Thimble Summer

Here's an oldie but a goodie.  I found a practically pristine copy on my shelves and decided I'd better read it before weeding.  Turns out I'll keep it and recommend it to a few kids to see if they get as much out of it as I did.  This will be fore those who love outdoorsy girls and historical fiction. Those who love Charlotte's Web and the Little House books will love this.  It wasn't historical fiction when it was written back in 1938, but now it sure is.

It has great names.  Garnet, Citronella, etc.  It has great exclamations: "Land!"

It's not plot heavy, but character and place rich.  A small town farm girl in the 30s is worried about the drought affecting the farm.  She finds a shiny silver thimble. Rains come, an interesting boy joins the farm, she briefly runs away and has an adventure.  A pig she raised wins a prize at a local fair.  She decides this will always be remembered as "the thimble summer."

You get a good feel for the writing in the first chapter.  It begins with a great description of the hot, dry weather, still as a drum.  The tension and worry of this state of affairs for the farm family is palpable, the the release comes as a thunderstorm rolls in, banging the like a drum and releasing all the tension.

Garnet is drawn as a pretty, wispy blonde 12-year old but is described as someone who prefers to be barefoot and loves running and playing in the mud and has a good old time.  The weird thing is that she's always referring to her friend Citronella as "fat" but she's drawn as just not as wispy as Garnet.  I'd think it was a problem of interpretation of the illustrator if the author wasn't the illustrator herself and was actually an illustrator before she was an author.

But that's a minor quibble.  This is a well written book. I'll definitely be trying to breathe back some life into it as far as my own collection goes.

Oh, Travis is making his own covers for past Newbery winners and came up with this for Thimble Summer. I think I'd go more for a focus on the thimble or the bare feet than the pig, but what do I know?

Overnight Zoo Field Trip

So yeah, I spent the night at the Altanta Zoo Tuesday night as a chaperone for my daughter's 2nd grade class field trip.  But it's a big school.  There are nine 2nd grade classes.  Three of them went Tuesday night and the rest were doing it Wednesday.

It was wonderful and crazy.  So you get there, dump you stuff in this big room, then head into an auditorium where they lay out the rules for the kiddos.  The kid I'm sitting next to?  Lost his tooth right there.

Then we split up and our class went into tis room where our guide brought us different creatures to talk about and touch including a six foot python that used it's tail to try and pickpocket her radio.

After some other activities we hiked out at night and saw the Komono dragon, then up to the Reptile house.  Each of the kids were given little squeeze lights of different colors, the lights were left off and they were let loose inside.  It was wonderfully controlled mayhem with these kids seeing all these freaky snakes and snapping turtles being much more active (and creepier) by the glow of little quivering lights.

Then the highlight of the evening, off to the kitchen where the "food" is prepared for the animals.  I'm not going to go into detail on this.  It was awesome.  You should go.

Then we crashed in that huge room with sleeping bags.  I had a little camping pad under mine and smirked at the adults who had gone all out and brought air mattresses. How bourgeois, I thought to myself.  Next morning?  Wished I had one of those dang things!  But it wasn't like I was getting much sleep with the adults snoring and the little kid away-from home nightmares.

How good is my daughter's 2nd grade teacher?  My little friend was freaked to find the tooth fairy had left him a dollar.  At the zoo!  Wow.

Wednesday was the best.  That's the reason to do this trip. You get to run around the zoo with a knowledgeable guide and no massive hoards.  They answer all your questions and, even better, the animals are being fed and very awake and active (except for that lion who was up roaring at night, he was crashed out).

Some hilarious bits:  That lion was spreadeagled with his, um, boy parts getting happily aired out.  One of the kids said, "That's a boy lion!"  The guide smirked, "Clearly."  The kid: "Ya know how I can tell?  Because of his mane!"  Oh. Yeah. That too.

The rhino backed up to a large flat rock and let go an impressive jet of urine.  Guide: "That's how they mark their territory.  That's his rock."  Me: "He can have it!"

