The Color of Water - James McBride

My childhood friend, Sarah, loaned this book to me.  She is a teacher and a mother of three young children.  Attempting to balance all that life has to offer is a frequent topic of conversation when we get together.  This book tells the story of Ruth McBride, a Polish Jew born in 1921 who made her way to New York and at the age of 17 married a black minster and raised twelve children.  Needless to say, the woman is an inspiration when it comes to finding balance.  Once married, and essentially shunned by her family, Ms. McBride refused to acknowledge that she was white, choosing instead to pass as light-skinned.  She faced racism and poverty, but pushed for her children's education - and they all graduated from college, many going on to grad school.  She spoke rarely about her past, and this book is her son James's attempt to uncover more about his mother's life.  This is an interesting portrayal of the importance of race - Ms. McBride chose not to focus on it - to instead look at a person's character and contributions.  But, it's clear from the narrative that her mixed-race son faced difficulties growing up with respect to his racial identity.  Because his mother was unwilling (or unable) to discuss race, I felt like she did her son a disservice.  While so much of who we are is self-perception, when it comes to race, so much can be shaped by how others categorize and define us.  Without an open environment to discuss these difficult issues, my fear is that this is where anger, misunderstanding, and ultimately racism fester.  I think this would be a fantastic book for a book group - particularly one made up of teenagers.

Clara's Pick of the Week: Harold at the North Pole

Harold at the North Pole by Crockett Johnson:  Like many children, my kids are fans of Harold and the Purple Crayon.  I didn't realize until recently that there are more books in the series, including this one, which is obviously appropriate given the time of year.  In this adventure, Harold must find a Christmas Tree before Santa gets to his house on Christmas Eve.  Along the way, he encounters Santa and helps him load up his sleigh with gifts for children all around the world.  Given Clara's fascination with Rudolph, she particularly loves the pages where Harold draws the reindeer to guide the sleigh.  This morning, Clara insisted on bringing the book with her to school to share with all her friends.  Hopefully she will let go of it long enough for her teacher to actually read it to the class.

A Halloween Straggler: Frankenstein's Cat

Frankenstein's Cat by Curtis Jobling: Ben suggested this book to me after he read it at school - we couldn't find it at the library, so I ordered it on-line and unfortunately it didn't arrive until after Halloween - but fortunately, the kids don't seem to care and it is has been in the daily rotation for the past couple weeks.  Frankenstein's Cat is kind of a sad little tale about a cat put together by Dr. Frankenstein, before he made the monster.  The cat is made, in part, from a smelly alley cat, which makes the cat smell.  As a result no one wants to be his friend, so he asks Dr. Frankenstein to make him a friend - with disastrous results.  The basic gist of the story makes me a little uncomfortable - everyone being mean to the cat because he smells.  But, the illustrations are colorful and the story a bit silly - so the kids seem really drawn to it, and haven't seemed to adopt the idea of teasing each other for smelling or anything like that, so I think I will give this a tentative thumbs-up endorsement.  At least for the Halloween fun, if not for any deeper moral reason.

Rainy Day Stories

"Rain rain go away, come again another day.  Little Alice wants to play..."  My girls have been singing this song all week - and though here in Northern California we absolutely do not want the rain to go away, I have enjoyed hearing their songs.  The rain has also been a good opportunity to read some books about rainy weather.

Last night, Ben and I read the beautifully illustrated Umbrella by Taro Yashima.  In Umbrella, three-year-old Momo receives her first umbrella.  She is so eager to use it that she invents reasons to take it out in sunny and windy weather.  But, he mom convinces her to save it for a rainy day.  When that day arrives, Momo is filled with music and happiness.  I enjoyed this blog post about the book which provides some background on the author's life and some of the illustrations from the book.

