Tag: book review

Favorite board books

Posted on by Suki

A relative recently had a baby, so I thought I’d go raid our board book collection and give them a few of our favorites. Unfortunately, our remaining board book collection is being protected by a fierce dragon—uh, 13-year-old daughter—who swears that she will never part from them.

“Isn’t he too young for board books, anyway?” she asked.

Well, no. Babies are never too young for board books. Our babies loved being read to from board books. Sitting on Mom or Dad’s lap, looking at fun pictures, hearing them say funny inscrutable things, and—bonus!—chewing on cardboard book edges. What’s not to love?

Board books also lasted well past their recommended age. I won’t say how long ago it was that my 13-year-old grudgingly allowed me to move them from her bookshelves into her closet so she’d have some space on her shelves. Let’s just say she didn’t have any baby teeth left when it happened!

Here are a few of our favorites, including why we loved them:

Goodnight, Gorilla by Peggy Rathman

Who can say why this book is so charming? We, a family of words, just loved this book that only has a few. We, a family that gets queasy when visiting zoos, loved this tale of zoo animals running the show. This book is full of sly details in the pictures that kids love to look at. Pre-verbal children react to the fun pictures (and the book edges that are great for teething). Older children like to talk about what’s happening in the pictures that is not in the text.

Eating the Alphabet by Lois Ehlert

OK, I will admit that we didn’t have this in board book form. However, I’m adding it because it would have been great that way and it was one of our all-around favorite books. Ehlert’s incredible collage art is wonderful. She chooses some obvious and some very quirky fruits and vegetables to feature. And for some reason, kids just can’t get enough of alphabet books!

 

Jamberry by Bruce Degen

Somebody gave us Jamberry as a gift. Can’t remember who it was, but I do remember looking at it skeptically and wondering if we’d like it. Did we like it? Oh, yes. Degen’s ridiculous rhymes and unstoppably silly story was so fun to read that we the parents didn’t even get sick of it. (Well, OK, maybe just a little.) And this was one of those books where our kids would finish the sentences for us. Memorizing books, by the way, is a great way for kids to learn to read. Both of our kids became natural, whole-word readers very suddenly, and I think that having memorized books so they could then apply reading rules backwards was part of the reason.

First Book of Sushi by Amy Wilson Sanger

Noticing a theme here? Our kids loved to read about food. Probably that’s partly their parents’ influence, but I think it’s also because food is such a universal theme. Kids are hungry so much of the time that food is extremely important to them. And the lovely thing about Sanger’s books is that they feature non-standard American food. I remember the first time I saw a kid eating sushi—I moved to California in the 80’s from the Midwest and one day sat next to a grandmother and her son who looked to be about four. She asked him what he wanted. “Unagi, Gramma!” he said enthusiastically. A kid eating eel? My world was rocked. My kids’ world was so much different from mine—they were exposed to the love of international food from a very early age. My kids loved to point at the pieces of sushi they wanted, and then we’d pretend to eat them.

Yum Yum Dim Sum by Amy Wilson Sanger

People often ask how we got our kids to be such adventurous eaters. Well, just as a taste of our attitudes, I will tell you that after we read that sometimes babies would reject breastmilk after the mom had ingested unusually stinky food, my husband and I decided that we needed to make sure to eat a lot of unusually stinky food! My first takeout after my son was born was Thai. My son’s first meal was actually dim sum. We were at our favorite restaurant during the period while we were attempting to introduce single solid foods one by one, just like they tell you to. He hated solid food. But there he was, sitting next to us, drooling and smacking his lips at the scent of dim sum. We decided that because we were three minutes’ drive away from the nearest hospital, we’d take the chance. From then on, our babies ate the same thing we did, mushed up or ground up in a baby food grinder we would carry with us. Tangy, spicy, sweet or sour, they loved it all.

DK Board Books

If you are a family that loves words, you have to invest in some DK books. Our kids loved them and we would read them over and over and over. They start from the simple Baby Faces, which babies love, move to the “my first” series like My First Colors, get into words in general such as in My First Words, then move into genres such as farm animals (my kids loved this one!), bodies, vehicles, animals, and dinosaurs. The very best DK book we ever had doesn’t seem to exist anymore. It was a non-board book with hundreds of pictures and words in it. My kids just loved to sit and look at the book and make motions and noises to accompany all the words the book portrayed. It wasn’t this book, but something like it on a much larger scale.

