Boy Books Found!

A couple of weeks ago, in a post about the delightful Ivy and Bean series, I complained that the chapter books shelves were row upon row of girl series with nary a boy title in sight.  Now, I’m back to report that we found a few of these elusive boy chapter books.

First, an oldie but goodie.  Mushroom and BalletBoy adore the Flat Stanley books, which we started reading more than a year ago.  For anyone who doesn’t know them, Stanley is a kid who turns flat and has adventures using his new special flat skills.  At the end of the book, he re-inflates, but later books tell about more adventures he has.  I think Stanley in Space is my kids’ favorite.  Stanley’s adventures are always silly and they usually give me a chance to do my silliest reading voices.  For some reason, I imagine Stanley’s mother with a Minnesota accent.

I have to warn that there are new editions of these that have just been issued in the last year or so with new illustrations, along with a new series called Flat Stanley’s Adventures, which is not written by Jeff Brown.  The new books are borderline horrible and the new illustrations just make me sad.  They aren’t so bad on their own, but the original illustrations, with the cut out of Stanley that kids took all over the world, seems like a deeply ingrained part of the story.  You can re-illustrate some classics, but not others.  What would Green Eggs and Ham be if you got someone else to draw Sam-I-Am?  Sure, some other clever illustrator might come up with something amazing.  But would it be right?

Next, I don’t know how it missed my attention for so long that Judy Moody’s brother has his own series.  We even caught the tail end of Megan McDonald at last year’s National Book Festival.  Well, now that we’ve discovered them, we’re fast on our way to finishing all the Stink books.  As read alouds, they only take a couple of nights, which is even quicker than most chapter books, but will be a nice starter length when BalletBoy grows into reading chapter books on his own.  Stink is just a normal kid with a funny name.  The books are filled with cute facts and silly, simple stories about smelly sneaker contests and free candy.  Also, I appreciate that the stories aren’t completely centered around school, as so many series for this age seem to be.

The first Andrew Lost book by J.C. Greenburg found its way into my hands recently.  Andrew is an inventor who can shrink himself down and have adventures at the microscopic level.  The science of the shrinking is very Phineas and Ferb, but the science of what he sees while shrunk is more like The Magic Schoolbus.  This is a hesitant recommendation.  I read the first bit and thought the kids would really like it.  There’s a cute robot and a lot of gadgetry, but it’s also pretty educational.  However, when the husband finished it as the bedtime read aloud, it was with a lot of frustration because it ended on a cliffhanger, something I don’t really expect from books these days, even series.  When I read a little more, I was also a little disappointed by how the book seemed like it was all action and very little characterization of Andrew or his cousin, Judy.  Still, the kids may want to give them another chance.

Finally, I read the first in the Roscoe Riley Rules series by Katherine Applegate.  This is on the shorter end of chapter books.  Roscoe is a well-intentioned first grade troublemaker.  In the first volume, he glues his whole class to their chairs to help the teacher keep order and not look bad in front of the parents and the principal.  It works until all the kids have to get their pants cut off in order to stand up.  I think this would appeal to younger kids, like mine, who also like Stink.  I didn’t love it as much as the Stink books, but this was a funny, very easy to read title.  The kids especially liked the structure of the story, where Roscoe, who has already gotten in trouble for the glue incident, tells the reader he can explain it and then unfolds the rest in a flashback.  This piqued their interest and made them immediately want to hear the details.

Free Range Homeschooling

Some people know I’m a huge fan of the free range style of parenting.  If you also think that babies don’t need so much crazy gear, consider it reasonable for school age kids to run down the street to see friends on their own, and refuse to worry about the extremely remote possibility that a random stranger will kidnap your kid off the street, then this is the parenting philosophy for you too!  It’s all about fostering independence.

But wait, you say, that sounds like the antithesis of how people think of homeschooling parents!  I encountered someone just the other day who seemed to think that because I homeschooled, I must spend every waking minute keeping a watchful eye on my children.  Clearly he didn’t see this morning when my kids spent an hour watching Avatar cartoons before I even woke up.  Or this afternoon when they spent an hour… somewhere.  The basement with the Legos?  The backyard mixing “potions” in my nice glasses?  Well, they’re here now, so clearly nothing blew up.  I’m sure there are some stringently watchful homeschool parents out there somewhere.  But considering the helicopter parent trend, are they really that different from the population as a whole?  I do know many homeschoolers who have expressed to me that a desire to spend more time with their children is a primary reason for homeschooling, but wanting to spend more time with your kids is different from wanting to keep an eye on them at every moment.

