bibliomom

So while perusing the Hoagies’ Gifted Education site, I came across this fabulous link to Scholastic’s Teacher Book Wizard which is so amazingly cool. Their “BookAlike” search allows you to plug in the name of a book your kid likes, adjust the the reading level up or down, and then searches for similar books.

I’m not going to claim it’s perfect, but what a fabulous resource!

And it’s especially useful when trying to find books that work for kids reading below or above the “standard” level.

(If you do have a early/advanced/gifted reader – 0r a kid that’s just significantly ahead in any given subject – by all means check out the Hoagies’ site: they have some fabulous links and great book ideas.)

So how do you teach spelling to a child to can’t write, see or hear?

You know – to a boy.

Okay, so there’s some exaggeration there. He can write – it’s just very slow and painful. He can hear – now, after years of therapy, most of the time. And he can see – things that are far away.

So Monkey does have a few physical deficits in his corner, but honestly, he doesn’t seem that different from most ten year old boys to me – they can’t see messes or hear me when I ask them to do something either. And many boys also have poor handwriting and an extreme reluctance to sit still for extended periods of time. Yes, you can provide diagnoses for some of it, but even more of it is just who they are – kids who want to have fun and not sit around doing boring rote junk.

Which brings me back to spelling, a topic I have largely avoided. I kept thinking that surely a kid that reads as much as he does would learn to spell. And I was somewhat comforted that he did well on the spelling segment of his standardized tests. But of course that just goes to show that standardized tests are poppycock - the boy can’t spell his way out of a cardboard box.

Or at least he couldn’t last week. This week is entirely different.

Which brings me to the video game portion of this segment. Namely, Scribblenauts, a game where you actually *do* have to spell your way out of a cardboard box. Or at least over to where the Princess is located.

Scribblenauts is a puzzle game where the player is given a challenge – say, a cat stuck on a roof – and an in game vocabulary of tens of thousands of things you can summon. That is, *if* you can think of the word and write it. A “dog” can chase the cat off the roof, a “fireman” can rescue it, a “mouse” can incite it to jump down on its own and a “fire” can, well, set the whole thing ablaze, including the cat, and cause the level to reset – ask me how I know.

It’s actually my game, but I haven’t been able to get it away from the boy since he “borrowed” it. The anal, public school side of me wants to say, “No! That’s not teaching! He should be sitting nicely at the table, making lists on paper!” The lazy, rationalizing side of me says, “But he’s voluntarily spelling like crazy in a way that’s relevant, meaningful, and seems to be sticking with him. He even gets logic and problem solving as a bonus!”

For the time being, I’ve hedged. I’ve told him to come and write down his new words on a list for me as he masters them. So far, we’ve got ninjas, bazookas, sea monsters, and swords, pirates, castles, bomb shelters and tanks. Is it everything? Well, no.

But it might be just what a growing boy needs.

My Monkey likes art. He likes it sooo much that when he was a preschooler, he refused to draw for almost a whole year because his circles weren’t round enough.

(Really, you’d think that would have tipped me off that we were swimming in the deep end of the gene pool, but nooo, you can’t teach me anything.)

Eventually, he started drawing again and we’ve never looked back. But now that he’s all big, we actually have to start officially linking art into his curriculum, or at least log what we already do. And since I’m am now a) part of an impromptu co-op with adoptingmama and another friend and b) the one with the art history minor, I am also c) the one teaching an art class to a group of eight or nine kids on a semi-regular basis. All of which has made me start thinking more seriously about curriculum type stuff.

Before I get started, I would like to state the obvious and say there are as many ways of teaching art as there are people, and what’s important to one person might be deemed unnecessary by another. Teaching your child about the life cycle of a frog or building a baking soda-and-vinegar volcano is not what my husband would call real science. Real science (to keep up my husband’s inflection and attitude) is far more than spitting out random facts or blowing things up. It’s fun and useful, but has about as much to do with real science (there go those darn italics again) as, well, Michelangelo’s Pieta does with the tissue paper handprints my child brings home from Bible class.

