Afternoons on the Amazon
Our Magic Tree House Adventures
As part of our Magic Tree House regimen, the kiddo and I read through everything and anything we could get our hands on regarding rainforests. It’s been about a week, and every afternoon we’ve been diving into the magic of the Amazon River and its surrounding rainforests.
Last time we shared our Magic Tree House Adventures, we’d just finished our fourth set: Pirates Past Noon and Pirates! Fifth in line was Ninjas at Night, and I was searching high and low for a Research Guide (“Fact Tracker”) on Ninjas and could not find one. It looks as though I may have dreamed that one up. So we read the fictional adventure and moved on to Afternoon on the Amazon
So I built my own unit with out the help of Mary Pope Osborne, and found some pretty awesome books in our personal library the process…
Ladybird Explorers Plus: Rainforests
The Ladybird Explorers Plus series are flip/tab books with tons of information. They are great book to have if you have lots of different ages in the house. Even though I can’t say that from the experience of having lots of various aged children, I can say it from the experience of being just as fascinated by this book as my toddler. The pictures are lovely, the facts surprising (I didn’t know there were dolphins in the Amazon River, they must have skipped over that in my childhood rainforest studies), and the tabs and flaps were fun. One of our favorite tabs makes an Asian elephant move a heavy log. Another causes the monkeys to swing through the trees. It includes detailed but simple charts with flaps that show the water cycle in a rain forest, and clear glossy photos that overlap pages like you would find for an overhead projector. The chapter “Beauty in the Forest” lives up to its name and is indeed full of very beautiful illustrations of the trees, birds, and flowers.
Learn About Rainforests by Jen Green
The Learn About series is fantastic for the pictures now, but even more important for all the projects later. This really spells out detailed activities to do with an older child when we tackle the rainforest more formally. It shows you step by step how to plant your own canopy, how to make molds of animal tracks in the forest, and the basics of field studies. It is only 63 short pages in length, but the pages are full of facts, gorgeous photography, and 24 projects geared toward 8-12 year olds. It is advertised as “a fascinating fact file and learn-it-yourself project book” which to me is the very definition of what you should have in a homeschooler’s library. I’m not sure why they are priced so high on Amazon, but I got mine for a couple bucks at Half Price Books.
The Usborne Living World Encyclopedia
First, I love Usborne. Second, the Living Encyclopedia will be making its way into many lessons, as it covers all living things all over the world. Being that it covers so much, naturally there is a huge section on rain forests that made for some nice supplementary pictures to gaze at while reading our fiction. The kiddo was really taken with the unrelated lady bug on the front cover, but also liked seeing the extra pictures of the dolphins and jaguars while we were reading Dora and Diego’s Adventures, where they travel through the rainforest, use a dolphin to pull them through the Amazon river, and save Baby Jaguar.
Homeschooling / Life With a Toddler
Tea Time
We have tea parties with our geography lessons. She knows her southern states and can identify North America on a world map. No matter what, she can always find Texas, even when all its borders aren’t clearly drawn on… she looks for the Gulf of Mexico.
Card Games
She loves to play cards… these are first word matching puzzle cards. The nice, straight rows are all her doing. She’s quite the neat-nick.
Arts & Crafts
Painting is the best. Featured here is an acrylic on canvas piece.
Story Time
Story time at Half Price Books cannot be missed. It is an essential part of our weekly lives.
Word Love
Photograph by Maureen F, click to visit her Flickr page.
I have a strangely inappropriate love for certain words. One of them is wafted.
wafted past participle, past tense of waft
VerbPass or cause to pass easily or gently through or as if through the air: “the smell of stale fat wafted out from the restaurant”.
I’m sure I’ve mentioned my love for this word in this blog somewhere before, I know I briefly commented on it in my review of Kendall Grey’s Inhale. But while reading Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, I decided this topic deserved its very own post – not just a brief comment.
