Mary CappelliniMary Cappellini is a Bilingual Educational Consultant and a published children's book author who has worked in education for over 30 years. A teacher at heart, she enjoys engaging teachers in reflections and classroom demonstration lessons in her staf development with schools across the country. She works in large urban districts, lectures at prestigious universities, including Columbia's Teachers College, speaks at national conferences, and plans long-term staff development for smaller school districts with bulging ELL populations."I am hoping that my book, and the staff development I do, helps teachers think more deeply about how their children are developing as speakers as well as readers and writers. We cannot separate language from reading -- they are linked, and therefore, our instruction and our assessment of reading and language development must be linked," Mary explains.Besides her current role as an educational consultant, Mary taught in K-5 classrooms, was a bilingual reading resource teacher and a mentor teacher in the inner city schools of Santa Ana, California, an ESL and 5th grade teacher at the American school in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and taught ESL to adults at Community Colleges as well as worked as an adjunct professor and part time lecturer at California State Universities and UCs.A native of California, Mary still lives in Orange County where she grew up. Although she lived most of her life in California, she also lived in Spain and in Argentina, where she met her husband. Her bilingual family includes three daughters, and she says: "We travel as often as we can, visiting families on two continents." Besides consulting and traveling, she continues to write children's books in both English and Spanish and volunteers teaching ESL to recent immigrants in an after school youth program at Save Our Youth (SOY), a nonprofit in Costa Mesa, California, where she also serves as a board member. Read More Read Less