So first, think about what your actual goals are. Do you just want to do some fun, creative and messy projects? Fabulous. Because that’s what this section’s about. I love books like Mudworks which is full of easy, fun recipes for all kinds of different modeling doughs and ideas on how to use it. Basic playdough for daily sensory activities, baked dough for beads and jewelry, gingerbread dough for the creative baker, and novelty doughs using everything from peanut butter to dryer lint. Completely fun and great for preschoolers up through middle school.

It’s not art.

But it is a really fun and completely age appropriate craft. And you can find ideas for school appropriate crafts everywhere. Parenting magazines? Full of them. Holiday themed, Season themed – Usborne books like Pirate Things to Make and Do are also full of themed activities – and themes can be good if you have a reluctant artist. And yes, I just said “artist” in the same paragraph where I explained that this isn’t art. Art vs. Craft is not a fight I’m going to get into. Yes, I call these craft projects when I’m feeling all snippy and self-righteous, but I think they can also be completely appropriate for art class, especially for younger kids, special needs kids, kids with visual or fine motor skill delays or just plain old reluctant artists. (Which I think are usually kids who quit art because of some kind of delay, anyway.) Art should be fun in the same way that school should be fun, and process focused art – art where the doing is more important than the final result – has a very important role in making art accessible and enjoyable. Hopefully at some point, you’ll be able to start tying those projects into larger lessons about media, technique, and a variety of artists and works. At the very least, these projects can be great for fun, fine motor skill development and adding a kinesthetic component to other school lessons. (Can I tell you how many alphabet letters with beans glued on them my daughter brought home last year?.)

So, this section isn’t much of a book review, is it? But that’s okay – I mostly just wanted to get “school crafts” out of the way. These types of projects are as old as the hills and have about as many variations. Go online and search for “Art Projects for Kids” and you’ll get about a million results.

No, wait – I lie. Google says 17 million plus. My first ten search results include:

Enchanted Learning

Amazing Moms

Crayola’s Website

How Stuff Works

Bright Ring

and the blog that was actually titled Art Projects for Kids

Now, most of these are the old school, cut out handprint, paper towel tube, aluminum foil sculpture variety. Personally, I can’t stand 99% of these projects, but everyone knows what a pretentious snot I am. I know – “Egg carton flower bouquet not good enough for ya, heh?” Well, no actually, it isn’t. Transforming household junk into painted, themed junk doesn’t really turn my crank. But there are some genuinely fun and creative projects mixed in among the beaded toilet-paper-ring-napkin-holders, so sift my darlings, sift.

The Bright Ring link is a little different as it seems to be run by the publishers of the aforementioned (and much loved) Mudworks book. This site is nice because it gives sample art projects from a variety of their books – a try-before-you-buy kind of scenario. It stinks because they left out the illustrations, so you have to rely on the text alone.

The Art Projects blog is also a little different, since it seems to include information about specific artists and DIY projects for sale, as well as focusing a bit more on technique and materials. Please remember this list is not made up of my personal favorites – it’s merely a sampling of what’s out there.

So there you have it - Part 1. Next time I’ll try to include something that’s actually useful.

I am a total slacker. Granted, when I started this blog, I didn’t expect to end up with a special needs kid. I already had a high need kid and thought that my quiet baby girl was God’s way of telling me, “It’s okay – you’ve done enough. Why don’t you take all that free time and go start a blog or something?”

So, four years and one autism diagnoses later, I’m just as busy as always. The difference is that my sweet little Bug just got on the bus and headed off for first grade. She went to therapeutic preschool at Sorenson for two years (a truly amazing school) and to a special Transitional Kindergarten class last year, but those were both half-day, four day a week programs. That’s four days a week where Monkey and I desperately tried to cram as much school work into those hours as possible and I spent the rest of the day trying to keep Bug from … well, from destroying anything crucial.