I will conclude with one piece of advice: If you decide to buy bathtub books for your child (and I certainly hope you do!), spray them with bleach once a month. You really don’t want to know what starts to grow on there after it’s been read—and teethed on—for as long as ours were.

Enjoy!

Book Review: Creative Home Schooling grows up

Posted on by Suki

It was the weighty Bible of gifted homeschoolers. You saw it on every shelf. My copy was so coveted, one of my homeschooling friends apparently walked off with it and it hasn’t been seen on my shelves since.

What was it? An extensively researched book called Creative Homeschooling by Lisa Rivero, published by Great Potential Press (who published my book, From School to Homeschool, ten years later).

The new version of Creative Homeschooling is slimmer and more focused on modern homeschooling.

Creative Homeschooling was exhaustive and a bit exhausting. At least one homeschooling mom I mentioned it to said that just looking at it gave her a headache! But it was a necessary resource when the Web was in its infancy. With the great changes in homeschooling since the first edition in 2002, homeschooling books have become something other than a resource list. At the time the first edition of Creative Homeschooling was released, however, parents were hungry for information.

“I wrote this book because I needed more information,” Rivero writes in her introduction to the new edition. “At the time, little had been published about homeschooling gifted children, and the Internet was not nearly the quick go-to resource it is today. Fewer people knew anyone who homeschooled or thought of it as a ‘normal’ choice.”

When I started homeschooling in 2007, Rivero’s book was already a classic. Although I couldn’t utter the G-word (“gifted“) in my usual homeschooling circles, as soon as I met another gifted homeschooler, we’d talk about Creative Homeschooling.

But now it’s 2015. People get their homeschooling information from the Web. Why a new version of this venerable homeschooling book?

Rivero says that the first thing she did in the revision process was to realize that her book was no longer valuable as an up-to-date resource list. In fact, even if she updated the list, it would go out of date quickly. The Web is the right place for resource lists. So what is left?

The new version of Creative Homeschooling is slimmer, more focused on the “why” and “how” of homeschooling. Paper listings go out of date immediately, but great advice is timeless.

“Present generation [homeschool] families have quickly learned that homeschooling a gifted child is not about finding the perfect approach or even the perfect resource; they know that the only way to make homeschooling work is to inform themselves as much as possible, and then to always make decisions based on their individual families,” Rivero says. “There is no book that can make those day-to-day decisions for them.”

Rivero’s book focuses on the keyword in its title: creativity. Homeschooling is not about following a formula, and learning is not about attaining a set body of knowledge. Modern education is all about creativity and flexibility; homeschoolers are well-situated in a world where being a lifelong learner is key to success (monetary or otherwise).

“Many of my college students can do a Google search in a heartbeat but are lost or anxious when it comes to organizing their own thoughts during an hour of solitude,” Rivero says. “Time is homeschooling’s greatest gift.”

Rivero gives away her point of view in many ways, not the least of which is starting her “Nuts & Bolts” section with thoughts on creativity. She focuses on creativity throughout, even when discussing such mundane topics as the loss of income in a household.

“Some homeschool parents give up a job to stay home with their children,” Rivero writes. “Often more stressful than the loss of income is the loss of intellectual and creative outlets.”

Rivero
Author Lisa Rivero

The book’s emphasis is on “gifted” children, but the definition of that word has widened and Rivero’s advice is applicable to any child who is an asynchronous learner. Refreshingly, although Rivero’s book is aimed at families who value academics, she doesn’t push achievement-oriented learning. Rivero doesn’t jump on any bandwagons. Her material is based on research, such as questioning the validity of learning preferences, a bit of a sacred cow amongst homeschoolers at the moment.

The updated edition incorporates much of the cutting edge psychological and neurological research that has happened in the years since its first writing. Rivero includes information gleaned from research, such as Carol Dweck’s Mindset, takes on the right brain/left brain fallacy, argues for considering the problem of applying labels to children, and takes on the damage that overly high expectations can have on developing minds.

The new Creative Homeschooling isn’t the resource Bible it once was. It’s now a lean and focused look at the value and challenge of homeschooling bright children. The fact that it’s only being offered as an e-book is perhaps its most telling feature. This book is not a romantic look at homeschooling past, but rather a guide into homeschooling’s future.

