From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

When suburban Claudia Kincaid decides to run away, she knows she doesn't just want to run from somewhere she wants to run to somewhere--to a place that is comfortable, beautiful, and preferably elegant. She chooses the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Knowing that her younger brother, Jamie, has money and thus can help her with the serious cash flow problem she invites him along. Once settled into the museum, Claudia and Jamie, find themselves caught up in the mystery of an angel statue that the museum purchased at an auction for a bargain price of $225. The statue is possibly an early work of the Renaissance master Michelangelo, and therefore worth millions. Is it? Or isn't it? Claudia is determined to find out. This quest leads Claudia to Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, the remarkable old woman who sold the statue and to some equally remarkable discoveries about herself.

I picked this book because I fell in love with it the first time I read it in 3rd grade and I'm still in love with it. I am a bit like Claudia, I never ever saw the point of running away, especially when running to somewhere is so much more exciting.
I think one of the best things about this books that it can be used to teach so much: art apprieciation, art history, history, how to do research and what I think is an important accomplishment: living in NYC for a week on $26.35.

Nancy Drew History

Because lets face it: Nancy Drew is a part of everyone's childhood.

For over 75 years, Nancy Drew has trailblazed through generations, her enduring and forever timeless quality a huge part of her appeal. She endured through the depression era of the 1930's and the war-torn 1940's when many other series were discontinued and waned in popularity. There are many factors that have led to the success of Nancy.
In the beginning she was just a name, just a few pages of plot at the hands of creator, Edward Stratemeyer and his Stratemeyer Syndicate. She debuted at a time when girls were ready for something different--something that gave them higher ideals. Nancy was the embodiment of independence, pluck, and intelligence and that was what many little girls craved to be like and to emulate.
It was Mildred A. Wirt Benson, who breathed such a fiesty spirit into Nancy's character. Mildred wrote 23 of the original 30 Nancy Drew Mystery Stories. It was this characterization that helped make Nancy an instant hit. The Stratemeyer Syndicate's devotion to the series over the years under the reigns of Harriet Stratemeyer Adams helped to keep the series alive and on store shelves for each succeeding generation of girls and boys. Nancy was always Harriet's favorite. Harriet's dedication to the series helped tremendously in ensuring that Nancy is still around today and likely will be for many years to come.
The original publishers, Grosset & Dunlap, played a huge role in the success of Nancy Drew. From their marketing strategies to their many salesmen, they kept the series in widespread distribution so that children from all around the country and later in foreign countries could discover Nancy's exciting world.
It was Grosset & Dunlap who helped choose the original artist, Russell H. Tandy, to illustrate the series. His illustrations have been a huge factor in Nancy's success. They were sophisticated and classy. They brought to life the character of Nancy very memorably and no doubt helped sales as children were attracted to the glamorous covers.
Each succeeding generation of women and men who read the books as children, have passed them down to siblings, to children, to grandchildren and have kept alive the memories of reading Nancy as a child. Nostalgia plays a large factor in the continuing success of the series, which is still published today by Simon & Schuster, who helped bring Nancy Drew into the modern era.

Why read nursery rhymes?

The following is an article I found that I thought was very interesting:
Omitting nursery rhymes from your child's library not only leaves a gap in the cultural literacy foundation, but also robs them of some delightfully frivolous fun.Most parents want their children to achieve in every way possible. But they may also wrongly expect everything the child does, sees, and hears to have an academic purpose. Even if they do see the value of rhymes for learning the patterns of language, Mother Goose may seem to them simply outdated poems that can be effectively replaced with Dr. Seuss, Jack Prelutsky, or Shel Sliverstein.

