Thanks to the Fan Club!

It seems like an annual event (timed to be near my birthday) now...receiving a mystery package from the Extended Shelf Life Fan Club. What arrived in today's mail was most carefully packaged in two bubble mailers and wrapped in smooth, silvery paper. It felt like a book! It was a book! A most extraordinary book which combines my love of baking, art, and stories!

I gasped when I saw the cover of Modern Art Desserts: Recipes for Cakes, Cookies, Confections, and Frozen Treats Based on Iconic Works of Art by Caitlin Freeman! A Mondrian cake is the cover feature. Like a true librarians, I quickly flipped to the table of contents where thumbnails of the desserts accompany the recipe names and page numbers. Whom would I most imagine to be featured in a book of this title? Wayne Thiebaud, of course. And there are four cakes modeled after his art! 

Oh, will I ever love reading the stories and recipes...and then attempting to make some of the art-inspired desserts myself. I am a grateful writer today for this surprise gift. Thank you.

Killer Librarian

My yoga class meets at 5:20 on Thursdays, and most of the women in the class are educators. There is a sense of peaceful relief at 6:20 when class ends, but prior to 5:20, the discussion usually centers on books and learning. Last week, one person commented that it would be nice just to talk with each other for an hour! I did take one book recommendation from that class, and I am almost done with Mary Lou Kirwin's Killer Librarian.

Karen Nash is a Minnesota librarian who goes on a journey to London despite having been dumped by her boyfriend of four years the night prior to departure. At the airport, her recent ex and his new, much younger, much thinner, blond girlfriend are also there! Alas, she is saved by being in first class and can only ruminate over her anger. Once there, she stays at the B & B she booked and is befriended by Caldwell, the owner. While having a few pints at a local pub (something Karen has never done in her life), she confesses her secret desire to murder Dave, that awful ex. Little does she know, that guy named Guy has connections with the seedier crowd.

There is just something about this playful murder mystery that has kept me reading the past two days...perhaps it is all the literary connections or perhaps the thickening plot and incriminating evidence are teasing my deducitve mind.

I did note that the author is also known as Mary Logue, writer of the lovely Caldecott Honor Book Sleep Like a Tiger!

Licking Stamps

I love stamps. Each time I visit the post office, I inevitably buy more, just because a new design is so clever or lovely. My mom and I maintain a strong handwritten correspondence (since I left home for college almost 28 years ago), and I have saved every letter. Partly because the letters contain our history and partly because I love the stamps. Despite the opinions of naysayers, I think sending a letter is a good thing. I do not know a single person who does not like to receive a real letter in the mail (as opposed to junk mail or bills).

Eben McAllister, the main character in Betty Birney's book The Seven Wonders of Sassafras Springs, is on a quest for seven wonders in his small town. Having been transfixed with the images and descriptions of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, he was challenged by his father to find seven in Sassafras Springs, Missouri. If Eben can do it, his father will buy a train ticket for him to visit cousins in Silver Peak, Colorado. The year is 1923, and Eben believes if there were wonders to be found, he would have known about them by now. Still, he cannot resist the possibility of travel.

When he reaches the leaning-to-the-right shack of a man named Cully Pone (whose trousers are held up by a piece of rope and still hang dangerously low), Cully immediately claims to have a wonder...."the doggone doggonedest" of wonders, in fact. Eben listens to the fascinating story of a rainmaker who came to a Missouri county after years of drought, when the creek was so dry there was not enough there to wet a postage stamp. That is when the fourth grade listeners look at me with curiosity. They have licked envelopes, but stamps simply come from that sheet, like stickers. I explain that we used to have to lick stamps...and not that long ago either (or at least it seems that way to me).

With only 12 school days remaining, I regret that we will only join Eben for his discovery of three wonders. The readers will need to check out the book from the library this summer to finish the story.

Nothing New

The second graders have just finished listening to chapter five of Robert McCloskey's Homer Price. Because the book was published in 1943, I have to stop often to explain terms or concepts foreign to them. Uncle Ulysses' Lunch Room is not like the lunch room but more like a diner. Men often congregated at the barber shop. At the filling station, the attendant came out to pump gas and usually cleaned the car windows and checked the oil. Calling on someone meant stopping by to visit (and usually was motivated by love in the case of the sheriff or Uncle Telamachus). Those kinds of things.