For me, while I love my kids, spending a huge amount of time with them wasn’t one of my primary motives for homeschooling.  From the time that they were finally old enough, I jumped at opportunities to drop them off in classes.  They’re very comfortable with leaving me, even for strange situations, and I’ve tried to encourage that confidence in them.  I chose to homeschool for other reasons.  I believe that institutional settings aren’t usually the best learning or socializing environments.  I also find our country’s standardized test driven educational culture to be completely out of whack.  I see education as process-oriented, something that most schools don’t seem to understand at all.

However, I’ve discovered that homeschooling also gives my kids a balance that most kids these days miss out on.  They can spend a huge amount of quality time with me and the husband, have a varied and interesting slate of activities in the community and still have loads of time to play by themselves or with their friends.  They’re not quite old enough to venture far on their own, but they have the run of the house and when we go places, they can wander through playgrounds and creeks while I read a book.  I always bring a book.

I know I’m not the only one either.  The kindergarten co-op we participated in is made of homeschoolers who feel similarly.  Here’s what a typical co-op day looked like: one of the parents did an hour or two of planned activities.  Then we shoved a snack at the kids and set them loose in the house or the backyard out of our sight while the parents snacked and talked for the rest of the day.  Sure, the educational part of the day was important.  But the friendships and free social time were probably even more important.  This was also the group in which the kids went on a hike together completely by themselves.  We picked a place they knew well and couldn’t escape from because it was an island.  After a couple of misadventures, they arrived all together, all in one piece, and very proud of themselves.

Because of these experiences, I’ve realized that homeschooling makes it much easier to have free range kids.  Kids in schools are increasingly denied any free play during their days.  Even the physical education part of their day is increasingly diminished.  Because we homeschool, my kids get a lot more free play time than many other kids their age.  Unlike the school system, I’ve made that a priority for my kids.

Swinging at a huge suburban park on an afternoon when it was practically deserted.

Five Picture Books That Always Make Me Laugh

Humor is important.  And it’s difficult to craft a picture book that is amusing to adults and kids alike.  Here, in no particular order, are five that crack me up every time and amuse the kids too:

Squids Will Be Squids by Jon Sczieska and Lane Smith

Everything by Jon Sczieska is pretty funny. His most famous collaboration with Lane Smith, The Stinky Cheese Man, is probably more clever, but this one is much better for absurd, laugh out loud fun.  Each fable in the book is extremely short.  There are enough that by the time I reread the book, I’ve usually forgotten one and can be surprised by the silly moral.

Big Plans by Bob Shea and Lane Smith

I’ve got big plans, big plans, I say!  I’m laughing already.  I won’t bother to summarize the plot.  Just suffice it to say that the narrator is a little boy with big, silly plans.  This is probably my most favorite book to read aloud in the whole world.  I have actually begged my children for the opportunity to read it again.

The Day Jimmy’s Boa Ate the Wash by Trinka Hakes Noble, illustrated by Steven Kellogg

This is the story of a pet boa constrictor who gets loose on a farm, causing a chain reaction of events that would astound anyone.  It’s funny to begin with, but the humor is all in the telling.  Meggie only tells the story in little pieces, saving the most absurd bits.  When I read it aloud, it’s hard to keep ramping up the shock in the mother’s voice as she hears how things come out.

I Will Surprise My Friend by Mo Willems

All of Mo Willems’s work is pretty funny.  For a long time, I thought he could never top There is a Bird on Your Head. Then came the day that the kids and I spotted a new Elephant and Piggie book in the library.  I pulled it out and we curled up in a corner to read it.  By the end, I was literally crying with laughter and the kids cried, “Again!”  Just so you know, I never, ever read books twice in a row.  My kids rarely ask for immediate rereads anyway.  But this time they asked and I said yes and laughed nearly as hard the second time around.

The Wuggie Norple Story by Daniel Pinkwater, illustrated by Tomie DePaola

This is one of the strangest children’s books ever written.  Actually, you could probably start any review of a Daniel Pinkwater book with that sentence.  It’s the story of a cat that grows to an enormous size that no one except the father seems to recognize.  Most of the humor is in the bizarre names that Daniel Pinkwater has given every character.  That, and the fact that all they eat is onions.  You have to have a certain sense of humor to appreciate this one, but I apparently have that sense of humor and I appreciate it very much.  Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure it’s out of print so maybe I’m one of the few.

Death Warriors

I just finished Francisco X. Stork’s (by the way, doesn’t he have an awesome name?) book, The Last Summer of the Death Warriors.  I got excited when I spotted this one in the bookstore, in part because I really enjoyed Marcelo in the Real World (which made many a blog and critic’s top ten YA lists last year) and in part because it had such great cover design.  Yes, I do judge books by their covers.

