Archive for March, 2006
Yesterday really and truly felt like spring. Great friend Lisa came over and helped me clean up my front flower border; now I can just sit back and watch it bloom. Okay, so the “just sit back” part is meaningless cliche: I have tons of other work to do in the next few weeks, before the baby arrives. But let’s not go there right now…
Anyway, this springtime urge to spruce and tidy is the reason for the blog makeover. I needed to see some green inside the house as well as out.
But it’s one of my favorites. Beanie’s current Beatrix Potter kick brought it to mind yesterday.
When Rose was two-going-on-three, our beloved Alice gave us a "Bunny Bowling Set." The bowling balls were little plastic cabbages with which you attempted to knock down plastic rabbit-shaped pins. Jane set the game up and played it for a while, then wandered off. I was in the next room, fixing dinner, and heard Rose playing with the game. But she sounded frustrated. I kept hearing her knock the bunnies over with the ball, and then she’d cry out in dismay.
Finally she hollered, "Mommy! It no WORK!"
I went to watch her try again. She rolled the cabbage and knocked down half the bunnies. I cheered.
"There you go! You’ve got the hang of it now."
She looked at me incredulously. "No! It no work," she said, through gritted teeth.
"Sure it worked!" I said. "Look how many bunnies you hit."
Her glare was steely with pity and forced patience. "It—no—work," she repeated, slowly, as if she were the adult and I the child. "Bunny won’t catch cabbage!"
Looking for ways to keep the little ones occupied while you’re working with your older kids? Here’s a great suggestion from a homeschooling mom of eight.
One modification that has kept my girls entertained for stretches of time is a rice table or bucket. We use a plastic storage box, filled halfway with uncooked rice and add kitchen utensils, cars, small toys, or anything else that catches our fancy. All this goes on the kitchen floor atop an old tablecloth for easier cleanup.
Whenever I drag out the rice bucket, I am greeted by squeals of delight. I tell myself they are engaging in science experiments to keep myself from worrying about some of the more creative things they find to do with rice. After a couple bites, they decide it isn’t worth eating and get back to sifting, digging and pouring. I can count on this activity giving me a half hour or so to spend instructing the older kids without interruption.
HT: Daryl
When Jane and Rose were little, I used to keep a little baggie of cut-out construction paper fish for them to stick on a big blue pond (also construction paper, with wave lines drawn on and some clear contact paper slapped over it). Haven’t thought of that in years…poor Beanie, she’d have loved that game at age three. Heck, she might still love it now. And this time around I could put Jane and Rose on fish-cutting duty. Little loops of tape on the back of each fish heighten the fun—because, you know, ANYTHING having to do with tape is magical for the preschool set.
March 8, 2006 @ 4:39 am | Filed under:
Clippings Slept late this morning and Wonderboy has PT soon, so just a quickie for now. More later; until then, there is loads of good stuff to read at this week’s Carnivals. There’s Homeschooling, hosted by Palmtree Pundit, and Education, hosted by Mathandtext. And if you haven’t yet made it over to Chicken Spaghetti to see the second edition of the Carnival of Children’s Literature, you’re missing out!
Speaking of the latter, we have hosts lined up for the April and May editions. If you’re interested in hosting a future edition, just drop me a note.
As a followup to my post about a school board’s decision to remove certain titles from an elementary school’s to-purchase list, here are some links worth looking at:
Becky of Farm School has thoughts both humorous and insightful about the issue. I too have considered this issue from the Charlotte Mason anti-twaddle angle…it seems to me that the school library could find a far better use for its money than Disney’s Christmas Storybook. (Becky’s suggestion, for example: much better choice.)
Roger Sutton, the editor in chief of The Horn Book, offered some fascinating behind-the-scenes information about library purchasing. (Scroll down to the comments section.) I’d like to learn more about the ALA Bill of Rights, especially in regard to how it applies to public school libraries.
The original news report about the matter gave the impression that parents were equally upset over the removal of twaddly titles and books featuring what the trustees deemed “bad role models.” Mr. Sutton’s concern is over the latter. “NOT purchasing a book ‘because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval,’ ” he writes, “is just as much censorship as removing a book for those same reasons later.”
I’d love to hear from more readers about this.
March 6, 2006 @ 3:10 am | Filed under:
Books The gates are open at the second Carnival of Children’s Literature! Looks like Susan at Chicken Spaghetti has put together a wild assortment of rides—I can’t wait to try them all. Huzzah, Susan!
