The Cow Says, "Moo!"

How did we decide what is important for babies to know? And who decided it? I know it wasn’t me, and I know it wasn’t recently because my parenting of toddlers has spanned a generation and the stuff we taught when Keilana was little is still on the kid menu today. Some of the things make sense--colors, letters, numbers--but others leave a little more mystery to be explained. For instance, why are dinosaurs such a popular small people topic? I get cuddly things like teddy bears and fuzzy blankies, but when did sauruses of all kinds--prickly, spiny, scaly--become the go-to place for kids’ books? And why things that babies could never wrap their heads around or very few people really use anymore--like trains? Is it just because they fascinate us? Like I said, strange choices. But perhaps one of the most frequently occurring, but mystifying, topics that every baby in the know must know is animal sounds. What possible use could a baby, any baby anywhere, have for knowing what an elephant “says”? Or a goat? Or, heck, even a cat or a cow? But learn them they do and we measure how well things are going in baby learning land by how many they know and when. It’s funny, even the heavy hitters are in on the plot. In Eric Carle’s My Very First Book of Animal Sounds, all the regulars are present and accounted for. And guess who got the coveted cover shot? Yep, you guessed it--the elephant.

http://www.amazon.com/Very-First-Book-Animal-Sounds/dp/0399246487

http://www.eric-carle.com/home.html

Stick Around Awhile

Did you know a million Earths could fit in our sun? Did you know that, since atoms are mostly space, if a cathedral-sized model was made of an atom, the nucleus would be a fly in the middle? I’m sure I learned either these or similar facts as a junior high school student, but I didn’t really take note of the information until lately when I spent the semester working with a student in Physical Science. This school year we’ve been watching an astrophysics series produced by NOVA. With stellar (no pun intended) production value and fascinating Generation Tech-friendly graphics, it has been riveting. For me. Today’s jaded eight-grader basically embraces one guiding principle: If I can’t text to it or with it, why do I care? So, we all sat having the universe passionately explained to us while the only person in the room listening was the nerdy old lady. Every day I would come home with some new tidbit captivating or astounding me. And the one that most knocked my socks off was the theory that 99% of all species ever having existed on Earth are now extinct. Ninety-nine percent. Obviously, that means everything in the world now--plants, animals, insects, humans--comprises only 1% of the sum total of everything that ever was. Mind-boggling. Maybe Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle wrote Panda Bear, Panda Bear, What Do You See? about a child dreaming of endangered animals because they are NOVA fans. Or maybe they are just not-going-extinct fans.

P.S. Happy Birth Day, Posey Emmaline! Welcome!

http://www.amazon.com/Panda-Bear-What-You-See/dp/0805017585

http://www2.scholastic.com/browse/collection.jsp?id=387

http://www.carolhurst.com/newsletters/24dnewsletters.html

Visionary

Do you ever get asked those impossible choice questions some people live for? You know, the ones like which one of your children you would save if you had to choose or if you would flip the switch that would keep a full train from plunging into a canyon but kill your only son who had wandered onto the track. Those impossible questions. Maybe people just like to see me squirm because I seem to get that type of conundrum presented to me all the time. Most of the questions have varied and morphed over time but one has remained constant: Would you rather lose your sight or lose your hearing? Of course, the real answer is neither, thank you, but the point of these dumb dilemmas is to force you to make a choice. So, for me, the answer has always been clear. If I couldn’t see--to read, to recognize loved ones, to move about independently--my life would be qualitatively fractured beyond repair. I would have to preserve my sight, but I say that realizing how much I would lose if I couldn’t hear. Singing and dancing as I know them would be gone. I couldn’t gauge the tone of sadness or joy in voices I love. And a speech teacher who can’t hear speeches…But that would still be my choice. Maybe Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle’s arctic protagonist in Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear? would choose differently. Snow is snow is snow, after all.

http://www.amazon.com/Polar-Bear-What-Brown-Friends/dp/0805053883

http://www.teachingk-8.com/archives/celebrations_in_reading_and_writing/remembering_bill_martin_jr_by_maryann_manning.html

http://ericcarleblog.blogspot.com/

Too Much Of A Good Thing

I really, really, really loved angel food cake. It was a rarity in our house because my mom was a healthfood spaz, but it did show up at Easter. I’m not sure what the celebration of the Resurrection has to do with fluffy sponge cake, but I was glad somebody thought of it. Coincidentally, back before VCRs (yes, there was such a time), Easter was also the one time in the year when you could see “Sound of Music” because they played it on network television. And if there was one thing I loved as much as angel food cake, it was movies about song triumphing over the Nazis. Life was good. Until that year. The year when what we will refer to as “the incident” occurred. The family had settled down with our reasonably-sized slices of sponge cake and watched goatherds and brown paper packages tied up with string until bedtime. Sounds nice, right? It was until I ruined it. Just before bed, I snuck in and cut myself a ridiculously giant slab of angel food cake for a secret midnight snack. Which I gobbled down in its entirety long before the clock struck twelve. And then it proceeded to make several violent reappearances all night. I couldn’t eat angel food cake for years after that and “Sound of Music” is still a bit tainted. The voracious snake in Richard Buckley and Eric Carle’s The Greedy Python shows the same lack of restraint. And he learns his lesson, too.

http://www.amazon.com/Greedy-Python-Richard-Buckley/dp/0689820593

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Carle

Feed Me, Scarlett!

Scarlett must be getting ready to grow. Last night she ate veggie tamales and cotton candy from the Farmer’s Market, a can of corn, a peanut butter sandwich in the high chair, strawberries from Trader Joe’s, taco salad with Sissy, Cheerios out of a discarded baggie found at the bottom of the diaper bag, and the rest of a bowl of popcorn left on the couch. And that’s the stuff I know about. I’m telling you, a growth spurt of epic proportions must be around the corner. And it makes sense--she’ll never grow more rapidly in less time. But, if you are what you eat, Scarlett is Hometown Buffet for stoned toddlers. I know how she feels, the same thing happens to me every day but since I don’t have a sonic boom-fast metabolism, the results are much different. She gets the energy and fuel she needs to keep building all her parts while I get more rubber for the handy spare tire I’ve been nurturing for some time now. Same process, different results. Master storyteller Eric Carle is in touch with the voracious appetite crowd in his stuff-your-face tale The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Said caterpillar starts out as a tiny little egg on page one and, after emerging, eats his way through the next ten pages--no joke, there are holes in the pages, fer cryin’ out loud. In the end, nature follows its course and all that eating produces a gorgeous butterfly. I hope that only happens to caterpillars.

http://www.amazon.com/Very-Hungry-Caterpillar-Eric-Carle/dp/0399226907


http://www.eric-carle.com/home.html