Alice & Clara's Pick of the Week: Brownie & Pearl

We recently discovered the series Brownie & Pearl by Cynthia Rylant.  Brownie is a shy little girl, and Pearl is her right-hand cat.  Together they go on all kinds of adventures - having snacks, playing with friends, dressing up.  The books are brightly illustrated and the stories are very simply told with just a couple lines on each page.  Both my girls love Brownie and wish that Pearl was their very own cat.  They have quickly memorized the stories so that they can "read" them on their own and to each other.  I would recommend this series to any kid who enjoys the Maisy series.  There are 8 books in all:

• Brownie & Pearl Step Out
• Brownie & Pearl Get Dolled Up
• Brownie & Pearl See the Sights
• Brownie & Pearl Take a Dip
• Brownie & Pearl Get a Bite
• Brownie & Pearl Hit the Hay
• Brownie & Pearl Go for Spin
• Brownie & Peal Make Good

Later this year, Brownie & Pearl On the Go hits the shelves!!  

Happy Spring/Happy Easter!

Other than the terrible allergies that come with Spring, I love everything about the idea of the season - new life, beautiful flowers, bunnies and chicks - everything just seems so fresh and happy.  Easter is also one of my favorite holidays (I know, I have so many favorites!)  Growing up, I loved decorating eggs (drawing on the eggs with crayon before dipping in color was always my favorite method).  My mom always made us Easter baskets with chocolate bunnies and a little gift, and my dad enjoyed hiding eggs for us in places where we'd never find them.  My husband also comes from a family with many Easter traditions - since we've been together, I've enjoyed gathering with his dad's family on the Saturday of Easter weekend for a potluck and egg hunt, and with his mom's family on Sunday morning for a super competitive adult hunt with clues and a delicious Easter brunch of fantastic quiches, pigs in a blanket, and coffee cake.  It's a holiday that comes with a lot of opportunities for books and crafts, but more importantly, it's one of the few holidays outside of Thanksgiving and Christmas that really seems to bring families together (at least ours).

Getting all the craft supplies organized for 109 pre-schoolers!

This year, I volunteered to organize the crafts for my girls' pre-school Egg Hunt Day.  I know I always enjoy searching for, preparing for, and actually doing holiday crafts with my kids, so why not do it for 109 pre-schoolers?!?!  Luckily, my saintly mother stepped in to save me from myself and was a master with the templates, tracing, cutting, tying, and everything else necessary to make sure we had everything ready for our deadline.

Peek-a-Boo Chick

The first craft I chose was the Peek-a-Boo Chick.  This one involved cutting a lot of foam sheets for the egg and chick.  I got stickers for decorating, and then just used glue to assemble everything else (and a brad for the egg).  Even if you are doing this craft just with a couple kids, it does take a bit of prep time.  I figured many of the two and three year olds would be too little to successfully put the brad in the egg without ripping the foam, so my mom pieced together all the eggs in advance.  But once the prep is done, assembly for this craft is pretty quick, so it's a great one for kids with short attention spans.

I am a sucker for the crafts that involve kids' hand and footprints, so the second one I chose was the Handprint Easter Lamb.  Because I feared that actually inking the hands of so many pre-schoolers would be a nightmare, I just traced my kids' hands and then colored in the head and feet with black pen which I think worked just fine.  Getting the thumb-head at an angle that didn't look too weird took some trial and error, but the end product was fun.  I hope the kids will enjoy making these, and the parents will love them just as much as I do.

Handprint Lamb (courtesy of Ben's hand)

We are also  busy reading books about Spring and Easter.  Here's some of what we've been enjoying:

Books About Spring:

• Spring is Here - Taro Gomi
• Spring is Here - Will Hillenbrand
• Planting a Rainbow - Lois Ehlert
• Zinnia's Flower Garden - Monica Wellington
• Flowers from Mariko - Rick Noguchi

Books About Easter: (there are so many wonderful books about Easter - these are just a couple featuring some of my kids' favorite characters):

• Duck & Goose: Here Comes the Easter Bunny
• Pete the Cat: Big Easter Adventure
• Happy Easter, Little Critter
• LEGO City: Follow that Easter Egg!

Taking a Break to De-Stress

Clara making "ghosts" out of her batch

While we do a lot of reading in our house, sometimes you just need a break!  With three pre-school aged kids, some of my days just seem jam-packed with loud intensity - and there are times when I wonder just how long my group can go without whining, melting down, fighting, or just generally making me crazy.  So, to say I am always on the hunt for calming activities (for them and me) is an understatement.

We play with play-dough a lot in our house - and my go-to recipe is from the blog The Imagination Tree.  I love it.  It takes less than 20 minutes (and it only takes that long because I often have one of the kids help, or I'm trying to make it while doing a million other things!)  Usually, we go pretty standard and just add food coloring.  Play-dough is so fun, but it's also clearly a great sensory activity that strengthens little hands for fine motor skills.

