A shell story by Ella

From Deb:

Here is the kind of story Ella tells now; I guess she based it on the great time she had on Monday at the Lake Anna beach. She dictates, I type verbatim.

Finding Shells at the Beach
By Ella

Once upon a time, Ella was collecting shells at the beach. And she was going to play with them with her friend Lara. They were playing with them until they found one little shell that was little. It was a connect-shell. There was a little conch shell, but there were lots of those little connect-together shells too. Then they connected the little shells together, and then the conch shell, and they put the two little shells under the conch shell. They showed them to their mom and dad, and they were going to keep them. And they found two places that had those same things, and they did the same thing for one of them, and the other.

And then, they swam out to the deep part of the lake with their fathers. Ella found a huge conch shell at the bottom of the lake, even bigger than a child’s head. Since they couldn’t reach it, but their fathers could reach it, Ella’s father got the big conch shell and put the conch shell in a big sack. Then they swam back with Lara carrying the sack, and showed their mothers.

They kept the big conch shell until they found another one that was the big size, but it was in the shallow end of the lake. And then, they were trying to find treasure at the down part of the shallow end of the lake. They were trying to find a big shell that had these little double baby shells on it, and they found them. They also found little conch shells.

When they were going back home…the street behind Ella’s house was Lara’s house…they played at Ella’s house. They played and played, the rest of the day.

The End

Not-Back-To-School Day

From Deb:

Yesterday, the local kids started back to school. To celebrate our not-back-to-school, we spent the afternoon at Lake Anna, a large man-made lake a little over an hour to the east. They had a lovely, clean beach, with nice sand that extended far out into the lake -- no icky, living lake bottom like they usually are, and fairly clear water that you didn't mind getting in the babies' mouths and noses.

I was feeling fiercely defiant the whole day. David was amused, and made a cryptic, not-quite-critical comment about the fact that I kept mentioning that the girls were NOT in school. I was able to spend a lot of nice, quiet time on the beach, and I realized during it that I am still burningly angry about the amount of desperately trapped feelings I had to repress at the start of school for probably 11 of the 12 years I was in public school. I wasn't psychologically able to experience those feelings then, because I wouldn't have been able to manage them. So that's what's coming out now. I resent having been forced to go, and I still experience that resentment to a degree that I find surprising now, almost 20 years later. And I was good at school, heck, I was valedictorian. I know that circumstances would be a lot different for my girls, that they would never feel trapped in the way I did...but I tell you, you'd have to pry them from my cold, dead fingers before they'd set foot in a public school as a student.

On the other hand, 15 years ago I vowed to leave the Philadelphia area forever, and just look at what are we contemplating now. So much for vows.

Back-to-school spending

From CNN.com today:

A survey by the National Retail Federation found the average family expects to spend $527 on back-to-school items this year, up 18 percent from $444 last year.

If I spend $527 on curriculum stuff for this entire upcoming YEAR I'd be amazed. And they say that public school is free?!

Synonym Silliness

Madison discovered the right-mouse-click thesaurus today in Word as we were working on the book. She got the biggest kick out of finding random words that we had written, and right-mouse-clicking on it to select a recommended synonym that was just "off" enough to make it funny. For example:

“No swimming, silly!” said Elizabeth.

became

“No swimming, harebrained!” said Elizabeth.

We definitely had fun!

Insurance?!?

Overheard from Madison:

"Mom, why don't I have insurance?"

"INSURANCE?!?"

"Yeah, you know, where parents give kids money for doing little chores around the house."

The Frontier Team book

From Deb:

Madison and I have been working on the book very hard for the last two days, and she shows no signs of wanting to stop. We've been working perhaps three hours per day!

We have a plot summary, a plot outline, the setting, annotated list of characters, the first chapter, and we're now working on the second chapter! (The chapters are pretty short.)

It's so much fun! At lunch yesterday we had a really great, long discussion about first person, second person, and third person writing, omniscient narrators, non-omniscient narrators, and why books written in the first person can't have omnicient narrators. Our book is written in the first person, although I think third-person omnicient is appealing to Madison because it makes the author into god.

Vocabulary used, PURELY from reading

From Deb:

This evening, Madison and I were talking about the Rules for Detecting that we're going to write about in our book (starting Monday!), and she proposed one to me:

"Never element a clue unless you're absolutely sure it's not part of the mystery."

Element? Of course, she meant eliminate. And she knows the word "eliminate" to speak it, in regular conversation. But she had come across the word "eliminate" written out very often in her own reading, and for some reason had always in her mind apparently pronounced it "element."

"That's funny," she said. "I kind of thought 'element' (spelled eliminate) was a synonym for 'get rid of something,' just like 'eliminate' -- I didn't realize it was the same word."

And then, a tiny bit later, she used the word "element" again, showing how firmly the written word "eliminate" is fastened in her mind with that wrong pronunciation. She was even interested, herself, in the fact that I had to correct her again (mildly and interestedly, of course. Then, the next time she used it, she said the word correctly, "eliminate."

This was fascinating from the perspective of how children learn (and how she is learning to learn independently), and also very good for her in one very important way: She got it wrong, I corrected her, she was interested introspectively in why she got it wrong, but most important, she didn't mind at all getting it wrong, and worked to get it precise...without any problem at all, without the profound embarrassment or self-consciousness that my little perfectionist sometimes exhibits. This was marvelous.

I told Madison that I remembered doing the exact same thing when I was in the second grade, and I even remembered the two words that I mispronounced because of reading them rather than speaking them: "Rapid" (which I pronounced as it's spelled: "rape-id" -- the darned word should be spelled rappid), and "crouch" (which I pronounced "crutch"). She was very interested in these words, and in fact told me that she often makes the same inner-ear mispronunciation of "crowch" into "crutch." I think it's because it is spelled like "touch."