It struck me, much more strongly than ever before, how much I truly love this word as I read these lines:
“His napkin clung to his waist for a moment, hanging absurdly, like a loin cloth, and then wafted to the floor in slow motion.” – On Chesil Beach, pg. 33
Because there I was reading Ian McEwan’s book, completely uninterested and partly uncomfortable by the topic altogether, until that word hit the page. With one word, my entire mindset turned around. With one word, I thought: McEwan really is a lovely writer.
As soon as that thought struck me and I was able to identify where it came from, I recalled reading that word somewhere else earlier in the week. I poked around in my reading material a bit and found that M.G. King used it in Fizz & Peppers. Not only did she use it, I found that I had whimsically underlined it without giving it a single thought. I often read with a pen or pencil in my hand. You can often find doodles, or notes, or sporadic underlining in many of my books. It is something that often happens without thought, and sometimes upon re-reading the title, without reason. It seems as though, while reading Fizz & Peppers, I came across that word, and my pencil just reached out from my hand and licked it like it was a delicious bit of whip cream on top of a fine dessert.
“Even before he made it halfway down the hall he felt the hot, soggy air wafting through the house.” – Fizz & Peppers
Well, it doesn’t have to be in past tense, you see, I like any form of the word waft:
Definition of WAFT
intransitive verb: to move or go lightly on or as if on a buoyant medium <heavenly aromas wafted from the kitchen>transitive verb
: to cause to move or go lightly by or as if by the impulse of wind or waves— waft·er noun
Although these fonts aren’t doing the word justice, in all its forms I just love that word. The deep smile it gives me is inevitable. And I couldn’t tell you whether it starts with my lips and seeps down into my gut or if it is the reverse, but I cannot read the word waft without becoming inexplicably happy.
I would like to go on a hunt through my personal library and see where else I have made note of this wonderful word in my books. That would take years, but it would be a worthy cause. From now on, I’ll just remember to make note in my journals of where I have read it and who wrote it.
Click to visit book blog: Wafting Through the Bookshelf, adventures in bookwaft
Do you have any favorite words? Another of mine is speakeasy, I like they way it feels when it is spoken aloud, but I have no deep love for the meaning. Waft is unique for me in that I love every aspect of it, how it sounds, what it means, the elegance it gives a sentence when it used, the image I have in my mind when I read it… oh yes, but what is your favorite word? And why do you like it?
April 2013 Events
In addition to Book Club (first Monday of the Month) and Poetry Night (first Thursday of the Month), this is what’s going on at Half Price Books Humble in April. Keep checking back, there may be more to come!
Nowhere Near Almost There
Title: Almost There
Author: Nuala O’Faolain
I love reading for holidays. Around Christmas, I choose appropriately wintery titles. For Valentines Day, even though I am not a fan of the holiday, I’ll read a short cheesy love story that I would probably otherwise not pick up. Earth Day in April calls for all things naturey and Halloween is for spooky-ness. So of course, once a year in March, I pick up whatever I have on hand that seems the most Irish.
This year’s choice was Nuala O’Faolain’s Almost There. It was a crappy trade paperback I got for free that I remember picking up out of a recycle bin somewhere and thinking, I would read that for St. Patty’s sometime. Memoirs are generally quick reads too, perfect for a weekend in March. Even more perfect, I thought, because I just finished Sheridan Hay’s The Secret of Lost Things and in the thank you’s Hay thanks O’Faolain. I like streaming my reading along these sorts of vague connections. Reading Almost There would be the most awesome St.Patty’s 2013 book, I thought, everything just fell into place.
Except not.
I am 29 years old. I may have not done as much as I would have wanted by my 29th year, but I don’t feel like I’ve wasted my time either. I have 15 years of experience as a Kung Fu instructor. I was briefly in a crappy band, my singing years better spent in a high school choir. I have waited tables, been an emergency bartender for an evening, become a “bra expert” at a lingerie store, and earned a Bachelor’s degree in Marketing and Management. I am married, I have a child, I have worked in the book industry for six years (and have loved every minute of it) and done all kinds of book related jobs, and I am currently in the midst of publishing my first title. In all that I have been blessed to have the opportunity to make time for my reading habits, and oh do I love to read.
