Before the Lesson Begins: Using Breath, Reflections, & Affirmations to Inspire Student Learning
In Before the Lesson Begins, educator and author Rebekah L. Pierce offers a transformative approach to teaching that meets students where they are:hurting, disconnected, and searching for purpose. Drawing from over two decades in the classroom, Pierce introduces a holistic framework that blends breathwork, freewriting, and affirmations to help students build confidence, focus, and self-awareness before academic instruction even begins.
Through practical strategies and reflective storytelling, Pierce demonstrates how these mindful practices reduce writing anxiety, nurture resilience, and deepen engagement with literature and critical thinking. More than a teaching guide, this book is a call to educators to see beyond the lesson plan—to see the whole student. At its heart, Before the Lesson Begins reminds readers that learning starts not with a textbook, but with a breath. By creating space for calm, reflection, and affirmation, educators can help students find their voice, reconnect to their purpose, and rediscover the light within themselves.
Rebekah is represented by Lisa Hagan. Submit all inquiries to www.lisahaganbooks.com.
I Love Me More
I Love Me More is Rebekah's story of overcoming low self-worth, abandonment, and abuse. In what she calls her "quasi-memoir," Rebekah offers opportunities for the reader to self-assess their own life's journey with interactive activities at the end of each chapter. Always open for a teachable moment, I Love Me More is the perfect book for those who are ready to change their thoughts to change their lives.
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In Rebekah's own words: "I Love Me More" is what I said to myself when I finally decided I’d had enough. Enough of not owning my power. Enough of trying to live up to other people’s expectations of who they thought I should be. But more than anything, I’d had enough of dimming my light so that someone else would love me. I Love Me More is a love letter to myself. It’s the story of how I came to understand that I cannot ask someone to love me if I don’t love me first. We all deserve to be loved, but true love begins with owning and loving who you are even if the “love of your life” walks away from you, or you walk away from them. This is my love story."
https://www.amazon.com/Love-Me-More-Rebekah-Pierce-ebook/dp/B07QJDRT6Y
It's 1929 and a local Negro neighborhood called Jackson Ward in Richmond, Virginia is booming. In fact, it's called "The Black Wall Street of America" by economists of the day. Things are booming financially and socially for the Negro community, but then a series of what appears to be random murders of poor working class Negro women begins to happen and everyone is on edge, especially the Negro business owners. The Ward is a very tight community – strangers cannot move freely about in this segregated town. They hire haunted World War I veteran and alcoholic Sy Sanford to catch the cold-blooded murderer, but murder is not the only thing threatening to destroy "The Black Wall Street of America." The real Wall Street is about to come tumbling down and plunge Jackson Ward and its infamous 2nd Street into a debilitative financial and social state it may never recover from.
Lucy Bosman is a shrewd business woman in a day and time not too amenable to the dreams and desires of women - especially colored women. The widow of an ex-slave and well-educated, the mulatto woman had great plans to start over and make a life for herself when she left her hometown of Nashville, Tennessee and headed further South in the spring of 1860. Two years later, Lucy is planted firmly in Richmond, Virginia, running a successful business while passing as a white woman and avoiding the personal attentions and promises of love by plantation owner, Thomas Parker. She has managed to keep her identity a secret from the town and Thomas, but the looming Civil War threatens to change everything. In The Secret Life of Lucy Bosman, nothing is safe from the destruction of war and secrets. Not even the dreams and heart of a single mulatto woman.
https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Life-Lucy-Bosman-ebook/dp/B00R58NPDE