About six months ago, thanks to a friend of a friend, I got really into essential oils.  Check out her Facebook Page (Nurse Freckles) for all kinds of wonderful information about things you can do with essential oils (as I'm writing this post, I'm drinking hot tea infused with Lemongrass, and my son is down the hall diffusing a blend to help with his breathing).

So, when I saw a post from  Lemon Lime Adventures for Calming Glitter Slime, I was immediately inspired.  Calming Glitter Slime is basically made from Elmer's Glue and Liquid Starch.   As explained on the post:

Calming Proprioceptive Input | Since this slime is extremely resistant and thick it provides a great deal of deep pressure and joint compressions. As you squeeze, fold, roll, and even pull the slime, you are sending signals to your brain that are calming and organizing! Much like chores, brain breaks and simple daily tasks, playing with slime is actually calming and can increase focus.

The material is vaguely play-dough-like, and the suggestion was to add calming essential oils to maximize the de-stressing properties of this substance.  Two of the things I get overly excited about in one place!  I had all the best intentions of following the recipe and making a huge cool batch for my kids...but, alas, I have no idea what liquid starch is!  I ordered something on Amazon that claimed to be liquid starch - but it was not.  I'm sure it serves the same purpose on clothing as liquid starch, but it did nothing for my Calming Glitter Slime!  But, I had no time to run out and track down liquid starch (it's probably not THAT hard to find, right?)...so I turned back to my trusty play-dough recipe, and I whipped up a batch.  My girls asked for purple, so I mixed my red and blue food coloring as best I could.  Then, I broke my #1 craft activity rule, which is NO GLITTER!!  Or as I like to call it "Devil's Dust."  And I added half a vial of purple glitter to the play-dough - and then, because the whole point was to get some CALM and RELAXATION out of this, I added a few drops of lavender oil to the recipe.

In the end, we didn't get to try this cool SLIME.  But we will.  I still have a ton of glue!  But, my girls were so excited to get some glitter in their lives, and I was so relaxed having just smelled the lavender as I was kneading the dough and absorbing it through my hands, that even if I only imagined that it worked on my kids too, well, that's just fine by me!

Alice poking at her Surprise Egg

As an added fun activity...my son is excited about Surprise Eggs (after he saw it on a youtube video), so I took a few of our plastic Easter Eggs, put a few jelly beans inside, and then wrapped it in the play-dough.  My kids are young, so they had a lot of fun doing this over and over, even if I just put old little trinkets in the eggs before covering them up.  

I loved the process of this activity - finding inspiration from all the amazing blogs out there, using essential oils to help my family re-gain balance, making an activity with and for my kids, screwing up but still finding a way to make it work, and of course, generating a lot of excitement and smiles!  And we will get to the GLITTER SLIME.  Soon.  I promise :)

Opera: A New Musical Journey

Recently, Ben was looking at one of those "Seek and Find" books and saw the stereotypical image of an opera singer in one scene.  He was curious about who she was and I explained that she was an opera singer - along with probably a poor explanation of what opera music is and how people act out operas.  He just nodded.

Several weeks later while we were at the library, he turned to me and said, "We should probably learn more about opera.  Maybe there are books here about it."  And of course there were, so I borrowed a few that retell opera stories for a child audience, including:

• Sing Me a Story: The Metropolitan Opera's Book of Opera Stories for Children by Jane Rosenberg
• The Random House Book of Opera Stories by Adele Geras
• The Magic Flute by Anne Gatti
• The Barefoot Book of Stories from the Opera by Shahrukh Husain

I then turned to my friend Paul, who is a trained opera singer, and asked him what operas he might recommend for obvious novices/children.  He provided a list, and I went on to iTunes and downloaded a CD that contained all the ones on his list.

My plan had to been to listen to the music as we read the stories about them in the books.  But, as with many of my plans with the kids, it didn't quite work out that way.  They didn't want to just sit and listen while I droned on about what the people were singing about.  So, in the end, I have just played the music at home in the background now and again, and we read some of the stories just so I would have a better idea of what this opera stuff is all about.

I'm not becoming an expert in anything musical any time soon, but this was a really nice way to introduce myself and my kids to a different form of music that the general pop and rock stuff we head on the radio.  It's inspired me to make more of an effort to do this with other forms of music - a least just to get a taste of something different once in awhile.

We Need Diverse Books

While I'd like to think that I make an effort to read diverse authors, choosing diverse books for myself and my children - the truth is I often read books that are recommended to me; the ones that win awards or that everyone else seems to be reading.  And, often times, as a result of not being mindful about what I'm choosing, I am in fact choosing the more mainstream straight white male authors. This is not to say that many of these books aren't worth reading (like anything, some are good and some are not), but I think I could do more to promote women, people of color, and LGBTQ authors in publishing.  So, to that end, I have been reading more about the We Need Diverse Books movement.