This year, Bug’s going to be off at school all day. Which is both tremendously difficult and a huge sigh of relief. Academically, she gains nothing by going. She taught herself reading and basic math in preschool, so as a dedicated homeschool parent, it’s really hard for me to write off yet another year of academics in favor of social therapy. But it also means that Monkey and I won’t have to rush through school work so frantically. We might actually have time to go out on field trips without Bug. And I might actually get to be off duty for a few hours a day. Feeling like you’re on red-alert guard duty whenever your child is in the house gets really old after the first few years. It also makes it incredibly difficult to give another child, say, a high need kid with his own significant speech and social delays, the time and attention he needs for school.

Anyway, to continue making a short story long, I’m going to try and actually review books. I know – shocking on a blog called Bibliomom. But I’m hoping I can finally do more than just write therapeutic attempts at humor and actually do something useful.

Because I really do love books. My husband also loves books. And being that the last time we went out for breakfast, all four of us were sitting there quietly reading when the waiter brought our food, I think it’s safe to say our kids are as passionate about books as we are. (Seriously – it was one of those moment that made me think, “OMG – the two of us were barely functional enough to survive childhood – what were we thinking when we decided to have kids?!”)

So, I’ll have to try and change up my reader categories and start adding in some of the cool stuff we find for homeschool every time Monkey and I start a new unit. And if I can better reading materials for a hyperlexic first grader, so much the better.

Well, spring’s a comin’ and tulips are popping up at grocery stores all over Seattle. Amazingly, we found a great book a the library that fits the spring theme and is perfect for early readers.

The Great Tulip Trade is a darling book about a little girl named Anna who receives tulips for her birthday. Of course since it’s set in 17th century Holland during the great tulip craze, amazing things begin to happen when passers by spy her beautiful flowers.

For a book about girls and flowers, it’s actually not that girly. The drawings are charming, not sappy, and little Anna shows remarkable common sense when it comes to trading her beloved tulips. The story’s well written and enjoyable, balancing the historical frenzy (and underlying greed) with Anna’s practicality and ultimate choice to save her last tulip for herself, no matter what she’s offered for it. There’s even a nice little author’s note at the end providing further information about this fascinating time.

I was really surprised at how much my son enjoyed this sweet little story. Tulips are his new favorite flower and we actually have a reason to brave the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival traffic this year. A fun little story that introduces a new moment in history with nary a pouty little princess in sight.

If only I could hope for as much from the Tulip Festival.

Once again, Costco was full of fun stuff I just couldn’t resist. One such item was their big box o’ “Coloring Classics” - which is to say, 12 coloring books pulled from the Treasury of Illustrated Classics series - Pinocchio, Robin Hood, Alice in Wonderland, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Little Women, Beauty and the Beast, Black Beauty, Jungle Book (with Rikki Tikki Tavi), Peter Pan, Treasure Island, Wind in the Willows and the Wizard of Oz. Now, I don’t think my seven year old is going to give a flying flip about Little Women, but I know plenty of kids I could pass that one on to. And in the mean time, my boy is loving just sitting and reading these easy, illustrated editions of people running around with swords - I mean “classic adventure stories”.

In some ways, I think the market for these stories is a little weird – there’s only a couple of sentences per page, but the text requires a fairly proficient early reader or adult help. The stories have been super-simplified (like a Disney color book edition of a story) but it’s still enough to get the gist of the story. (And even as an adult, I can use the five-minute reminder of what each story is about.) The pictures are fairly simplistic as well, and usually far more cartoonish than the cover. Not bad, just basic, and probably really great for early elementary kids who are really visual and/or have short attention spans, as well as for slightly younger kids whose auditory comprehension skills are up to something more complex than “Maisy Drives the Bus”.

Best of all, it’s twelve coloring books for $11.49 with no t.v. characters, movie tie-ins, or bratty princesses in sight. Perfect for kids who love to color and parents who’d like to nudge their kids towards classic literature instead of the t.v.

Right up my alley.