A gorilla decided to vigorously scratch his ass. Kids: "Ewww!  Why is he doing that?"  Guide: "It itches."

Guide at the Kangaroo pen: "These are all females with our one intact male." Me: "Intact?"  Guide: "I'm just going to leave it at that."

Fun times!

It's a great program, our guide couldn't have been better and the kids reportedly remember it forever.  Totally worth it.

Atlanta Zoo NightCrawler Program

(Oh, and that picture is one of my many from the trip. It's of the Red Panda which isn't really red or a panda.)

Inventory, Day Two plus

It went better than I expected.  We finished Tuesday afternoon.  Then I printed out the list of "Lost" and "Unaccounted for" books.  Then I called my mentor to see how bad that was.  "That's the first question everyone wants to know," she laughed.  But yes, my numbers were apparently in the normal range so nothing too drastic to worry about.

One thing I learned is that with the software today you can still have circulation going while you do inventory.  We didn't just because it seemed like a good idea to have everything frozen where it was as we did it, but it's good to know we don't have to close up shop.

Testing week seemed a good time to do it.  Some schools do it on parent/teacher conference days because the school closes early for two days and there's little activity.  One intrepid librarian I know says came in on a Saturday since she needed to make up Snow Day hours anyway and that it was nice to do at least part of it in the quiet of a closed building with no interruptions.  Hmmm.  That's a good idea...

Now I need to go have a few chats with teachers who don't think checking out professional materials and videos seems to be necessary...

A Smaller Wireless Device...

(via lookatthisfrakkinggeekster)

Inventory, Day One

Yesterday was the first day of my first inventory.  Technical glitches and frustration (for me) was high), but at the end of the day we were more than 60% finished (according to the software) so I can't complain.

I got everything set up and my clerk and I were happily scanning books, then our Super Mega Awesome Volunteer showed up.  I let her take over my station and went to get the laptop out of the broadcast room.  For some reason it was having technical difficulties.  After many trips to the tech guy's office and over and hour of time, I finally got it going.  Problem was, my computer (the one the volunteer was using) wasn't making the satisfying "ba-dink" noise after each scan so she was having to eyeball each one to make sure it took.  So we traded computers so she could have the satisfying "ba-dink" and I could go twiddle with mine.  I never could get that sound working so just eyeballed it.

But then the wireless kept kicking hers off about every ten minutes or so and I'd have to wander over and log her back in.  Extremely annoying but in the interest of time I decided that was better than bringing the tech guy back into this.

The reason we chose this week to do inventory was that it's the big state test for our 3rd-5th graders and the schedule is all wonky so it was easy to shut down circulation for a few days.  I could handle the technical difficulties, but then a whole second grade class came in to use the computers.  I told them that was fine but we couldn't help them because we were doing inventory.  The teacher said that was okay, she was just waiting on the computer lab guy to come show them what they're supposed to do.

Well, the computer lab guy had all the second grades around the building in different labs and was setting each one up on something.  Apparently we were last because my clerk had to spend 40 minutes logging these kids into computers and playing "Simon Says" with them before the guy came in to set them up on whatever program they were using.

And THEN they brought a 3rd grader down who couldn't test that day because she had to do it one-one-one and they wouldn't have that set up until tomorrow.  They sent her down with a book and that's it.  I told her we were busy and behind so she could goof on on computers or read but to leave us alone.  I soon figured out why she needed to be tested one-on-one.  She has the attention of a Tsetse Fly.  She followed me around yammering and pulling books of shelves and generally driving me nuts.  Finally I put on my headphones and gave her blank paper and markers to play with and that quieted her down some.  When the clerk and volunteer saw me with the headphones they just about lost it.

But they did not blame me.  No, not one bit.

Now for Day Two!

Hope we finish with the scanning because I have to take tomorrow off.  I'm one of the chaperone's on my daughters class overnight field trip to the Atlanta Zoo.  So yeah, I'm taking a day tomorrow.  The sub can help the clerk run around and look for missing books.  I'll be back in on Thursday to see what's what.