Part of the Mission Statement of We Need Diverse Books reads:

• We recognize all diverse experiences, including (but not limited to) LGBTQIA, people of color, gender diversity, people with disabilities*, and ethnic, cultural, and religious minorities. Our mission is to promote or amplify diversification efforts and increase visibility for diverse books and authors, with a goal of empowering a wide range of readers in the process.

The movement focuses mostly on Children's Books - and doesn't only encourage the reading of diverse authors, but just books featuring diverse characters.  On the adult level, many people have proposed only reading diverse authors for an entire year.  One person's experience doing that was written about here, and another one here.  This proposal has created some controversy - of course, there are diverse authors out here who write terrible books, and there are white male authors out there who write about female characters or people of color - there are simply many who see the whole idea as a type of reverse-racism.  Some of the purpose in seeking out diverse authors (I think) is to also support their lack of inclusion in the general publishing world.  Some of those ideas (and more) are represented in the referenced article, with this:

• The “We Need Diverse Books” campaign has kicked off 2015 asking followers to pledge to read books that highlight diversity in a myriad of aspects (so not just people of colour, but looking at various inclusivity issues such as disability and gender and sexuality) with the hashtag #WNDBResolution.

Since kicking around this idea in my head for the past couple weeks, I have made exceptions for "books by white authors already on my night stand" or "books by white authors that I've been in the queue for at the library."  But, maybe I need to stop doing that.  I'm also not sure where "gender diversity" falls in this endeavor.  I read a lot of women authors, but probably the majority are white (I don't know, I haven't been paying attention which is kind of the point).  All this to say that I'm thinking about this and reading a lot about it, and I'm ready to dive in - and at least start keeping track better of what I'm reading on this front instead of just reading whatever gets recommended or I see people reading on the bus.  Just looking at the We Need Diverse Books website and their list of resources for places to find diverse books is really inspiring - often when looking for books for my kids I just flip through the shelves at the library and see what catches my eye.  I can and will still do that, but this is a fantastic (in my mind) resource for just being more mindful about the breadth of what is out there.

I know that even raising this as a possible way to make reading choices will offend people - and I've noticed that every time I post something on the What the Wild Things Read Facebook page about emphasizing diversity in reading or my family's exploration of non-mainstream ideas or holidays, I tend to lose a "like" or two on my page.  Of course, that's fine.  The purpose of the blog is to share what my family is doing - for better or worse.  I don't seek to offend, and I welcome thoughts about all these issues (as long as the comments and discussions are respectful), but I doubt any of them will stop me from consistently trying to seek out more, new, and different books and authors with the goal of expanding my world view, as well as that of my children.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Magical leprechauns, gold coins, brilliants greens - what's not to love about St. Patrick's Day?  Well, maybe not the excessive revelry for some, but as a holiday for kids, there's so much to do with St. Patrick's.  When it comes to reading up on a subject, I've come to find that Gail Gibbons can usually be counted on to have some sort of straight-forward factual background material suitable for children.  She did not let me down here, and I recently borrowed St. Patrick's Day to give my kids a sense of who St. Patrick was, why we celebrate St. Patrick's Day, and of course, all the fun we can have with it.

Even though St. Patrick's Day has come and gone, I have no problem celebrating holidays throughout the month, so if you haven't had your fill of green, here are a few we've enjoyed:

• There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Clover
• Happy St. Patrick's Day, Curious George
• A Berry Lucky St. Patrick's Day
• Green Shamrocks
• Emeraldalicious

And for adults looking for books set in Ireland, there are a million, but here are a few of my favorites:

• The Dublin Detective Squad Series by Tana French (In the Woods, The Likeness, Faithful Place, Broken Harbor, and The Secret Place) - note that these do not need to be read in order.
• Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt
• Brooklyn by Colm Toibin
• Anything by James Joyce

Clara's Pick of the Week: Construction Kitties

At our local library branch, we have have a fantastic children's section - tons of books and comfortable chairs to lounge in and read all afternoon.  But, one of the things about this branch that my son, Ben, has always loved is that they have a specific section for books about transportation.  So, he learned early on that he could just go straight to that section and find countless books about cars, planes, trucks, trains, boats - and anything else transportation related (every once in awhile there's a good bike book thrown in there).  Over the past couple years we've borrowed and re-borrowed so many books from that shelf.  It's a nice safe place for Ben to gravitate toward, and even though his tastes are starting to change, it's always one of the first shelves he visits when we arrive at the library.

My girls are also into books about transportation, but I've found they often have to have a little bit more - and usually that little bit more involves animals.  There have to be animals driving the vehicles or somehow or other involved in the stories.  And so this book is purr-fect.  Construction Kitties by Judy Sue Goodwin Sturges is a brightly illustrated book with simple text that shows a group of cats work through the process of building a playground.  The cats are super cute as they put on their construction hats, dig and move the dirt, take a break for lunch, and eventually go home for the day.  This is a book that has appealed to my kids for years, and one that I don't mind reading over and over and over again.