This story - "Nothing New Under the Sun (Hardly)" - required short summaries of two well-known other stories: Rip Van Winkle and The Pied Piper of Hamelin. When a mysterious stranger arrives in Centerburg, the townspeople are suspicious of his appearance and curious about the contraption hidden under a canvas on the back of the man's truck. His long beard gets wrapped around his steering wheel and dipped in his gravy. He whistles a strange tune and seems to attract the children. The sheriff and the librarian deduce that he is like Rip. Only when he is hired by the mayor to trap the town's mice with his musical mousetrap and is followed to the city limits by the children does the children's librarian think she has associated him with the wrong story. Would the children of Centerburg be lured away by the odd man? They are not. They devise a clever plan to save themselves. But the intertwined stories and the wonderfully detailed drawings make this yet another favorite story in the collection.

Versions of the Pig Story

Author/illustrator Mark Teague joined us at school this afternoon for a reading of his latest book and a drawing demonstration. The Three Little Pigs and the Somewhat Bad Wolf offers a slightly different version of the traditional tale, and he says it evolved through numerous retellings as his daughters prepared for bed in their younger years. Mark and the second graders (and later the first graders) talked about things they knew for certain in various versions of the story (three houses), things that made them uncomfortable (like the wolf ending up in the stew pot), and things they noticed in his story. They also discussed improbabilities, like a wolf being able to blow down a house - straw, stick, or brick.

As he drew the third pig for the audience, our school nurse leaned over and said, "It is just a few lines. Why can't I do that?" Practice, of course. Mark encouraged the children to draw again and again, just like he did to create consistent characters for the story. Thanks to the Red Balloon for facilitating this visit!

Movie Premiere

On Thursday, the fourth graders (with whom Debra Frasier has been working since February) presented their premiere of "Dog Diaries." It was an incredible production featuring their cut-paper dog puppets acting in a makeshift theater frame, accompanied by several lines from the students' narratives and read in their expressive dog voices. Technical difficulties occurred multiple times during the filming as dogs streaked across the screen in pursuit of squirrels or as dogs congregated in a barking chorus on stage. The two classes in attendance loved the film, and the movie-makers beamed in pride.

The guest classes were especially interested in the process of creating these dog stories. The students began working with Debra several months ago. They first randomly selected a dog biography (retrieved for them from petfinder.com) and then used a mini-book called Spike's Friends (designed by Debra) to consider personality traits and determine the voices of their dogs. After numerous revisions and an experience with writer's craft groups to assist in those revisions, they began working with Debra again on the dog puppets (no writing utensils allowed!). The cut-paper dogs amazingly resemble their real dog photographs! All the puppets and stories are currently on display in the library and are a huge attraction to library visitors.

Each dog puppet, by the way, is mounted on a strong piece of electrical wire and attached with a small bungee cord to a can of dog food during its off-stage time. Debra's book, Spike: Ugliest Dog in the Universe, is scheduled for release on October 15, 2013.

Wonder Books

My parents sent the most incredible gift to my school earlier this year: money to purchase a class set of R. J. Palacio's book Wonder. After reading the book and discussing it with each other via online and in-person conversations, the fifth graders created small books about the ideas of Wonder.

They shared their wonder books with each other and parents today. Each book was supposed to contain three things in response to the story:

a precept that shapes life (composed by the student or borrowed from another source)
a wonder question that could not be answered with facts
a word that guides (illustrated in some way)

The book covers needed to convey an important scene from the story, and their varied responses foretell the  thoughtfulness of their responses. The precepts (like those shared by the teacher in Wonder) covered topics of great importance, and the choices showed the students' careful inclusion of ideas they believe are essential to living. They wondered about why people treat others unfairly because of personality traits or appearance, why life on earth is temporary, what can be done for the world to be at peace. Words like joy, others, family, love, wisdom, and peace filled the last pages of their books. All of these things were excellent examples of what the students learned from the book - and far more powerful than answers to comprehension questions!