Friday Links

The first step to being a good critical thinker is seeing if you are wrong.  Kathryn Shultz, author of Being Wrong, now has a great TED talk on this as well.  Well, I thought it was pretty good.  But, you know,  I could very well be wrong about that.

Roger Ebert had a great essay on the idea of being "well-read."  It led to another essay by NPR's Linda Holmes,  The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We're All Going To Miss Almost Everything.

And I've heard a lot about the Khan Academy, but only recently started watching some of the videos.  Great stuff and worth sharing!

Laura Miller at Salon points out that while the Three Cups of Tea guy may be a liar, it's really the cheating that sucks more.

And does anyone have experience with Jump Math?  It sounds very intriguing. I'm intrigued!

I don't know, I might NEED a Stupendous Ball, Elmo...

Reading Challenge...Westerns? Yee-Ha!

Yessirree, I'm finally doing a reading challenge.  I kinda-sorta did C.B.'s TBR Dare in that I've made a commitment to read a physical book off of my TBR pile between every Kindle book I purchase (to assuage the guilt).

But this one is great.  I really only have to read one book, so it's not much of a challenge, it gets me (slightly) out of my comfort zone, but allows me to read something I've been curious about but never really explored (other than in the movies).

And it'll make my Daddy happy.  He's a big Westrern fan.  He loves every movie starring John Wayne and Clint Eastwood and read a pile of Zane Grey's and Louis L'Amour's back in the day.  I did skim through L'Amour's Education of a Wandering Man once (which isn't very good, I think it was something unfinished his family published after his death) and was impressed with his autodidacticism and pure, unalloyed love of books and history.  Over the last holiday break I was lucky enough to take my Ma and Pa to the moving picture show to see the new True Grit which was a treat for all.

The only Western I've read would not be something Daddy would enjoy (but I'll bet C.B. would).  It was a book I read years back called The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon by Tom Spanbauer.  It was about a bisexual, biracial (half Indian, half White) male prostitute in 1880s Idaho.  Now that was a story!

For this challenge I think I'm going to go with something by Elmore Leonard.  He's known for his crime novels now, but started out writing Westerns.  Some great Western movies have been based on his work including 3:10 to Yuma and Hombre.  After reading his 1930s-era novel The Hot Kid, I knew at some point I'd want to try one of his early Western books.  It has that same feel.

If you want to saddle up for this but don't know what to read, C.B. has you covered.  He recommends Deadwood by the blisteringly talented Pete Dexter.  Which I'll definitely add to my TBR pile (I loved Paris Trout).

Yippie Ki-Yay, mofos!

The Hop-a-Long, Git-a-Long, Read-a-Long Western Challenge

Morning Linkage

Jenny, one of the most insightful classroom teacher bloggers you'll ever read at Elementary, My Dear, or Far From It generously opened up her classroom for this series of short videos on how she is using VoiceThread with her first graders!  Wow.

When I used to run the children's section at a big box bookstore I would often have parents come in and actually consider dropping eighty to a hundred bucks on nonfiction books on like Lewis and Clark for a report their kid had to do over the weekend.  I'd ask, um, what about the public library? Often they would smack themselves on the forehead V-8 style.  I don't know what it is about people forgetting about the public library, but Linda Homes over at NPRs Monkey See blog has a great post up about rediscovering the joys of the library.

Roger Ebert has really found his writing voice since losing his physical one.  Here's a TED talk that was just released about his experiences.  He "talks" about how social media has saved his sanity because it's a kind of conversation he can still participate in.  He has even "met" many other disabled people who connect this way. He mentions one blog in particular that if you can laugh with a politically incorrect disabled person that calls his blog Smart Ass Cripple, than you'll love it. Enjoy!