For this month’s picture study, we’re doing something a bit different. I thought it might be fun to take a close look at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s famous Unicorn Tapestries. These spectacular late-fifteenth-century tapestries are on view at The Cloisters, the Met’s uptown collection of medieval European artwork. Designed in Paris and woven in Brussels and the Netherlands, the seven large wall hangings vividly depict the hunting of a white unicorn in a richly flowered wood. The gorgeous weavings are rich in symbolism and drama—there are at least three layers of meaning to explore here. In addition to the excitement of the hunt, complete with lanky greyhounds, odd-looking lions, and a smiling stag, there are the symbolic interpretations of the story:
“They can also be explained as a tale of courtly love, presenting the search and eventual capture of the lover-bridegroom by his adored lady. And there is the Christian interpretation as well, the symbolic retelling of Christ’s suffering, Crucifixion, and Resurrection.”
The Met’s Unicorn Tapestries website is loaded with information and pictures. If, like my family, you can’t venture to NYC to view these incredible weavings in person, a long exploration of the website will be the next best thing.
Related links:
• New Yorker article, “Capturing the Unicorn: How Two Mathematicians Came to the Aid of the Met.”
• Another set of tapestries known as The Lady and the Unicorn, on display at the Musée National du Moyen Âge in Paris.
• Wikipedia entry on unicorns
• Children’s books about weaving
• The Cloisters—field trip info (Go ahead, make us jealous!)
Unicorns in children’s literature:
The Last Battle
by C. S. Lewis
A Swiftly Tilting Planet
and Many Waters
by Madeleine L’Engle
The Unicorn Treasury : Stories, Poems, and Unicorn Lore
by Bruce Coville
What a great new find! Two enterprising home-educated boys have launched a blog for video and computer game reviews. Well-written and comprehensive, their reviews provide some much-needed guidance for bewildered parents wandering in a wilderness of gaming options. I for one am delighted to know such a valuable resource exists. These guys know their stuff.
This post from their mother’s blog gives a behind-the-scenes look at the vision behind The Game Guide. Very cool.
March 5, 2006 @ 10:38 am | Filed under:
Books The book blogs are abuzz over this California school board’s decision to delete 23 children’s books from a to-purchase list drawn up by parents and teachers. The reasons put forth by the school board trustees to explain why some titles were rejected range from stupid (they nixed certain fantasy titles because “We want books to be things that children would be able to relate to in real life”) to incomprehensible (“With this ever-changing society, we have to just stick back to the traditional thing of what kids are supposed to be learning”—Huh?). However, it’s important to note that this is not a case of outright book-banning. The rejected titles, which include Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Disney’s Christmas Storybook, and two Artemis Fowl books, are not being yanked from library shelves: they are simply not being purchased in the first place.
(This distinction jumped out at the Deputy Headmistress too.)
Like I said, I think some of the trustees’ reasons are ridiculous. The thing about rejecting fantasy because it isn’t something kids can “relate to in real life”—that’s just plain silly. Kids have been “relating to” characters like Winnie the Pooh, Charlotte (a spider who can read and write?), Pippi Longstocking (who can lift a horse and a couple of policemen without breaking a sweat), and Peter Pan—to name but a very few of the fantastic characters who enliven our bookshelves and enrich our lives—for centuries. Hercules, anyone? I suspect that the board member who gave that quote was trying not to articulate for the record her real reasons for not approving the purchase of a Harry Potter book. Of course that is mere supposition. I have no way of knowing whether she really meant what she said, or what she might have been hesitant to say to a reporter.
But I do think it’s important to be clear about what is actually happening before we sound the book-banning alarm. Listen, one of the reasons I undertook the responsibility of educating my own children was because I object to the idea of some group of elected officials having the power to decide what is and is not appropriate for my kids to read and to learn. In a public school district, as everywhere else, someone has to have authority over the budget. In this case, the folks who’ve been granted that authority are exercising their right to approve or deny the purchase of book titles on a list of possibilities. That doesn’t prevent kids from getting hold of the books elsewhere. Can individual teachers include these titles in their classroom libraries?
I imagine there are some school library purchasing committees out there who have chosen not to include my books on the to-buy list. Am I happy about that? Of course not. I’ve worked hard to write books that are engaging, moving, and historically accurate, and I’m darned proud of them. I’d be thrilled to see them in every library in the country. But I don’t dispute the rights of the folks who’ve been invested power over fund-dispersal to decide whether or not my books make the cut. And if they don’t, I wouldn’t say “my books have been banned.” They just haven’t been bought.
What I’d really like to know is: What would the trustees do if parents or teachers were to donate the rejected books to the school library? If donations are regularly accepted, but these titles were refused, then perhaps it would be time to sound the censorship alarms.
