The Silver Ink Story
Jill Nolen and Laura Beaver have spent their careers passionately advocating for effective and transformative family engagement in their own schools and across the nation. Early in their career as North Carolina classroom teachers, Jill and Laura learned they could make a positive impact on families from all walks of life by combining their southern entertaining etiquette with a welcoming spirit and easy-to-implement home strategies. Their unique family fun events engaged families in a non-threatening way and broke typical barriers for a home-school partnership. With the barriers eliminated, they were then able to share easy-to-implement strategies better equipping parents to work with their children at home.
As they progressed in their career working with more families and teachers, Jill and Laura soon realized most educators have little family engagement training, few tools to effectively accomplish this essential task, and limited time to plan. Thus, with an inspiration and mission to help families and teachers, they wrote Into the Tub, as their first children’s book complete with embedded early literacy strategies any parent can easily use.
After this dynamic duo recognized positive outcomes in their school, they began presenting at conferences. Schools and districts soon began requesting Jill and Laura’s expertise and support at their family engagement events. At a pivotal moment, one principal wanted Into the Tub literacy strategies shared with parents in his school but lacked sufficient funds to purchase books for all families. From this need, Jill and Laura’s mission became clear – to create affordable resources that are easy to implement and save teachers time. Silver Ink Publishing was born! Those same literacy strategies became inexpensive but powerful parent handouts schools could purchase to send home with every family. Today, Jill, Laura, and Silver Ink Publishing continue to innovate, create, and educate with this same mission in mind!
