Heinemann proudly announces our Spring 2021 Catalog. With new resources from Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, Jennifer Serravallo, Thomas Newkirk, Liz Kleinrock, and many more, you’re sure to find support and inspiration as you turn the corner toward Spring.

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This catalog features a special message from Heinemann’s EVP and General Manager Vicki Boyd:

I wrote to you last from my quarantine desk in August. What happened from there—surges of the coronavirus infection, a listing economy, natural disasters of epic proportions, unmitigated civil unrest, and a troubled election cycle—combined for the darkest fall in memory.

Through it all, despite your own worries for your family and yourself, you found ways to keep showing up for children. Experts wrung hands about learning loss, while you quietly attended to what mattered most—being there. You never stopped trying to figure out how to engage children, how to keep them talking, thinking, reading, writing, solving problems. How to keep them safe.

It’s a comfort to think of things having beginnings, middles, and endings. Research shows that motivation is U-shaped. We experience a deep spiritual sag in the middle of anything we attempt: the middle of a project, a day, a week, a school year—a pandemic. In the middle, we’re far enough from the tunnel’s entrance, a beginning backlit with possibility, that we can no longer see it, and yet, so far from the end, we cannot imagine how we will ever emerge.

We can’t be sure till we reach the other side, but I believe that in August, when you last heard from me, we entered the bleak middle of all this. This means we have a ways to go, but as you remind me again and again: if we find our way from here, it will be because we let children lead us.

We might begin with Ray, the five-year-old son of poet and Heinemann editor Zoë Ryder White, whose practical wisdom one morning Zoë captured in a poem entitled “Ray, Munching Toast.”

In the poem, Ray asks “what humans are made of anyway,” and what Zoë is made of, in particular. He doesn’t wait for her answer. “Mom, you’re made of letters,” he declares. “Or just one. The letter O, over and over and over again.”

What would it mean to be worthy of such appraisal—to be an embodiment of the letter O, a symbol of openness, a place where the light gets in, where breath finds its ebb and flow? Deep in the tunnel of this difficult time, far from any opening we can see, it seems a good year to find out.

My hope for all of us is that, borrowing from Sesame Street, this year is brought to us by the letter O. The letter O, at once empty—of judgment, suspicion, expectation—and full—of possibility, wonder, and amazement (“Oh!”). May we remake ourselves in all that this implies: a state of compassion, responsiveness, and freedom from cynicism.

What do we stand to learn if we can hold one another in a place of such grace? As we make our way from here to there, we will surely discover what we are made of. Your colleagues at Heinemann will be there every step, seeking alongside you to cast ourselves in the letter O’s image, learning how to prove ourselves worthy of a child’s esteem, “over and over and over again.”