And did you see that if you don't mind ads on your screensavers, you can now get a Kindle for $114!?  I read a theory online (sorry, didn't keep the link) that if their price decreases keep going the way they have since the Kindle first debuted that it'll be basically free with some bundled package of ebooks or Amazon Prime by November.  Nothing surprises me anymore.

Check out the "News & Blogs" stuff I share in the right column for more continually updated fun and interesting links.

Stiff

I've had this on my TBR pile for a while.  I don't know what took me so long to read it.  It's right up my alley.  I love a breezy, fun non-fiction book in which the author is just indulging in satisfying her curiosity and taking us along for the ride.

Of course, Mary Roach was curious about what happens to dead bodies after they are donated to science so it's probably an either love it or hate it proposition as to whether you want to read this.

Subject matter aside, I love her style and will be reading her other books for sure. She does for scientific curiosity (and curiosities) what Sara Vowell does for American history.

Now I know you're wondering about the mix of her funny writing and the subject matter of dead people.  Is she disrespectful?  I didn't think so.  She often talked about if she would be comfortable or not either being the subject or having a family member be the subject of any given experiment.  She also discusses the great lengths many of the researchers go to keep everything as dignified as possible.

Then of course, beyond the humor and the interesting subject matter there's the scientific knowledge we're continually gaining from our dead fellow humans.  It's all amazing and worthwhile.  Safer car crashes, better body armor, better footwear for land mine sweepers, along with much, much more.

You don't have to donate your body to science, of course.  I'd be happy to, but that's an entirely personal decision.  I do, however, heartily wish everyone was at least an organ donor as a matter of course.  There's really no good reason not to and it's so needed.

Morning Linkage

Tennessee doomed?: Antievolution bill passes in the house; Creationists notch big win in TN

Lost Dr. Seuss books to be published!

Richard Peck is awesome.  Big Kahuna Round of the battle of the books.

Global warming skeptic changes his tune - by doing the science himself: I think my favorite part of this story is  that this study was funded by the Koch brothers.  Heh, heh.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

You've undoubtedly heard of this book.  I heard about it quite some time ago when the science writer Carl Zimmer posted about it on his blog before it was even officially available.  Unfortunately, it's been a busy year for me so I didn't get to rush out, read and review it and happily introduce you to this amazing book.

But hey, now it's in paperback so if you are one of the twenty or so people left who haven't read it I'm here to tell you it's been worth the wait.  Even if you know that basic story and have heard the author interviewed, well, just about everywhere, it's still worth reading.

It's written in such a clear and compelling way.  She has to jump around in time quite a bit, but at the beginning of each chapter there is a timeline pointing out where in this story you are, from the beginnings, in the 50s, to the present day.

It is really three stories in one.  There is the amazing medical history book in which the HeLa cells transform medical science more than once and in many different ways.  There is the story of the impact of the ignorance and knowledge of these cells and what they mean to the family and the family's sad history.  Then there is the tale of the hunt for these stories, the uncovering of clues and how two very different women; the young, educated writer and the older, uneducated and fearful daughter work together on and off to bring this story and this book to light.

So beyond anything else, it's just a great story.  Then you learn so much not only about the science and the history but the way our culture has changed so dramatically over the last fifty or so years.  It really is as good as you've heard it is and is one of those unique books that is both well-reviewed and popular and deserves both.  I'm just glad Ms. Winfrey hasn't chosen it for her book club, so there's still a chance mine might be able to!

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

The 39 Clues

I've already posted about books 1-4 and have been kinda busy with fun stuff like jury duty and Spring Break (at the same time!) to post much lately, so here's a rundown of my thoughts on the rest of the series.

Book 4 was definitely the turning point for me.  I loved 1, but two and three were just more of the same without much growth in story or characters.  But book 4 was pretty good.  Then book 5, The Black Circle, was just as good.  Lots of great Russian history and mythology there.  I've said before that I think these are great for 3rd-6th graders to hear about some great people in history in a fun and entertaining way (along with geography of course).  But they also throw in plenty of historical myths that turn out to be true in the world of the Cahill family clue hunt.  Anastasia lived and all that.  Perhaps history teachers might be miffed, but the line between the fact and fiction is made pretty clear and I personally don't think it matters.  If it makes some kids go on to look up the true history then it will be for the good.

