Life With Charles and Emma

Charles and Emma Darwin are the focus of this week's curriculum tie-in.
Three cheers for the Young Adult title Charles and Emma : the Darwins' Leap of Faith by Deborah Heiligman. The Darwins are an example of how opposites attract. He was neat and organized. She was disorganized and messy.
Because he was developing a theory about evolution, he was harboring many doubts about religion. She was a religious woman who worried whether her husband would be with her in the afterlife. Nevertheless they had a happy marriage and she  supported his work.

 This book was a labor of love for the author, Deborah Heiligman. Listen to her talk about this in her acceptance speech for the YALSA 2010 Printz Awards.

She and her husband also discuss religion  and science. Like Emma Darwin, she too found the right partner in life.
 The librarian in me absolutely needs to share how she did her research.
And if you prefer audiobooks, Charles and Emma is now available in this format.

The pioneer spirit

The 10th anniversary of  9/11 has reminded me of the pioneer spirit of this country. This week's curriculum tie-in is Heading West: Life With the Pioneers, 21 Activities by Pat McCarthy.


This wonderful book has so much to offer. It provides an historical overview of how pioneers settled the country, beginning with the Appalachian Mountains and continuing to the Pacific Ocean. Join Pat as she journeys with the settlers in their covered wagons and the hard work they encountered during the trip: the cooking, the hunting. Learn about the native Americans they met.
Then when they arrived they had to build themselves shelters. A dugout would be constructed by digging into a hill or creek bank until there was enough space for one room. Next they contructed a front wall using blocks of sod.
Laura Ingalls Wilder's family lived in a dugout for a time. She wrote about that in On the Banks of Plum Creek.  

Pioneers were the original do-it-yourselfers. Pat includes a number of activities for you to try. Try making maple snow candy, like Laura Ingalls Wilder did.
Try churning your own butter. Back then toys were handmade. Would you want to make a doll out of a clothespin?  Some little girls did.

If reading Pat's book makes you and your family hanker to visit pioneer sites, this  article from The New York Times  will give you information about visiting places Laura Ingalls Wilder lived. 

If you can't  visit,  read  Laura Ingalls Wilder Country, a  photographic  book of  Laura's homes.

If you want Pat to visit your school to give a program about the West visit her at her web site.

The Wonders of Electricity

Electricity is something we take for granted until we loose it. In the aftermath of Hurricane Irene, many people along the East Coast still have not had their power restored. If you have well water you don't have water either because you need electricity to pump water from your well. I hope power is restored to everyone very soon.



This week's curriculum tie-in is an ode to electricity.Wired by Anastasia Suen takes  middle grade readers on a journey of how electricity gets to their homes.


Anastasia has an activity and games for students to try. For more information visit her at her web site.

Paddle Your Own Canoe

I just came back from  a trip to the  Delaware shore  and the New Jersey shore where I had fun in the waves. Swimming is my favorite sport but maybe you enjoy boating or canoeing.


 This week will start a periodic salute to Canadiana: books related to our neighbor to the north, Canada, with the title  An Algonquin Heart Song: Paddle My Own Canoe by Amber J. Keyser.


Amber takes her readers on a canoe trip in  Alonquin Park, located in the Province of Ontario, where she took canoe trips while growing up. Her grandmother, Esther Sessions Keyser, was Algonquin Park's first female canoe guide.

For more information about Amber and her books visit her at her website.

Eat your vegetables

On a recent visit to the New Jersey State Fair, I visited the tent with the prize-winning vegetables. A man was pulling a basil bush onto the floor. It had fallen over, he said. Did I want it all for $1.50? Absolutely I wanted it!

 Basil is excellent in tomato sauce and if you have a kid who likes tomato sauce but hates vegetables do I have a book for you! This week's curriculum tie-in is Rah, Rah, Radishes: a Vegetable Chant by April Pulley Sayre.




What is a chant?  As a noun it is a phrase repeated rhythmically. As a verb it means to shout or sing rhythmically. 

What age range this book for?  April says,  "The publisher put the age level on the book at ages 3-7 in order to hit that preschool age that would not read the book but could hear it. But from what I'm hearing, teachers are using it all the way up the curriculum (even to grade 4) as a read-to, read-aloud, chant-out-loud, poem for many voices because so many older kids love rhythm, rhyme, and need veggie vocab. "

For more information on April's chant books  visit her web site.   And eat your vegetables.   

Swimming to the start of the school year

This week's post will use swimming as a metaphor. There will be no mention of swimming, the sport. Instead I will be introducing what I hope will be a weekly feature  the curriculum tie-in.

  Yes, parents, it's time to get your offspring swimming enthusiastically to the start of the school year. With this in mind, I'd like to introduce Phillis Sings Out Freedom: the story of George Washington and Phillis Wheatley by Ann Malaspina. When George Washington was struggling to win  independence
from Great Britain, the poet Phillis Wheatley wrote a poem of encouragement just for him. This picturebook biography  can be used as supplemental reading for the lower grades. Since the book is set in Massachusetts, I looked at the states core curriculum. Biographies are among the informational texts   acceptable for Pre-K- grade 5.

Ann says, "In my book, I tried to stick to what is known about Phillis Wheatley's life, which is not that much.  Because there are wide gaps in the details of her life, I did the best I could, using the best historical sources I could find. I gathered details and words from her poems and writings, as well as documents from Massachusetts Historical Society, scholarly biographies, and George Washington's own letters and biographies. "

For more information, visit Ann at http://www.annmalaspina.com/

"Longer Boats Are Faster"

Recently I read an on-line article called LONGER BOATS ARE FASTER, by Terry Laughlin, a swimming coach. Laughlin talked about a naval architect who tested various vessel shapes to find out the one that would go the fastest. The architect discovered the fastest boat was longer aat the waterline.

Laughlin  went on to discuss how this applied to swimmers. Swimmers should not try to increase muscle size. That does not produce speed. swimmers need to keep their bodies as long as possible  in the water.

I am planning to use his suggestions for improving my own swimming strokes.
Compettive swimmers  spend much of their time doing drills specific to freestyle, backstroke, etc. Fitness swimmers can do the same.

And I am extending my reach into my writing by thinking outside the box.  This means writing for children, writing magazine articles for adults, and providing good content for this blog.