I wasn’t disappointed.  Yet again, Stork has crafted a well-told tale that is both entertaining and thought provoking.  The main character, Pancho, is grieving for the loss of his sister and father when he goes to live at an orphanage.  There, he meets D.Q., who has terminal cancer.  D.Q. immediately insists that Pancho become his helper as he enters a new stage in his treatment.  At first, Pancho is too distracted by thoughts of revenge on the person he believes was responsible for his sister’s death.  As time goes on, D.Q. and his “death warrior” philosophy begin to give him something else beyond his anger.  The questions that D.Q. deals with as he faces death give the reader a lot to think about.  The book’s structure is also satisfying.  D.Q. wants desperately to live while Pancho, in his depression, is ready to throw his life away.  This book deals with different issues than Stork’s previous young adult novel, Marcelo in the Real World. However, in both books, he has created a teenage boy on the brink of adulthood who begins the novel with a single minded pursuit of a goal.  Only by breaking out of that mindset and letting the world in can each character grow.  While this is a YA novel, I think it’s one that could also be enjoyed by adults.

Summer Reading

Summer reading time!  The hilarious part of this is that what we’re doing for “summer reading” is pretty much the exact same thing we do all the time.  We check out books and write down what we read in reading journals.  I wish I could have grown up like that.  I don’t remember there being “summer reading” when I was kid, but I do remember that I got to read more in the summer because teachers weren’t forever taking my books away or giving me worksheets that interfered with my reading time.  However, I just told them it was “summer reading” and the kids got excited.  Maybe all some projects need is a catchy title.

This year, the library didn’t issue the kids cute stationary to record all the books they read, so I made some and they immediately dove in.  I was especially excited that Mushroom pulled out a book from his pile on the first day after we got them from the library.  He’s my slower to read kid but I think he’s going to turn out to be my lifelong reader.

Another cool change to this year’s library program is that they’ve asked the kids to make their own goals with reading.  If they meet their goals, then they can come get a little prize from the treasure chest.  I’m all about goal setting.  We do goal setting every two months when we update homeschool portfolios.  The kids have to set their own goals, and while the goals often revolve around achieving a certain score on some Wii game, they also usually throw something really academic and often unexpected to me in there.  Then they take it pretty seriously.  They take everything about portfolios pretty seriously though.

I have more mixed feelings about the whole rewards issue – probably too many to put in a quick post about summer reading.  I try to avoid them myself, but I don’t have a strong problem with other people giving them to my kids.  Still, I didn’t tell them about any of the summer reading programs offered by Pizza Hut or Barnes and Noble or anywhere else.  If the little rubber ducks and bracelets offered by the DC Library are enough, then I’m not questioning that.

Carnival of Homeschooling

The new Carnival of Homeschooling is up at Homeschooled Twins.  For anyone unfamiliar, this is a weekly blog post that summarizes and links to lots of other blogs.  It roams around from blog to blog.  I have a post in the current one.  I’ve not read them all yet, but it seems there are a bunch of other good ones as well.  In the past, I’ve found some good homeschool blogs this way.

Gender and Kids

This is a topic that’s been on my mind a good bit lately.  The other day, at our corner park, a couple of little girls berated my son for several minutes because they simply didn’t believe him when he said he was a boy.  “Are you sure?” one of them asked repeatedly.  I wanted to go over there and point out that he had a penis.  BalletBoy, in his infinite sweetness, just chewed his long hair and looked at them like they were on some other planet, which to him, I suppose they were.  However, he’s been getting it from the kids in T-Ball as well.  And he’s been getting it out in the world more and more.  I notice that he’s either grown extra oblivious to people calling him a girl or weary with correcting people because I rarely hear him even bother anymore.  If he’s pressed on it, he simply says, “I just like girls more than boys.”

I think that nowadays, in the homes of white, well-educated, middle class families, it’s pretty common to let toddlers and preschoolers play dress up in their sisters’ princess costumes.  I think it’s even pretty common to let them dress themselves however they wish, and that includes little pink dresses.  I know that’s not everywhere, but among the people I know, it was pretty common to see little boys, especially little brothers, in dresses, with genuinely nonchalant parents who know that a dress doesn’t make their sons girls any more than a superhero cape gives them the ability to fly.