Okay, you know I’m all about the wiggly kids – the ones who can’t play Candyland or Chutes and Ladders, or any other game involving card drawing, spinnners or endless turn taking. I can barely stand these games, so I don’t know why I think kids under 5 have any chance of making it through alive.

Having said that, we recently repurchased Cariboo for my 3 year old and I remembered 1) why we loved this game so much the first time and 2) why we needed to buy a new copy.

First, this is possibly the best game ever for bright, non-verbal, sensory-happy, and/or attention challenged young children. The game is basically a box with three holes at the top, a grid of 15 doors beneath that, and an empty tube (for balls) that leads to a treasure chest on the right. (Amazon has good pictures.)

You take turns drawing a card, matching the color/shape/number to a door on the grid, opening the door by poking a “key” into a little hole, and seeing if there’s one of six brightly colored bouncy balls is inside. If there’s a ball inside, you get to add it to the tube on the right; if not, the turn moves to the next person. After all six balls are put in the tube the treasure chest pops open, everyone says, “Yay! We won!” and you start over.

Basically, it’s opening little boxes (with a key no less) and looking for pretty balls. What could possibly be more fun? Unless you’ve deeply offended the luck fairy, everyone will find at least one ball and as long as you emphasize, “That’s okay - try again next time!” it’s a great chance to work on turn taking (especially since the key moves with the turn). It’s also really fun to have a game where everyone legitimately gets to share an obvious win.

My oldest loved this game, eventually loving it to death, popping off all the doors and losing the balls.

The new one seems even better – the doors come with reversible cards for more advanced matching – but it’s still just as popular. It took my daughter about three minutes to master it and only about five to get her to echo back, “That’s okay - try again!” when she failed to find a ball. Considering her speech and social delays, I was thrilled – matching she can do, but dealing with disapointment and taking turns can be a challenge.

Anyway, what with Christmas looming I thought I should through out my suggestion for an oldie but a goodie.

Cariboo gets a 2 chair rating in my household – as in, ‘my daughter dragged two ridiculously heavy chairs into the library in an attempt to liberate her beloved game from the top shelf’.

And if that doesn’t convince you, then nothing will.

While my son has worked his way past the excellent beginner BOB books, he’s by no means a flawless and accomplished reader – and that’s okay. He’s only six, after all. But it does mean that we’re always on the lookout for beginner readers that he 1) is capable of reading with minimal guidance and 2) is interested enough in to sit and just look through on his own. The Step into Reading edition of David and the Giant is both.

One of their Level 2 readers, it has a little more text and a lot more plot that he’s been reading, but they do a good job of keeping the narrative clean and the wording simple. In short, it’s a charming, easy to read edition of a familiar story. It lists for $3.99, but since WalMart (which I normally think is t3h 3vil) has a good selection of early readers for $2.50, it might be worth a special trip.

(Oh, and for those who are wondering, it manages to stay fairly true to the original story without being overly gory, preachy, or smarmy – an accomplishment in and of itself.)

Picture, if you will, the idyllic scene of an adorable pig-tailed preschooler, perched on Mama’s knee, book in hand and rapt with attention. Now picture the same child (but much dirtier) crawling around my lap and up and over my head before yanking the book out of my hand in order to rapidly flip through the pages herself.

Now guess which scene is the norm at my house.

It’s not that she doesn’t love books – she loves to look through brightly illustrated picture books, preferably featuring her favorite tv characters. But as much as she loves looking at Dora, she just doesn’t have the patience to sit through the direct-from-tv-scripted text.

Hola! It’s Valentine’s day! Boots and I just finished making a valentine’s card for my grandma! Mi abuela! We’ve also got a special Valentine’s Day surprise for her.
WIll you help us bring the surprise to Grandma’s house? Great!

This is all on the opening page. Needless to say, by the time we get to the special surprise, Bug’s grabbed the book and flipped the page herself.