Book 6, In Too Deep, get us to Australia and some great character development and is again by Ms. Jude Watson.  Mr. Lerangis comes back for book 7, The Viper's Nest and does a much better job in my opinion.  By this point some of the original bad guys had grown consciences, so some of they're parents or uncles have shown up to be even badder bad guys.  Like on the Star Trek series' when the Klingons went a little soft around the edges, they brought in those no-good Romulens.  But when we could somewhat deal with Romulens they brought in those no-good Cardassians and so on.

Mr. Korman made some missteps in Book 8, The Emporer's Code.  The plot and story were just as exciting as the other outings, but the way he got Dan and Amy apart for a good chunk of the book didn't ring true to me.  He did well with the development of one of the other clue-hunters, though, which leads us up to the two final installments.  Ms. Linda Sue Park did book 9, Storm Warning, and does it brilliantly.  There's plenty of intrigue and clue-hunting but there's much more characterization and history.  Every object in the hunt isn't just another thing to check off a list and lead to the next clue, it becomes representative of the families and history it has been through.  Nellie, the babysitter, becomes a full-fledged character and a second important death affects the children.

Finally, Ms. Haddix has to tie up a jillion loose threads and while she might not get every single one, she does a great job with it and it's way better and more satisfying than Lost was.  It even opens the door to what has recently been announced as either an 11th book in the continuing series or the first book of a new mystery.  But this book 10 is definitely the finish of the hunt for the 39 clues and the brilliant historical figure she ties it too could be none other than William Shakespeare.  We get to have an action set piece at the new Globe theater, travel to his birthplace and visit his grave.  His dramatic style and the way he wrote some of the best low comedy and high tragedy simultaneously becomes the background which Haddix uses to tie together these disparate characters and all of their motivations.  It also pointed out (to me anyway) the funny things that had been going on in the series.  Like how Dan has a photographic memory, except when he doesn't and how Amy always stutters, except when she doesn't and how, well, you get the idea.

Whew!  I'm happy with the way it ended but not feeling like rushing out and getting the new one yet.  And I still need to finish the Percy Jackson series!  After that I'm going to stay away from series books for a little while.  I have plenty of other things to read.  But I felt it was important to get through this one because I added a set to our collection this year and a few boys are nearing the end.  I wanted to know what they were getting into and be able to geek out with them.  Now I need to find the $ to buy another set and the upcoming continuing series!

One final note: I read about half of them and listened to about half of them.  Listening to them takes longer and you don't get to see all the illustrations, but David Pittu, the reader does a fabulous job and evens out the differences between the writers by giving the whole thing one continuous voicing.  I wish I could afford audio books in the library but just can't so will definitely promote the use of the local public library for these!

The 39 Clues Box Set

Sneak Peek at the New "Elizabeth Bird Reading App!"

See that icon on the right end there?  That's the icon for the new "Elizabeth Bird Fuse #8 Reading App!"  Yes, of course I stuck it right next to my Angry Birds app just to be silly. (Get it?  Angry Birds?  Elizabeth Bird?  Oh, never mind...)

Here's my daughter interacting with one of the graphically-enhanced read-alouds:

She enjoyed the graphics, the sound, the cartoon characters, everything.  It is definitely pitched a little younger than her age group (she'll be in third grade next year and this seemed to be just about right for preK through 2nd) but it was still fun for her.  We'll definitely recommend it to her younger cousin's family.

Be sure to check out the "Parents and OTher Grown Ups" tab.  There are many booklist, read aloud suggestions and even a KidLit Drink Mix Guide!  Ms. Bird and company have thought of simply everything!

Elizabeth Bird Fuse #8 Reading App