But then most of those kids head off to school, where gender conformity is enforced through peer pressure, especially for boys.  The husband and I have often lamented that while there are plenty tomboy role models in literature and TV for girls, there’s not even an equivalent word for boys who like stereotypical girl things.  Thankfully, BalletBoy isn’t headed off to school any time in the near future, because if he did, I’m sure his hot pink Keens, purple T-shirts, and maybe even his love of ballet would all go the way of the dodo.  Kids would tell him there was something wrong with the things that he’s chosen to make up his sense of self.  He would begin to believe that he couldn’t love pink or needed to get his long hair cut.  He would be changed.  As it is, homeschooling is protecting him from that, at least until he gets some maturity and has to deal with that mysterious animal called the “real world” more.  Almost none of my sons’ playmates have ever even been to school.  They think BalletBoy’s look is totally normal because they have known him for ages and see him as an individual.  While they might exert peer pressure in some ways, they’re mostly pretty positive ones, encouraging the each other to play together, to share, not to be mean.

Having a son, especially a twin, who doesn’t conform to gender stereotypes has been an eye-opening experience for me as a parent.  For one thing, it makes me furious every time I hear a parent say something like, “I always thought it was how they were raised, but then I had my son and he only wants to play with trucks and my daughter just loves all that Disney princess stuff no matter how I discourage her, so I guess it’s all just hard wired into them!”  And trust me, I’ve heard that a lot since becoming a parent.  I don’t think there’s anything wrong with how my kids are “wired” and I think it shows that gender simply isn’t the only determinant of likes and dislikes in life.  My kids like a lot of “boy” things, but they also love their baby dolls and they used to love their play kitchen.  I’m sure some boys are born with some innate desire to push wheeled toys around, but I’m also sure that’s not every single one because both BalletBoy and Mushroom seem rank toy cars near the bottom of the toy ladder.  They like building materials a lot more.  And so did I when I was their age.

Second, watching how people react to BalletBoy shows me how completely we rely on the most crude external clues to inform our understanding of gender.  He has long hair and pink shoes, therefore, people assume that he’s a girl.  Never mind that he looks identical to his twin brother.  One look at the hair and even though he’s in a baseball shirt and a pair of jeans and their opinion is formed.  I don’t mind that and I don’t fault them for it.  But I’ve realized that our expectations of children fitting into gender stereotypes are even more set than when we look at adults.  I think this is because we expect adults to make choices about their appearance, but many people don’t see children as being capable of controlling their own appearance or making those kinds of decisions.  I think our society expects children to be very simple in every possible way, not fully fleshed out individuals, and that absolutely includes our ideas about gender.

Finally, let me just say that I have almost no doubt that my son’s propensity for pink and frills is more about defining his identity as separate from his brother’s than anything else.  Yes, he does actually like flowery things and ballet and the color purple.  He gets all doe eyed at me when I put on a fancy dress because he thinks it’s so amazing.  But he also has claimed these things very clearly as his own, not his twin’s.  My two boys share a lot, but this is one way that I’ve seen them carve out separate space.  You should have seen the look of relief they both gave me when I suggested to them more than two years ago that they didn’t have to have the same haircut.  BalletBoy decided to leave his long, thus heading down a path that has eventually led us to his borderline heavy metal length hair today.

It's not girl hair, it's rock star hair.

In Praise of Cynthia Rylant

Sure, I had heard of Cynthia Rylant before BalletBoy dove into the early readers, but I never really appreciated her work.  Now I’m in love with it.  Sometimes, I get this silly idea in my head that nothing new happened in early readers between the early classics of the 1950’s and 60’s and the moment when Mo Willems thought, what if a pig and an elephant were best friends?  But it’s not true!  In 1987, years before she won the Newbery Award for Missing May, Cynthia Rylant began her series of books about a boy and his enormous, lovable dog and they’re some of the best early readers out there.

It’s easy to miss them today in bookstores, where early readers are dominated by poorly constructed books about licensed Disney and Nickelodeon characters, but if you look at the hardcover early readers section in our library, Cynthia Rylant gets something near a full shelf all to herself, maybe a good eighth of the whole section just for her books.  After creating Henry and Mudge, she went on to make Mr. Putter and Tabby, Poppleton and the High Rise Private Eyes.  Now there is also a somewhat new spinoff series to Henry and Mudge called Annie and Snowball.  My favorite is Poppleton, in part because I love Mark Teague’s illustrations and each book contains several little stories, each about the right length for BalletBoy in one sitting.  I remember the first time we read the story of Poppleton being sick and making a mess as he sneezed.  I broke out in peels of laughter at the end of the tale.  However, all these books are great, each in their own way.  She has even somehow made the tribulations of an elderly man with a cat into something compelling for 5 year-olds.  And most importantly in the world of early readers, her books tell proper stories with proper plots.  They know that the readers are young and have a small vocabulary, but still deserve a funny, well-crafted tale.