Other rainy day children's books we've enjoyed include:

What Can You Do in the Rain? by Anna Grossnickle Hines
Who Likes Rain? by Wong Herbert Yee
Who Likes the Rain? by Etta Kaner
Come on, Rain! by Karen Hesse
Rain Feet by Angela Johnson

Ben's Pick of the Week: Secret Agent Jack Stalwart

Recently Ben discovered the Secret Agent Jack Stalwart series by Elizabeth Singer Hunt at the library.  Jack Stalwart is a nine-year-old Secret Agent for the GPF.  His older brother, Max, went on a secret mission and has disappeared.  In Jack's quest to find Max, he finds himself transported to countries all over the world solving mysteries.  The series has been named a "must read" for boys by the British Education Secretary.

Currently, there are fourteen books in the series taking Jack everywhere from Nepal to the Arctic to France.  It does not seem that the books necessarily need to be read in order, and we started with The Pursuit of the Ivory Poachers which takes place in Kenya.  The plot of the book was pretty simple.  Jack arrives in Kenya and learns that someone is illegally poaching elephant tusks.  Eventually, he finds the culprit.  The excitement of the story lies in all the secret gadgets Jack has at his disposal to help him get out of trouble and outsmart the bad guys.  As this book was set in Kenya, it also had a lot about animals which Ben enjoyed - and it sparked a discussion about poaching and endangered animals (also started back when we read Danny the Champion of the World).

We've just started on The Search for the Sunken Treasure set in Australia (a country/continent Ben loves thanks to Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day).  In this one, Jack investigates the disappearance of a diver off the Great Barrier Reef.  Since we've been focused on maps and geography lately, these books have been an unintended supplement to our work, and Ben has enjoyed looking at the world map on his wall as we read through the books and talk about Jack's travels.

Ben went a little crazy checking out books this week, so we also have Japan, Cambodia, and Great Britain adventures to look forward to in the upcoming weeks.

Mixing Colors

My son has had a recent interest in mixing colors - while painting and drawing with crayons.  He likes to ask what happens when you mix certain colors or how to make other colors.  In an effort to help him better understand how this works, we've checked out a few books about color mixing.  Some of the ones we've enjoyed are:

Colors for Zena by Monica Wellington

Mix it Up by Herve Tullet

Monsters Love Colors by Mike Austin

Magic Colors by Patrick George

We've also done some work with the color wheel to help the kids gain a better visual of how the colors are all related to each other.  I'm also always on the look-out for children's books with vibrant colorful illustrations just so we can be exposed to different ways to use color.  Exploring color has been a fun uplifting exercise!

I Spy Storytelling

My kids love books where the goal is to search for a given object.  Some of their favorites include:

I Spy
Can You See What I See?
Where's Waldo
Look & Find Disney Friends
I Spy Art Series, which includes:
     -  I Spy An Alphabet in Art
     -  I Spy Shapes in Art
     -  I Spy Colors in Art

Often, all the kids want to do is find the images they're looking for and then turn the page.  But sometimes, I can get them to linger on a page for long enough to start talking about what is going on in a given scene, what the people are doing, why the objects are there in a given way.  I particularly like the Can You See What I See? books for this because each page of the book follows a story along.  For example, in Toyland Express, the reader follows the train from creation in the toy shop, to the toy store, to the home of a child opening it in a brand new box, to abandoned in the attic, to refurbished and played with all over again.  Because these book tend not to have too many words (the I Spy books do usually incorporate a small rhyme), they are wide-open for children to use their imaginations to start learning how to tell a story.

Recently, our friends at Carrots are Orange and An Everyday Story introduced us to another set of books that are in this category:

Welcome to Mamoko
The World of Mamoko in the Year 3000
The World of Mamoko in the Time of Dragons

The Mamoko books are written by the same people who wrote another favorite I recently shared, Maps. They are wordless books intended to promote storytelling in children - at the front is a page with a number of characters that appear throughout the rest of the book.  Then, as you flip through the pages you can choose to look at the scene as a whole or follow a given character through the book.  While it is fun just to search for each character on a page, slowly my kids started to get the idea of telling the story of each character - including interesting funny backstories.  Here is an explanation by the authors of the books and explaining their thinking behind their creation:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCwo5JHJgQo.  We had so much fun getting know the world of Mamoko.  We can't wait for more to come!