Creative Homeschooling
by Lisa Rivero
Great Potential Press, 2014
Buy at Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble

Empty Shelves for Gifted Readers

Posted on by Suki

Most parents wonder how to get their kids to read more.

In our house, we had to have a penalty for unbridled reading! We’d send our son to his room to get dressed, and twenty minutes later we’d find him on the floor, pants half on, reading. He’d read anything he could get his hands on. He’d probably have starved if I didn’t physically take his book away at lunchtime.

Green glass sea
This is a lovely book for aspiring girl scientists—or any girl who doesn’t fit in.

Though voracious readers like my son aren’t the majority, there are many. Enough, in fact, that their parents find each other online to ask the same question, over and over:

What should I do? My child has run out of books!

Specifically, at two points in these readers’ young lives, there is a dearth of books aimed at high reading capacity but lower social/emotional development. I’ll use my son as an example.

Most, though not all, gifted readers start young. My son didn’t start young; he started to read at the boringly average age of 6 3/4. But unlike the other kids in his first-grade class, he didn’t slowly progress from ABC books to early readers to chapter books. In October, he was still pronouncing “the” as “tuh-HUH.” In November, he was reading anything he got his hands on.

The problem was, he was still six, and an emotionally young six at that. He blew through all the classic children’s repertoire in about a year. I remember my gratitude upon finding that there were over 30 books in the Oz series.

The advice we got from other parents, teachers, librarians, and booksellers was almost always off. Sure, Dick King-Smith books are adorable, but a kid like this can eat one up in half an hour. Harry Potter started out a boy, and the early books were just on the edge of too scary, but as Harry ages, the books get more terrifying to a young psyche and further from her experiences.

What these kids need is good, thick books with compelling storylines, rich vocabulary, and little-to-no violence. Writers could look to the past for models: White, Baum, and Wilder got these kids.

Somehow, we got our son through this period. We thought it would be smooth sailing till one day in the library he said, “I’ve read everything here.”

It was true, sort of. He’d read every possible book that wasn’t aimed at young adults. He was now going on 11, and entering that period of human development when all kids become more sensitive. Correspondingly, highly sensitive kids experience a fearful change in themselves and in the world around them.

And so I turned to my friends online again, and found out that once again, our kids were in synch. Though some of their kids had graduated to YA fiction with no problem, many of them tried it and responded like my son, with nightmares, repulsion, or just plain boredom.

Once again, my son needed more depth, more breadth, bigger stories and bigger conundrums. But he did not need more things to make him feel fearful, awkward, and uncertain. As an adolescent, he had enough of that racing around with his hormones.

A great lover of kids’ fantasy, he couldn’t take YA fantasy with its violent imagery and scary plotlines. As an emotionally young 11-year-old, he had no interest in the teen emotional world. He had read all the older classics for middle grades years before.

Though some of these kids can just skip straight into adult classics, my son found them difficult. (Also, when I read Oliver Twist out loud to him, I remembered that even nineteenth-century writers can’t be trusted not to include a horrific, vividly described murder scene!)

Some books that we have found to work really well for him include the Mysterious Benedict Society series, Carl Hiaason’s books, and Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series (which is, like early Harry Potter, just on the edge of too much graphic violence).

Writers could fill this hole with more books that offer the exciting plots, highly imaginative worlds, and character complexity of the best YA fiction, combined with a slightly safer world view, less visually stimulating violence, and no need for teen-level understanding of interpersonal relationships.

One of the common reactions of writers and readers of fiction who read this request is, “Well, fiction is all about conflict, so you can’t ask us to take out conflict.” And of course, that’s not at all what’s being proposed.

Instead, I ask writers to reconsider how the recent acceptance in our culture of the violence in visual media has affected their writing, and more importantly, their perceptions of “what YA readers want.” I suspect that my gifted readers aren’t the only ones turned off by the, frankly, stomach-turning and heart-wrenching violence in many YA books.

Recently, my son, 7-year-old daughter, and I listened to the audiobook of Kenneth Oppel’s Airborn in our car. It was so gripping that when we got near the end of the book, we sat in the car for a while and then finally I said, “OK, I’ll pop the CD and play it inside.” We just couldn’t put that book down.

The book turned out to be a perfect example of what we’ve been looking for: Though there is plenty of sexual yearning and a good measure of violence in the book, it was written with the slower pacing and moral footing of the Victorian fiction it was modeling.

