Beach Baby

After a fancy-restaurant dinner on my seventeenth birthday, we decided on the spur of the moment to go to the beach. It was already dark and none of us was dressed in beachwear, but we went anyway on that gorgeous summer night and walked on the sand in our stockinged feet. It was great and a favorite memory. And one of the best things about living in Southern California--the beach is just a breath and a wild hair away. It becomes part of your world, your culture, even your blood. What a great way to grow up. But, unfortunately, not one I’ve shared with my kids. All of my children except Keilana were born in Northern California, and she was young enough when we relocated that she doesn’t have any memories of living below Santa Barbara (which, in my opinion, is the official dividing line between north and south). So, their visits to the oceanside have been few and far between. It almost broke my heart the first time five year-old Connor sputtered up from a wave yelling, “Someone put salt in here!” As if he had just discovered that. Which he had. And Scarlett’s first impression of the beach as a toddler last summer was a definitive “No, thank you!” She really hated the experience, was freaked out and scared. How can these be my kids? In Margret and H.A. Rey’s Curious George Goes to the Beach, our favorite monkey spends a day in the sand and surf. Heaven.

http://www.amazon.com/Curious-George-Goes-Beach-Rey/dp/0395978386

http://thereycenter.org/Welcome.html

Weather Report

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m a So Cal girl, born and bred, so warm weather is important for my psyche. I love New York, no cliché, I really do, but I couldn’t live there in January. I think Chicago is one of the most vibrant cities I’ve ever been in, but one big storm and I’d be outta there. I imagine myself as one of those gaudy, giant-hat-wearing biddies on the beach someday. If I could live anywhere, it wouldn’t be a place where it snows--except maybe a place where it snows once in a hundred years and the news makes the front page of the newspaper. That would be acceptable. I know that those of us who love the sun are legion (Are there any songs about Minnesota girls? Are postage stamp-sized pieces of property a million dollars in Iowa?), but, to my surprise, we aren’t the only game in town. And this time of year always reminds me of that with people glorifying snow, traveling to snow, and lamenting the lack of snow. I still find the snow fixation a bit mystifying--no airport was ever closed for too much nice weather and no car ever slid on patches of sun--but there are diehards who find the benefits outweigh the negatives. Apparently, they’ve got company. In Margaret and H.A. Rey’s Curious George In The Snow, the monkey who’s game for anything goes ape for the white stuff. What does he know? He’s a monkey.

http://www.amazon.com/Curious-George-Snow-H-Rey/dp/039591907X

http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/features/cgsite/history.shtml

Service Credit

It may not seem so to our students, but those of us who teach are always trying to update and improve our classes. We spend an inordinate amount of time analyzing what went well, dissecting what went awry, and debriefing ourselves for next time. Most of this is to reach our students more fully, but a tiny bit is to keep ourselves from going batty with boredom at the repetition that happens so easily (and necessarily) in education. I teach four sessions a year of the same class and have as many as three sections in a session. That’s a lot of sameness. So, I try every semester to make the course a little different than the previous semester. With varied levels of success. But some things I will always keep because I have seen their impact. One of these keepers is the Community Activity my Small Group Discussion students are required to complete. As a group, they must “identify a need in the community and do something to fill that need.” They are given fairly broad leeway with the definitions of “community,” “need,” and “do something,” so I get to see a range of projects each time--with a crowd favorite being throwing 60 lb. hunks of meat to the tigers living at the local wild animal rescue, the Barry R. Kirshner Wildlife Foundation. They love that stuff. And so does the little guy in Margret and H.A. Rey’s Curious George Feeds the Animals. Sometimes community service is really cool.

http://www.amazon.com/Curious-George-Feeds-Animals-ebook/dp/B002JM0X8G

http://reyfriends.net/margretandharey/

I Scream, You Scream...

An advantage to having significantly older siblings is getting taught a host of things you would never learn otherwise. Being the oldest child, I never fully realized this until I watched my own children pass on useful knowledge to the next in line--including the idea that canned whip cream sprayed directly into your mouth tastes better. Nick says we are turning Scarlett into a baby diabetic but really it just seems like we are teaching her to be precocious about the finer things in life, like realizing cookies are best in dough form, you should lick the beater when someone makes brownies, and, most of all, whip cream does taste better from the can. I knew Scarlett would love to see one of her favorite characters getting sweet treats in Curious George Goes To An Ice Cream Shop by Margret and H.A. Rey because it shows George with an enormous sundae he makes himself when the Man With the Big Yellow Hat leaves an inquisitive monkey to his own devices with barrels of ice cream and shelves of sundae fixin’s. Frankly, I think George is less “curious” and more “badly behaved," but he can sling a mean scoop. The whole time we were reading, Scarlett kept saying, “yummy,” which is exactly what I was thinking. Never mind the flagrant health code violation of having a naughty monkey serve your ice cream, that stuff looked like a twenty-scoop, whip cream-covered, bananas peeking out, cherry on top party waiting to happen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._A._Rey

http://www.amazon.com/Curious-George-Goes-Cream-Shop/dp/0395519373