Seedfolks

Today for Children's Lit. class we are supposed to discuss our last book of the semester, Seedfolks by Paul Fleischman. I was going to read it yesterday so I wouldn't be so busy today, but I couldn't find it. I roamed my bookshelf (with my eyes, of course) and counted up nine of the ten children's books we had to buy for the class, but I just couldn't find the last book. So today after my first class I finally consulted my syllabus to find out what it was called and that triggered my brain to recall that it was a small chapter book, not a picture book like most of the others for class. I went and found the book and read it through before Children's Lit. At first glance at the front cover I thought it was going to be an uninteresting book. Boy, was I wrong! If I'd been reading fast I probably could have gotten through the 87-paged book in about half an hour or so. But it actually took me almost two hours to read because I kept stopping and re-reading words, sentences, paragraphs, and sometimes even entire chapters. I was amazed at the writing. It's exactly the type of book I long to write and I was astounded by the emotion and weight carried by the words the author chose. In addition, the brevity of his words astonished me. How he could get those thoughts and feelings across, how he told the reader so much about each character in just one chapter - just a few pages really - was truly astonishing. Seedfolks is definitely one of my new favourite books (and yes I know I say that a lot, but it's really true this time). Especially when I got to the end and found 14 more pages to read, an author's note by Paul Fleischman telling how he got the idea for the story and how he worked to write the characters and the book. I've been inspired, once again, by the children's authors I've been exposed to during this semester while reading 100 children's books for Children's Lit. class.

Dr. Seuss

Today was author study presentation day for our Children's Lit. class. A few weeks ago we paired up and chose our favourite (or one of our favourite) children's author. Then we did an author study on him/her and made a presentation board. And today we got to go to Spalding Elementary to show our presentations and tell the kids about our authors. My partner, Ryan, and I decided to do Dr. Seuss and we got assigned to a grade two classroom along with two other groups. Presenting was a lot of fun although the kids were kind of crazy and wild and VERY talkative because we came just before their recess time. In any case, the teacher split her students up into three groups of five and so each of us had five minutes to tell the kids at our display about our author before they rotated to see one of the other presentations. I had found this neat find-the-differences activity sheet online using two pictures of the Cat in the Hat that had five differences between them so I'd printed out a bunch of those and we had each kid do that. When they'd found all five things Ryan gave them each a Tootsie Roll lollipop and then we told them what we'd learned about Dr. Seuss.


I'd forgotten how amusing kids can be. One little girl in the first group that came to our table informed us that she had 55 Dr. Seuss books. I was greatly impressed since Dr. Seuss wrote around 60 books for kids. A little boy in the second group exclaimed loudly, upon the receiving his lollipop, "Wow, this is my FIFTH dessert today!" (we found out later that the first group of kids at the James Marshall display had pretty much eaten a whole plate of cookies by themselves, some of them taking four or five cookies each). Another boy in the second group told me that he and his sister are Thing 1 and Thing 2. When I asked him why he said, "Because there's two of us." (Of course! Why didn't I think of that?) Then he told me his sister is older and that has always made him mad. I, assuming that he and his sister were twins, asked him how much older and he replied that she was in fourth grade. It took me a second to wrap my brain around the fact that they weren't twins and by the time I figured it out he was already off of the Thing 1 and Thing 2 subject and was telling me that the activity sheet was "soooo easy." So the kids were fun to talk to and interact with. I just hope they will actually remember one or two things about Dr. Seuss. Maybe they'll remember that his real name was Theodor Seuss Geisel or that he loved hats and had a huge, diverse collection that he wore as "thinking caps" while he was writing or that he made up another pen name (other than Dr. Seuss, which was both his middle name and his mother's maiden name), Theo LeSieg - his last name backwards. I think maybe at least one of those facts might have stuck with some of the kids we talked to, which makes me happy.

I can't even remember the last time I was in an elementary classroom. Even though I had a lot of fun visiting grade two today, I'm very glad that I'm not an elementary education major. I like kids. I'm even good with kids. But I'm not sure I would be able to think fast enough to keep up to 15 rowdy, rambunctious, rollicking grade two-ers for five days a week, 9ish months a year, much less be able to teach them all they need to learn. I'm pretty thankful I'm a journalism major. Anyway, if you care to see, here's our presentation board.


Ryan gets all the credit for making the hills and the Lorax trees and for designing the middle panel, which would mean that I get the credit for compiling and writing up all the information on the side panels. It guess this group project had a pretty equally-shared work load.

Love That Book

I read Love That Dog by Sharon Creech yesterday. It immediately catapulted right up near the top of my "favourite book" list. Since reading it I've been wondering how in the world people write like that? It's utterly amazing to me. One of the reasons I love reading books written for the pre-teen to young teenager age group is because of the writing. Usually when I finish reading these books, my heart aches to be able to write like their authors. To capture the readers attentions right from the first sentence and keep them captivated until the very last line. I've read books from most every genre and from numerous age categories and I've found that books for young teenagers touch my heart in ways adult books rarely can. I've always claimed that everyone, even adults, can learn from these books. I certainly learned a lot from Love That Dog. Now I need to find the sequel, Hate That Cat.