The kids were fully able to ignore the romance, and the violence was never gratuitous. When one of the three main characters is killed, his death is properly mourned and relates to the theme of the novel. (Unfortunately, the second book in the series, with its creepier villains, frozen dead bodies, and weird flying squids, was way too much for my son and gave him nightmares.)

For both the age-groups I’m concerned with, modern fiction has done a great job of filling in the holes left in the classics for struggling readers: books that offer ease of reading and more excitement, books that take cues from visual media, books designed to tempt kids away from other pursuits.

But for the gifted reader, the library is shrinking. As the classics recede further into the past, and thus further from our kids’ experiences and language, very little is taking their place. The child who dashes through easy readers at the age of four can finish the whole of English language children’s literature by nine or ten. And the child who has done that might just have to skip to adult classics to fill the hours of reading she yearns for.

Gifted readers, especially adolescents, want to read current fiction just like their peers. Writers were often gifted readers themselves; perhaps they can channel that hunger they had for meaty, compelling, but not too scary books, and offer them up for their future biggest fans.

Visit my book lists for gifted readers:

A grown-up Harry Potter for me and you

Posted on by Suki

Some years ago my husband was reading a book he’d bought on the basis of a good review. He was sitting in his chair chuckling, and occasionally he would say, “You have to read this!” and then “I mean it, you’ve really got to read this!”

“OK, dear,” I said, and back to my own book.

Then I did. The book was The Magicians by Lev Grossman. After I finished it I was hanging out with my sister and she said something like, “Oh, my book club read the greatest book!” and I answered, “I just read the greatest book, too!” And it turned out to be one and the same.

Harry Potter for grownups! Put the kids to bed early and enjoy.
Harry Potter for grownups! Put the kids to bed early and enjoy.

The Magicians has now morphed into a trilogy, the final episode published last month, and it’s one that I think every parent who was jealous of their kids for having Harry Potter just has to read. Remember how reading Harry Potter with your kids (or in my case, listening to the wonderful audiobooks) made you wistful for how the Narnia series really didn’t cut it once you put them side-by-side? Harry Potter let kids be real kids. They did real stuff that was not in the least allegorical. They lived in a world that was tactile and dirty and complex.

All we got as kids was weak Christian allegory. (Apologies if you still love Narnia, but reading it as an adult killed all my affection for it!)

The disappointing thing about Harry Potter, from the adult point of view, is that because it’s a series for kids, it does have to stay within the kids’ world experiences. There are no great revelations, no deep learning that happens in that series. The kids have adventures and eventually they overcome the evil.

The end happily ever after et cetera.

The Magicians is Harry Potter for grown-ups. It opens when our “hero” (rather less heroic than Harry, even) stumbles his way into a college for magicians. He doesn’t even know that magic exists. He’s never done anything the least bit magical, yet they’ve been watching him and they want him. Why?

In Harry Potter,  that question gets answered, but Grossman’s books are for grown-ups. Questions don’t get answered; they just balloon and get overwhelming, then subside and let you get on with your life. Quentin, Grossman’s protagonist, stumbles through young adult life in an endearing and somewhat scary way. Quentin’s a thinker, and he lets you know why he makes the decisions he makes, but unlike in a children’s novel, it doesn’t all come together to make sense. It ends, but the ending is just the beginning of the rest of his life.

These are not books for kids, or even your teenagers. In fact, don’t let your teens read these books. They’re yours. I mean it. I think you have to have lived long enough to realize that you don’t really know what the hell you’re doing in life in order to appreciate these books.

I love this piece by Grossman on how he found himself as a writer. I think Grossman does a great job of summing up why his books are so great to read:

“Fantasy is sometimes dismissed as childish, or escapist, but I take what I am doing very, very seriously. For me fantasy isn’t about escaping from reality, it’s about re-encountering the challenges of the real world, but externalized and transformed. It’s an emotionally raw genre — it forces you to lay yourself open on the page. It doesn’t traffic in ironies and caveats. When you cast a spell you can’t be kidding, you have to mean it.”

It’s clear that Lev Grossman means it. Go read these books. Ignore your children for a while. Really. And don’t let them read over your shoulder, as my 11-year-old attempted to do last night. She could see I had a good read, and she was jealous.

