know, often when you're teaching weather, you're touching on the winds, and wouldn't it be cool to have a book that would let you explore the different winds? Or if you're talking about habitats and biomes, to be able to connect to Antarctica and you're teaching about the penguins and then talk about the wind, and then, with the seawolves, we talk about biomes, we talk about habitats no-transcript. 

19:49 - Megan Benedict (Guest)
I love that idea. You know that literacy is in everything, and so to be able to pull it into the science class in a really in a way to like reinforce both your poetry standards and your science standards just is. I wish I had had this resource when I was a teacher. Honestly, I wish I had had this resource when I was a teacher. 

20:07 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
Honestly, oh same, and I feel so strongly that we have to connect STEM and literacy, and literacy and science. They go hand in hand and kids need engaging, hands-on teaching. And when we can bring in these beautiful books, we're a step ahead of where we were. Yeah, yeah. So what's next for you? What are you all working on now? Are there any fun topics that we're discovering and exploring? Yeah, we're both. 

20:36 - Megan Benedict (Guest)
We have a few on the like on the back burner that are sort of waiting for publishers to grab them, and a few more ideas that are like in the drafting stages. I don't want to say too much about what those are yet, since they're not for sure, and a few more ideas that are like in the drafting stages. I don't want to say too much about what those are yet, since they're not for sure and since they're in conversation with publishers about some of them. But we are continuing to write together, which is really happy, and then I'm also working on my own novels and picture books as well. 

21:01 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
That's wonderful. So is it going to stay in a nonfiction realm or are you going to expand out to other genres as well? 

21:13 - Megan Benedict (Guest)
You know it's so interesting. Both of us on our own do not write nonfiction primarily or very much, but together that has sort of been the key that makes it work, and so together we're focusing still on nonfiction and poetry. 

21:23 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
I love that and that makes me very excited because I do think that there's a huge opening in the nonfiction world for that. You know, I've heard publishers and authors and editors say we're living in a golden age of nonfiction right now. And it certainly feels that way, because these are not the same old nonfiction books that we were reading as children or that we were even teaching with when we were in the classroom. 

21:47 - Megan Benedict (Guest)
We were reading as children or that we were even teaching with when we were in the classroom, right, yeah yeah, they're a little less cut and dry nonfiction, they're a lot more lyrical nonfiction. There's so many biographies now that are just amazing that I don't remember having that as a kid. 

22:06 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
Well, and I love the idea of these picture book biographies that are zeroing in on one aspect of somebody's life and so really doing a deep dive on this particular part and looking for just interesting angles and ways to make them human and relatable yes, which is very cool. So I'm going to shift gears again because I'm just really curious about this. I can tell the books meant a lot to you when you were younger and I'm wondering are there particular books that you remember from your childhood that continue to influence you today? 

22:39 - Megan Benedict (Guest)
Oh yeah, from my childhood especially, I think for sure, just in general, anne of Green Gables is going to forever be the kind of character I'm trying to write. 

22:52
I mean, I think you know, when you get that lovable kind of person who makes mistakes and is trying to just find their place in the world, that's, I think, what all kids go through and need more and more examples of that. But for in this realm, like in the nonfiction or the poetry realm, I had these two picture books when I was a kid that were poetry collections, and one was of Emily Dickinson poems and one was of Robert Frost poems, and so they were both, you know, very much in tune with the natural world and I remember loving those books and loving just sort of the short, sweet, accessible poems that were illustrated. I forever those have kind of stuck in my memories as these really beautiful examples of a poetry collection for children. That isn't necessarily, you know, like the length of the side where the sidewalk ends or something, just like a short and sweet one where the sidewalk ends, or something just like a short and sweet one. 

23:53 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
And if you were encouraging teachers or family members to expose kids to poetry, to get them to feel comfortable with poetry, what would be some strategies that you would share with them? 