Summerschooling the Movies

We’re going to continue with several “school” things over the summer.  In particular, there’s summer reading through the DC library.  Last year, when BalletBoy was just beginning to sound out words, he scored a large number of special trinkets through the DC Library’s program.  However, with trips and summer camps interspersing our days, we’re taking a break from most of our normal routine beginning right about now.  I’m pretty happy to have that break and I’m sure the kids are too.  Not to mention all the extra awesome writing time I’ll get during summer camp time!

But I thought we needed a summerschooling topic, so I suggested a few to the kids and they picked film as something they’d like to learn more about.  So whenever we have a little time, here’s what I’ve designed for us.

We’re starting off by going to the Helios exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery.  This exhibit explores the work of Eadweard Muybridge, who was a very early pioneer photographer in moving images.  He’s most famous for the series of photos below of how a horse moves.

Drawing from that, I’m hoping we’ll make flipbooks and maybe take photos to make a photo-based flipbook.  Speaking of which, I just ordered the book Movie Science: 40 Mind-Expanding, Reality-Bending, Star-Struck Activities for Kids by Jim Wiese, so I’m hoping that will have even more fun activities for us to do when thinking about movies over the next couple months.  And speaking of books, there’s also the book Lights, Camera, Action by Gail Gibbons.  I’m hoping to find a few more fun titles to read about movies for summerschooling.

I hope that this will be a little bit of the science of movies, a little bit of art and a little bit of culture.  Classic films are cultural reference points the same way that plays, music, and other works of art are.  However, I’m also hoping this unit will add a little more media literacy to my kids’ lives.  We already talk about commercials and the way that things are sold.  However, I think there’s more to media literacy than that.  I’m hoping to work on Mushroom and BalletBoy’s ability to talk about how moving images, music and story can make us feel certain ways and how that works.

Last, but not least, the movies themselves!  I think watching movies will be perfect for lazy, hot summer afternoons.  Here’s what I’ve got in mind so far:

• Some of the first films, such as Georges Melies’s A Trip to the Moon
• Safety Last with Harold Lloyd
• Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights
• The Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup
• The Wizard of Oz
• Fantasia
• Singing in the Rain

I’d also like to add a western.  You always have to have a western!  Plus, we may jump ahead and do some more recent classics, like E.T. and The Princess Bride.  I’d love to do this again in a few years, when they’d be old enough to appreciate a whole different level of storytelling and dramatic tension.  Right now, I think movies like To Kill a Mockingbird will be a little too complex and Raiders of the Lost Ark a little too scary.  But in a couple of years…

The Young Wizards Go to Mars

Some series are well-mapped out, time limited sorts of things, like Harry Potter or His Dark Materials.  Others begin and become an author’s bread and butter then never, ever end, like The Magic Treehouse.  And then there’s a strange third way, the series that seems to add another volume at random intervals, like Diane Duane’s Young Wizards.

I’m a huge fan of this young adult series, but it hasn’t fully satisfied me in the last few books.  However, diving back into the storyline in A Wizard of Mars, I was reminded how much I love the main characters, Nita and Kit.  The world of the books, with its strange melding of magic and theoretical physics and broad themes about good and evil is a complex and interesting one.  Others have compared them to Madeline L’Engle’s Wrinkle in Time, which is a flattering but fair comparison in my opinion.

This book started very slow and I felt like in the opening chapters Diane Duane had just brought back every character from the previous volumes to satisfy fan interest, which annoyed me.  There were also several storylines and themes that didn’t fully pay off for me.  Both Nita and Kit face issues at home with their families that aren’t resolved.  A subplot about Nita’s sister, Dairine, seems to be nothing more than a dead end or a buildup for a future book.  Speaking of sisters, one wonders if the whole deal with Kit’s sister, Carmela, will ever get explained.  Recurring mentions and thoughts about gender differences feed into the larger plot but also don’t fully get explored.

But despite any issues, the action picked up midway through when the focus went squarely back to Nita and Kit and the book became a very quick read.  I like how the issues Kit and Nita face are slowly becoming less black and white as they age from book to book, as well as more about working with others in the larger world.  The plot cleverly explores all our stereotypes about Mars.  And finally, I think anyone who has enjoyed this series will be pleased with the ending.  It’s not the classic that the first book, If You Want to Be a Wizard, is, but it’s a strong entry into the series.