Let them be jealous. Let them have Harry.

We have Quentin.

The search for the girl scientist in literature

Posted on by Suki

Note: This piece was published by a publishing industry blog a few years ago, but they have apparently reworked their site and I can’t find it anymore. So I am reposting it here. This is one of the pieces that I have written that people find over and over—we need to support our scientist/techy/mathy girls, and part of that is letting them know through literary role models that they aren’t alone. Unfortunately, I got some wonderful suggestions on that blog for other books, but they are now lost! If you have any other girl scientists up your sleeve, please do leave comments!

My eight-year-old daughter is a scientist. This isn’t a career choice. This is just a fact of her being.

When she was 18 months old, she accidentally pulled on her sensitive big brother’s hair.

He cried!

Green glass sea
This is a lovely book for aspiring girl scientists—or any girl who doesn’t fit in.

Another child might have felt guilty or might have been upset. Not my daughter. She had only one possible reaction:

I wonder what will happen when I do that again!

And again and again.

Fast forward seven years, and she’s a regular exhibitor at our county science fair. If I want her to practice her penmanship, we do science. If she learns new words, it’s through science.

In the midst of this we had an accidental book club. We’re homeschoolers, and we do a lot of driving. Those two combined mean that we love audiobooks. I balk at the high price tag, so we get most of our audiobooks from the library. This means that more often than not, we listen to whatever happens to be on the shelves.

Unintentionally, two of the books we listened to were about girls who love science.

The first was The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate. This lovely book by Jacqueline Kelly covers nearly a year in the life of a girl living in rural Texas at the turn of the 20th century. She forms an unexpected alliance with her grandfather, an amateur naturalist, and becomes entranced with science the way that some girls now become entranced with teen idols.

This positive portrayal of a girl scientist in a place where she is so completely out of place is riveting. Not only did it inspire more interest in evolution and botany in my already science-loving kids, but it presented the role model of a girl who is a scientist against all odds.

The second book, The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages, is also historical, set in Los Alamos as scientists work desperately to create the “gadget” that will end the war. Dewey is a born scientist also, in this case, an inventor. She loves to create her own gadgets, and largely ignores the taunting of the other kids. When she is unexpectedly required to spend a few weeks living with another family, she forms an alliance with another misfit girl, who is finding her calling as an artist.

Sea and Tate are very different books. In Tate, the negative pressure on the main character comes largely from adults. In Sea, however, adults are largely charmed by Dewey’s inventiveness, but the kids are just short of brutal to her.

In both books, however, today’s girl scientists can see girls sticking to science because it is what calls to them. Interestingly, both books almost ignore the girls’ schooling, which seems tangential to their real lives.

In the midst of this mini girl-scientist book festival, it occurred to me to look for more books. In my wanderings, I got a recommendation to ask Tanya Turek, who runs the blog books4yourkids.com. She mentioned that Sea has a sequel, White Sands, Red Menace, which I had found.  She also reminded me of A Wrinkle in Time, which fits closely enough to the theme I was looking for. But then she came up with a blank.

“I spent quite a bit of time on the internal book search system at the Barnes & Noble where I work as well as the internet and I could not come up with any more books that what I suggested already,” she e-mailed me. “I think that there really, truly are only a handful of books that have scientific themes AND female protagonists.”

I can imagine the reasons for this: Few women are scientists, and scientists in general are unlikely also to be fiction writers, so when you look for the cross-section of those two small groups, you apparently only come up with two current writers amongst our many writers of fiction for children.

To explain the lack of these books, however, does not excuse it! We need more books about girls who love science. Girl scientists, even in the 21st century, meet with a good measure of what met Calpurnia in 1899 and Dewey in 1945: misunderstanding, social pressure, and disappointment. Books are where misfit kids can find themselves, and where they find out they aren’t misfits after all.

When my daughter was three, she was nearly impossible to have in a preschool room. All order would be upset; all expectations would be stymied. Forget learning outcomes, her teachers just wanted her to stop experimenting!

I finally found the right teacher for her. One day when I went to pick her up, Cari said, “I have realized what is going on here. Your daughter is a scientist. She must find out how everything works, and the laws behind everything the classroom.”

As soon as Cari understood my daughter, things went much more smoothly.

Books like Calpurnia Tate and Green Glass Sea will hopefully help my daughter understand herself.

Now available