Really, in so many ways, that girl IS me. And in so many ways, that girl IS David. Actually, she's an almost perfect blend of the two of us.

Morse Code

Ella and Madison are discovering a neat new way to represent the alphabet: Morse Code! It's particularly useful for Ella. My friends from college visited last night and today, and they brought little gifts for the girls. For Madison, they brought a little electronics kit, one of whose products is a telegraph. She and David built it this afternoon, and now they're having a great time building words in Morse Code. I don't even care about the shrieky quality of the beeps the thing makes.

Editor-in-Chief

From Deb:

Went to a curriculum meeting of a bunch of HS moms and dads last night at the local Barnes & Noble. Got a couple of decent leads on some stuff that has worked for others.

One is a program called Editor-in-Chief, produced by the same Critical Press people that do the Mind Benders. Editor-in-Chief teachers grammar, spelling, and punctuation by teaching kids the editing marks and having them make the corrections on things that are wrong. I think that Madison will enjoy this kind of thing.

I also saw the workbooks for Susan Wise Bauer's History of the World series. We have the first book in the series on Ancient History, but I skimped on buying the workbook. Several moms there swear by the workbook, and when I saw it I thought it might work for us too.

Toward a method of classifying children's literature

Theorizing from Deb:

As a means of furthering my goal of helping my KidsOutAndAbout.com readership grow ever smarter and more thoughtful about their parenting, I have started to write more book reviews and do more interviews with children's authors on the KOA site. As you know from the post that is two posts below this one, I intend to pursue writing children's books in earnest. So I've started to read Madison's books more actively. Actually, what I'm doing is steering her toward books that I enjoyed when I was a girl, and I'm either reading them with her out loud, or snagging her books and reading them on my own, as a means of formulating what I like and don't like about such books.

We're about 2/3 of the way through The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgeson Burnett, a book I loved as a kid and read until the pages fell out. Madison loves it too. Yesterday when the kids were at the pool with David, I read through to the end. I sobbed most of the way, as I would have throughout much of the first part had I not been under control while reading to Madison. It's not a sad book or anything, in fact it's quite a joyous book, but I think I was just astonished at how different it is to read the same book as an adult. One sees so much more in it. For example, I would never have understood as a child why The Secret Garden is, among other things, about redemption. The significance of redemption to human life was absolutely beyond me as a child (despite being Catholic then). I could understand it, theoretically, as a teenager, but there is no substitute for living life, making terrible mistakes and doing one's best to make up for them, to "get" what redemption is about and its significance to human relationships...and why books that address this topic can be so powerful. (Incidentally, I’m glad I have a good memory, because I can zoom back to childhood and remember what I got from reading a certain passage, and compare it with how I respond as an adult. I did this recently when I saw The Karate Kid Part II, as well. I loved that movie when I was 17. I saw it recently, and I still really like it, but now I’m seeing it from the adult point of view rather than the kid point of view. To say that it’s dramatically different is putting it mildly.)

Reading Madison’s books got me thinking a lot about the differences between the adult and child experiences of a book that is meant for children to read. After all, the book is written by an adult. Are some books experienced the same by both adults and children, and some experienced differently? What are the dimensions that comprise the differences?

I'm going to address chapter books only, because picture books are not intended to be read in the same way as are chapter books. It's true that picture books sometimes teach values, but I don't think they fall into my two neat categories, so they're out. I'm really interested in the higher-level conceptual thinking that is possible by readers of chapter books.

Here is my main conclusion: There are two kinds of children's books (aren't there always "two kinds" of everything?):

1) Books that place the child protagonists in a safe and stable world setting, in which the problem to be solved is situational, and achievements made and lessons learned are those typical in and useful to childhood.

2) Books that address personal development and integration into the rest of the world – an adult world – in which the personal development of the protagonist(s) is central to the plot.

Books of Type #2 win Newberry Medals, and books of Type #1 don’t. But I think both are important to have available for children.

Type #1 teaches concrete achievements that children ought to learn, and teaches them how to navigate their own world, an environment that has been carefully circumscribed by adults (difficult enough when you are a kid). It’s easier (and psychologically safer) for a young reader to identify with the protagonist in Type #1 books.

Type #2 books teach children to spread their mental wings beyond the concerns of childhood, to see themselves as the same person they will be when they are adults, to move in an adult world that is usually unstable and fraught with uncertainty. Type #2 gives young readers glimpses into the idea that things will change, that they will change, and that the direction in which change happens is important.

To put it briefly, Type #1 shows how to do, Type #2 shows how to become.

My next post will try to elucidate the characteristics of “Doing” books and “Becoming” books.

Question: What do you think of the words “Doing” and “Becoming” as designators of the two categories? I suspect there are better buzzwords to describe the two categories, and I’d love to have suggestions. Maybe "stable world" and "unstable world"? No, that's not that satisfying either.

One Lesson in Economics

When I was driving Madison to camp yesterday, we had a terrific discussion about economics -- about prices (as she'd already kind of derived, implicitly, the concepts of supply and demand when we were bargaining for something the other week), about macroeconomies and microeconomies, and why money was huge improvement on barter. So, given that this weekend is "tax-free school supplies weekend" in Virginia, I went out and got some cool new workbooks. Basics of Economics Grade 3

Also got two more, one is Teaching American History with Favorite Folk Songs which includes a CD, and also one that she is really excited about, Logic Safari Grades 3-4 which have those logic puzzles with the tables that really excite her.