I’m not bragging… there’s so much I have NOT done (like leave the country, ever!); but, in my 29 years, I’ve been busy.
I am desperately trying to get into Nuala O’Faolain’s memoir, but I can’t. 30 pages in, all we have established is that she is an older woman who feels like she has accomplished nothing. She has no significant other, she writes a column but hasn’t done anything great in her opinion, and frankly… I just don’t get it.
Maybe I am not old enough. Maybe I see my world in a glass half full sort of way and keep trying to figure out why being famous for an opinion column in Dublin is a bad thing. Maybe I am sad that even though she delights in her dog, she is busier being sad about the way things ended with her ex. 30 pages or so in, I have decided that for this year, I am done.
I did, however, pick up one of her novels. I think I’ll try that next and come back to the memoir later. I like her writing, but starting off with her Low Point has kept me in a foul mood. I was all too happy to set it aside for M.G. King’s Fizz & Peppers and had no desire to pick it back up again. If that’s not a sign to stop, I don’t know what is.
Have you read anything by Nuala O’Faolain? What were your favorites? Where do you recommend I begin?
M.G. King: the new voice of young adult fantasy
Title: Fizz & Peppers
Author: M.G. King
Genre: Young Adult/Fantasy/Adventure
“Sometimes great ideas are so genius and unlikely they fall from the heavens; but sometimes the best ones are simple, waiting to be found already in the palm of your hand.”
I don’t know if this idea fell from the heavens or was found in the palm of King’s hands, but Fizz & Peppers is utter genius. It’s quite possible we have the next J.K. Rowling on our hands, folks.
Meet Colin Colbeck and a girl named Pepper, arch enemies and ex-best friends. Also, meet Colin’s kid brother Sid… by the way, he has trolls living under his bed. There’s also a nutty but endearing grandmother to rescue, an entire world under suburbia and the nearby wood, thrums, hot peppers, and a game called knattlebones.
This book, written by a mom for and with her own middle-grade sons, is about two boys who are full of some of the most “brilliantly, beautiful idea[s] ever to be thought of in the history of the world” as they fight off trolls to rescue their kidnapped, sometimes senile grandmother from the bottom of the world.
What an imagination this family has! The family responsible for writing the book that is… After reading King’s dedication at the front of the book to her “what if?” family, immediately I wanted to be a fly on the wall at their house as they speculate the nature of the world. What minds! To come up with the idea that a little bit of fizz from a soda pop would wake up a sleeping troll from a stone-like state and send them romping the underground, free to steal from (and eat!) Peoplekins and wreak havoc on everything.
Not every author can make such a smooth transition between genres – picture book to young adult is a couple hundred page leap – but King has done an excellent job. Fizz & Peppers is just as wonderful as Librarian on the Roof, and I am excited to have an author to share with my daughter for her whole life, not just her babyhood.
The only draw back is that Fizz & Peppers is currently only available on e-book, and I am very old fashioned when it comes to books… I like them in my hands, I like to sniff their pages, I like the risk of a paper cut. Lucky me, King printed me a copy in a binder! (Yes, I am bragging to cyberspace, I have this book in a binder! And I feel special.)
Reminiscent of The Labyrinth (come on you ’80’s kids, I know you were fascinated with Jareth the Goblin King as much as I was) and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Fizz & Peppers will captivate you and keep you wide-eyed from the first hint of a troll until the very last drop of ginger ale. It’s a fantastic adventure for all ages that I believe will stand the test of time.
***UPDATE*** Fizz & Peppers is now available in paperback!
A Two Year Old Reads The Lorax
I sat down at the breakfast table with my daughter who will be two and a half in a month. It’s St. Patty’s Day, so I thought I would read something appropriately Irish to her over breakfast. I didn’t have much follow through, though, because my daughter looked at me with those big blue eyes, batted them, and said, “Read The Lorlax, Mommy, the Lorlax.” This pronunciation is a great improvement from when she was calling him the “Workass.”
So I went and got Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax and began to read. There was an interruption regarding her cereal, another about the dog, a few more about the characters in the book. Two pages in I shoved the book at her and said, “You read it.”