Which is why we love the Maisy books. Instead of me having to make up my own story in order to keep pace with her manic page flipping (“Look! There’s Dora and Boots! Hi, Dora! Hi, Boots” insert page turn noise here), most of the Maisy books are just flat out geared for small kids with no attention span.

Take Maisy’s Train. For starters, it’s a board book – perfect for violent page turners. Second, it’s illustrated in bright, primary colors, with simple illustrations. Third, it’s only about 16 pages long. Last, and more importantly, the text consists of simple descriptions of what’s going on in the pictures and only takes 5 or 6 seconds to read – about the length of time it takes to look the picture over and turn the page.

Maisy is driving her train today. All aboard. Toot-toot.

insert page turn noise here

We’re off to the country. Hello, Geese!

It’s that basic. And yet at their best, the Maisy books are also utterly charming and entertaining. Reading Maisy’s Fire Engine makes that same wiggly girl fall off my lap giggling with delight instead of impatience.

Now, there’s a whole herd of Maisy books and videos (the videos are largely the book and text set to calm, entetaining music – we’re rather fond of those, too). There’s board books, paper books, flap books, slide/pull tab books, and a book that turns into a paper doll house. My daughter has matured a little and is now willing to sit through just about anything Maisy, but some of the stories are a little snappier than others, and different sets tend to follow different themes. For instance, Where Are Maisy’s Friends? and Where is Maisy’s Panda are two of our favorite Lift-the-Flap books where Maisy’s searching for something (“Who’s that hiding under the bed?”) – really basic and especially fun for hands-on kids. Maisy Drives the Bus and Maisy’s Pool are inexpensive paper picture books that have a bit more of a story and which my daugter adores. Maisy’s Big Flap Book is more of an activity book than a story (“Maisy and Tallulah work in the garden. Look how many flowers they have grown! Can you count the flower and bugs in each row?” proceed to flip up 15 flower flaps) but what’s not to love about an oversized board book with flaps? Some of the pull-tab books I’ve seen are also lots of fun, but much more fragile.

Gotta kid who won’t sit still for storytime? Try Maisy – the illustrations are always charming, the text is always simple, and with flaps, pulls and dozens of titles to choose from, there’s bound to be something your little wiggler will enjoy.

So, despite my moniker, I haven’t been blogging much in the way of books. Don’t get me wrong – I love books. My kids love books, my spouse loves books – if we ever manage to get a cat, it’ll probably read, too.

I just couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do.

Amazon is rife with “so, you want to read a good mystery/kid’s book/slime monster story” categories, so I wasn’t really sure I wanted to do that. That being said, I finally decided that since I tend to be so passionate about books that I love, that I’d recommend those. I’m going to try and categorize them in some kind of useful way and not worry about whether they’re new, old, popular or educational or even dreadful overexposed.

Since both my kids are very visual learners (and very wiggly), I’ve decided to start with “beginner picture books for wiggly kids” and “beginner read alouds for wiggly kids”. For my purposes, picture books are geared for the “hurry up and turn the darn page!” crowd – usually toddlers and preschoolers – and the read alouds are picture intensive books that still tell an actual story that a more visual learner (in our case, a kid with audio processing delays) can keep track of and enjoy. If your child can sit quietly and listen to Beezus and Ramona or Peter Pan and be able to tell you what’s going on, then they’re beyond these books. They’d probably still enjoy them, but they’d be capable of more. My son isn’t – as much as he loves books, he’s only capable of processing and keeping track of so much information per page. Which is to say, while he does fairly well with the beginner Five in a Row books, but is totally unprepared for the Sonlight Core 1 Readers that we just bought.

So for Gabe, we’re focusing on getting better retention and more content out of the read alouds he’s capable of listening to – and I’m going to try reviewing/making a functional list of them as we go.

And for Sophia, I’m going to try to start keeping track of the books that she loves and is wiling to listen to.

Most of all, I’m trying to find and catalogue good books that my kids love. And if you happen to be one of those parents with wiggly kids, or visual kids, or kids with some other developmental impairment, maybe they’ll love them, too.