Bios for Contributors

Rebecca Otis

Rebecca Otis lives and works in Massachusetts with her husband, two sons and stepson. She is Carol Otis Hurst's daughter and was her biggest fan. They worked together from 1991 until Carol's death in 2007.

The first book they wrote together was In Times Past which integrates children's literature with the US History curriculum in grades 3-8. It is now in its second edition and available as an eBook on CD.

Carol and Rebecca also coauthored four guidebooks for Children's Press. These guidebooks were given to teachers to accompany the Children's Press series of biography collections, Extraordinary Americans. The guidebooks give teachers discussion starters, research starters and activities to go with the various time periods in each of the biography collections: Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, Asian Pacific Americans and Black Americans.

In 1994 Carol and Rebecca wrote Picturing Math, a guidebook for using picture books in the math curriculum for prekindergarten through second grade. There is now a new version of this as an eBook on CD, Picture Book Math.

Carol and Rebecca wrote a book for middle school teachers, Using Literature in the Middle School Curriculum which brings much of what has been learned about teaching reading and literature in the elementary school classroom to the middleschool setting. It was released in 2000.

In 1995 Rebecca began taking Carol's and her own back articles and book samples and transforming them into the Carol Hurst's Children's Literature Site. This site opened in March of 96 and is currently being visited by over 4,000 people each day (as of 4/2000) and contains 500 articles. Rebecca is the webmaster.

Rebecca also edits and publishes the quarterly newsletter, Carol Hurst's Children's Literature Newsletter which is available as a web document on the web site and also as an electronic newsletter sent directly to users' email addresses.

Rebecca and Carol have also authored two books for using literature in the social skills curriculum, Friends and Relations: Grades K-2 and Friends and Relations: Grades 3-6.

In addition to her educational writing Rebecca does computer consulting for Macintosh users and Web site development in the fields of education and children's literature.