Ellen Javernick, a teacher since the 1960s, published a new book

Ellen Javernick was 9 years old when she first published an article in a children’s magazine.

“I thought I would grow up to be a writer,” Javernick said.

She did just that, and now the 87-year-old schoolteacher and children’s book author has written another book, “Awesome of the Day,” which encourages young people to find something each day that makes it good, even if the rest has been bad.

She still teaches kindergarten at Garfield Elementary in Loveland, and has taught either preschool or kindergarten since the 1960s, in addition to being a prolific children’s author.

Maintaining her ability to work a full-time teaching job, an exhausting prospect for someone even a third her age, while also publishing best-selling children’s fiction, curriculum materials and other written work, simply requires that she stay active, Javernick said.

“I go to the rec center a lot,” she said. “Yesterday I played tennis. I’m taking pickleball lessons. I think if you want to be active, you’re active. If you want to be out and around people, you’re out and around people.”

“Awesome of the Day” is far from Javernick’s first published children’s book. “What If Everybody Did That?” was her first effort, published over 40 years ago, has seen two editions and sold over a million copies.

The book has become a staple in classrooms across the country for its lessons about prosocial behavior, asking young people “what would happen if everybody did what you are doing right now?” about a variety of topics from littering to whispering in class to leaving coats on the floor.

Javernick has an eager childlike enthusiasm about her, something that she made explicit when discussing the process of writing for an audience of young people, as opposed to adults.

“I think you have to think like a child first,” she said. “Think about what’s funny to children.”

She doesn’t illustrate her own books, nor can she always work with her preferred illustrators, so an added layer of depth to her craft is anticipating how her words will be interpreted by an artist.

“All the time, I’m thinking, how would that look?” she said. “The illustrator is part of the story.

“You basically have to think like a child,” she continued. “Not a lot of adverbs, not a lot of adjectives. Basically just subject-verb. You have to learn that those extra words don’t help. You don’t say ‘the fuzzy cat.’ The illustrator will show you that the cat is fuzzy.”

Many of Javernick’s ideas come from the quiet and often overlooked moments in our own lives.

The premise for her favorite book came from a situation she found herself in when she was caring your her infant grandchild outside Washington, D.C., where her son was living at the time. She would often take her granddaughter for walks in a stroller, and routinely encounter a young boy chasing after a loose dog. Each time, she would help him catch the animal and return him home. After one such incident, the boy turned to her, exhausted, and said, ‘I wish I’d just gotten a turtle.’”

That story turned into “The Birthday Pet,” a story about a boy who receives a variety of pets, ranging from dogs to rats, before finally finding satisfaction with a turtle.

The same principle applied to her latest book, “Awesome of the Day.”

“The idea for all of us, not just for kids, is to think of the best thing that happened that day,” she said. “There always is a good thing. I started writing them down myself. I have a notebook where I write down ‘what was my good thing?’”

Originally Published: August 3, 2025 at 8:50 AM MDT