23:59 - Megan Benedict (Guest)
Oh yeah, you know I love I said I just said this but I think it's important to start with short and accessible poems. I think kids have a and not just kids, actually a lot of our world has sort of an ingrained belief that poetry is hard and difficult and you know, it's like Shakespearean sonnets, that they don't understand the language and it's difficult to parse out the meaning. And so when you start with like poets that are modern and they're writing really interesting but funny stuff, it's really great. I'm not gonna be able to remember the name, but when I was teaching poetry, I taught this poem about a campesino and like flying mangoes and flying bananas, and it was. 

24:50
I'll find the, I'll find the title of the poem and the author and I'll send it to you so you can maybe put it in the show notes. But it is. It's such a quick poem that is has such a great surprise at the end and is that way that you write about, I think, love in a way that is so different than kids are expecting, that when you can like surprise them with something new, it is. I think it kind of turns poetry fans on immediately. 

25:15 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
You know, I agree, I was remembering recently that I did my dissertation research on preschoolers in poetry and we exposed them to a wide variety of poets and genres, you know, from Ashley Ashley Bryan's Hurricane to Casey at the Bat, to small haikus. So it was like a poem a week and at the end I talked to the kids, you know, and several weeks later and you know, sort of talked to them one on one and was able to sort of assess what they remembered and surprisingly, these three and four-year-olds could tell you about lots and lots of poems, including ones they had done, you know, eight, 10 weeks, 12 weeks earlier. And the trick was how the teacher presented it. 

26:02
You know, did it involve props? Was it done as we're going to have fun playing with language and even with longer poems? If there was an acting component, or we played with the funny words or we found a way to explore it, they remembered it and it was memorable for them. Think that we put our own baggage with poetry onto it, sometimes as educators and think we have to analyze it to death, when really all we have to do is to have fun and play. 

26:34 - Megan Benedict (Guest)
Yeah, that's exactly right. And when I'm doing story times with kids with my Great Gust Book, that's what I'm having them do. I'm having them, like, get their body into the poetry and feel the rhythm of it and try it out so that they can, you know, keep it sort of inside them. 

26:50 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
That makes so much sense to me, as you were saying that I was remembering the who has seen the wind neither I nor you poem, and I remember the preschoolers used to love to be the winds and they would come up with whatever wind they were that day. So you always knew how they were feeling that day, because the kids who were super windy had a lot of energy to burn. And then the kids who were maybe a little bit quieter or not quite there, they were the quiet gentle breezes for the day. 

27:16 - Megan Benedict (Guest)
Yeah, what a great way to learn it and to feel it and to know the wind in a different you know, not just like mental knowing. 

27:25 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
Well, if people want to find your books, I'm going to drop links because I absolutely think you should. Gusts is out now and Seawolves is coming out in July, and so pre-order, because pre-orders are so important to authors. So I'm going to tell you guys, go get it now. I will also include Megan's contact information so you can follow her and follow Typewriter Rodeo as well, and I'm going to leave with the final question, which is what brings you hope? 

27:53 - Megan Benedict (Guest)
Ooh, that's a lovely question. You know what brings me hope I was thinking about not about hope, but that kind of relates this morning about the idea of lyrical nonfiction and how it really is an opening of worlds, and I was thinking about how lucky we are to be in a time where we get to experience worlds that we would never have been able to experience before. You know, a lot of times technology gets a bad rap, but we actually have the ability to like see into another person's life, not just on our bookshelves but all around, and I think that will help build our empathy and our knowledge and our especially our curiosity, and I think that is what gives me hope. 

28:40 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
Ooh, that gives me hope too. Well, thank you for joining us today on the Adventures in Learning podcast Folks, go check out Megan Benedict and go get those books. 

28:49 - Megan Benedict (Guest)
Thanks for having me. 

28:54 - Dr Diane Jackson Schnoor (Host)
You've been listening to the Adventures in Learning podcast with your host, Dr Diane. If you like what you're hearing, please subscribe, download and let us know what you think, and please tell a friend. If you want the full show notes and the pictures, please go to drdianadventurescom. We look forward to you joining us on our next adventure.