No, it’s not back in print—as I wrote that subject title I suddenly realized I might be setting some of you up for disappointment. But I hope you’ll find this almost as good a surprise. This time of year, I get a lot of email from readers looking for copies of Hanna’s Christmas, which has been out of print for, I don’t know, a decade at least. Sometimes the letters sound pretty frustrated: as the holidays approach, used copies of the book jump to astronomical rates in the resale market. I don’t have any available for sale myself—I didn’t even hold on to enough copies for my own children. (I didn’t have quite as many kids when I wrote the book.)
But a couple of days ago, I got a lovely email from a teacher who said her class really wanted to hear the story, and would I consider reading it aloud in a video. Would you believe that has never occurred to me? It was a great idea, and that’s what I’ve done. I made a short video intro below and then comes a second video with the reading of the book. I hope you’ll enjoy it!
A peek at the new “Cat Spanish” app from Memrise. We’ve only just begun playing with it. Will report back later when we’ve worked with it for a while (mainly Rose; she’s the one learning Spanish), but it’s safe to say it’s a hit so far. Conversational phrases with amusing kitty photos: you have us at hello.
December 5, 2013 @ 5:16 pm | Filed under: Homeschooling
This is a quick-and-dirty list of homeschooling how-to and reference books I’d love to see in libraries. I’ll prettify it later. Throwing it up hastily now during #ReadAdv (the Reader’s Advisory Twitter Chat) and will probably add to it during the discussion.
From Liz Burns re the #ReadAdv Twitter chat for librarians and interested parties:
Our next chat takes place on Thursday, December 5 at 8 P.M. EST.
Sophie and Kelly and I were tossing around possible topics for our next chat, and homeschooling came up. Seems like librarians are always asking about and wondering about working with homeschoolers. What can they do? What should they do? What works?
So I said, oh, we should have guests. And I had a short dream list of possibilities: the two people who, in talking about homeschooling, makes me want to have kids just so I can homeschool them.
They are, of course, Melissa Wiley and Quinn Cummings. And both these terrific women said YES. So Melissa Wiley (@melissawiley on Twitter) and Quinn Cummings (@quinncy) will be joining us on December 5.
Got anything you’d like me to share with librarians who are wondering how best to serve homeschoolers? Wish lists, etc? Send me your questions and I’ll share them this evening, 8pm EST, 5pm here on the West Coast. Follow #ReadAdv to see the discussion unfold.
• Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (my college friend Beth Malone is starring as grown-up Alison in the Off-Broadway musical and I decided it was high time I read the book)
• and many, many picture books for the Cybils (178 so far, but some of those were read earlier in the year)
In progress: Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks (after listening to her seminar in the Coursera class I’m taking on historical fiction, as discussed here)