And this is how my two year old read The Lorax, along with great gestures and emphatic pointing:
“Town!
Grickle-grass!
Essepting Oooooooold crows.
TED!
Find the Lorlax! The Lorlax!
Baby Lorlax!
Butterfly milk!
Truffula Trees…
and seeds!
And Seed.
Last Seed.
The End.
Ok, Green Eggs and Ham, Mommy.”
The Wild Girls – A Review
Title: The Wild Girls
Author: Pat Murphy
Publisher: Speak (an imprint of Penguin Group)
Genre: Young Adult
Length: 288 pages
Dear Publishing Companies,
Allow me to tell you something you probably already know: Take a book, add a matte finish to it, trace some swirly-like-ivy lines about, and add a garden or forest scene – I will most likely take the book home on the spot.
At least that’s what happened with Pat Murphy’s The Wild Girls. And despite having an equally girly and gardeny looking book on my night stand (The Distant Hours
Even if the cover had not been so fabulous, the first line is:
“I met the Queen of the Foxes in 1972, when my family moved from Connecticut to California.”
How do you pass up a first line like that?
It’s a story about twelve year old girls for twelve year old girls, but at twenty-nine I was still dying to know all about the Queen of the Foxes and how interesting a girl would have to be to have the honor of meeting her.
My own wild girl, running, after we read in the park and took a boat ride, but before we had our picnic in the grass.
Joan meets Sarah in the woods behind an old orchard and immediately takes to her even though Sarah is malicious and contemplating throwing rocks at her. She can hit a kid dead on from about thirty feet away, too. Soon the girls are fast friends with woodsy aliases Newt and Fox, telling and writing stories together as they each escape their lives in the comfort and enchanting beauty of the woods and its wildlife.
In the spirit of Bridge to Terabithia (without the inevitable water works), The Secret Garden (without the invalid), and a dash of How to Buy a Love of Reading (or writing), The Wild Girls is a great coming of age story for girls harboring an inner Josephine March (Little Women).
I loved it. I read a lot of it to kiddo outside and she loved it as it served for a great book to welcome spring. I can’t wait to read it again when she is older and see what she thinks of it then.
In the mean time, I’m looking for more Pat Murphy titles, reading Kate Morton, and writing a novel.
Great Books to Read Outside With Kids
Weekly Low Down on Kids Books – March 12, 2013
Title:The Lorax
Author: Dr. Seuss
You know you’ve read The Lorax a few too many times when your two year old steps outside and says, “Look Mommy, the trees,” then breathes deep and continues, “they smell like butterfly milk!”
The Lorax is an oldie but a goodie. It follows the tale of the Once-ler and how he destroyed all the trees for the sake of industrialism. Ignoring the warnings from The Lorax, the delightfully curmudgeonous beast who speaks for the trees, all that is left of a once beautiful land is a small truffula seed.
The Lorax is a fantastic way to enlighten your kiddo to the environmentalist ideals and introduce them to be mindful of their world. We love reading it on the porch swing and inhaling the sweet smell of “butterfly milk.”
Title: Wild About Books
Author: Judy Siera
Illustrations: Marc Brown
Follow the tale of bookmobile librarian Molly McGrew introduces all the animals at the zoo to the wonderful world of reading.
“By reading aloud from the good Dr. Seuss,
She quickly attracted a mink and a moose,
A wombat, an oryx, a lemur, a lynx,
Eight elephant calves, and a family of skinks.”
Kiddo likes to find all the animals mentioned in the story illustrated out on the page. To the right of this segment, you can find Molly McGrew in a chair reading from The Cat in the Hat.
Later, the animals discover that they like books so much, they even start writing them! The Insects dive in with poetry and the scorpion offers “stinging reviews.”
We read this one outside on the porch a lot, but we also read this before bed at night too. If you don’t have a copy, check out your local Half Price Books, I purchased mine off a generous stack in the kids section at the Humble store. No guarantees that you’ll find one too, but it’s worth a shot.
Anakalian Whims 