The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim is an academic explanation of the psychological value of fairy tales and nursery rhymes for a child's development. Bettelheim holds that these childhood stories have great value in teaching children that "a struggle against severe difficulties in life is unavoidable, is an intrinisc part of human existance--but that if one does not shy away, but steadfastly meets unexpected and often unjust hardships, one masters all obstacles and at the end emerges victorious."Others have tried to dissect the historical backgrounds and hidden meanings of the nursery rhymes in an effort to give them a "value."But the reality is that although Mother Goose has value as poetry and may give children a structure by which to playact their deepest fears, and may also have interesting historical connections, many of them are simply nonsense. But children need time to play, laugh, and speak the nonsense of these rhymes. If childhood is totally devoid of nonsense, where is the wonder and joy of those years? The magic of the rhymes is their simple ability to please the child who hears and recites them. And to please a child is really reason enough to read Mother Goose rhymes.
http://www.squidoo.com/rhymesofmothergoose

I also found out that there is a Mother Goose Day. It is celebrated on May 1st and these are a few ideas on how you can celebrate:

• Get several editions of Mother Goose Rhymes and compare how different illustrators have depicted the same characters. Fine artists all have their own ways of illustrating the rhymes. This can be carried further by having a discussion of opinions on which illustrations best show the characters in the eyes of the particular reader.
• Have small groups act out skits of different rhymes (with only a few minutes to put together their acts). A variation on this is to give each group the rhyme to act out in pantomime, and have the other groups guess which rhyme is being acted.
• Another variation on acting out the rhymes is to play traditional Charades, with nursery rhymes as the focus.
• Search out the Mother Goose rhymes which are set to music and have a Mother Goose Songfest.
• Seek out Mother Goose Rhymes which have fingerplay actions, and teach them to the children.
• Have participants cook together to make a simple recipe associated with a Mother Goose rhyme. Ie. "Curds and Whey," associated with Little Miss Muffet is an old term for cottage cheese; "Pease Porridge" is thick pea soup. A surprisingly tasty snack is to put pea soup as a spread (directly from the can with no liquid added) on crackers.
• With the right age group, introduce the "rhythm and patter" of a nursery rhyme for writers to imitate in creating their own verses. Have a simple line-by-line recitation of rhymes, with participants taking turns giving the next line. Stay with the better-known rhymes so no one will be embarrassed.
• The most basic way to celebrate is to read aloud from an attractively-illustrated edition of Mother Goose rhymes.
  
  
  

Emily Dickinson bio

Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830. She attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, but severe homesickness led her to return home after one year. Throughout her life, she seldom left her house and visitors were scarce. The people with whom she did come in contact, however, had an enormous impact on her thoughts and poetry. She was particularly stirred by the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, whom she met on a trip to Philadelphia. He left for the West Coast shortly after a visit to her home in 1860, and some critics believe his departure gave rise to the heartsick flow of verse from Dickinson in the years that followed. While it is certain that he was an important figure in her life, it is not certain that this was in the capacity of romantic love—she called him "my closest earthly friend." Other possibilities for the unrequited love in Dickinson’s poems include Otis P. Lord, a Massachusetts Supreme Court Judge, and Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican.
By the 1860s, Dickinson lived in almost total physical isolation from the outside world, but actively maintained many correspondences and read widely. She spent a great deal of this time with her family. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was actively involved in state and national politics, serving in Congress for one term. Her brother Austin attended law school and became an attorney, but lived next door once he married Susan Gilbert (one of the speculated—albeit less persuasively—unrequited loves of Emily). Dickinson’s younger sister Lavinia also lived at home for her entire life in similar isolation. Lavinia and Austin were not only family, but intellectual companions during Dickinson’s lifetime.
Dickinson's poetry reflects her loneliness and the speakers of her poems generally live in a state of want, but her poems are also marked by the intimate recollection of inspirational moments which are decidedly life-giving and suggest the possibility of happiness. Her work was heavily influenced by the Metaphysical poets of seventeenth-century England, as well as her reading of the Book of Revelation and her upbringing in a Puritan New England town which encouraged a Calvinist, orthodox, and conservative approach to Christianity.
She admired the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as well as John Keats. Though she was dissuaded from reading the verse of her contemporary Walt Whitman by rumor of its disgracefulness, the two poets are now connected by the distinguished place they hold as the founders of a uniquely American poetic voice. While Dickinson was extremely prolific as a poet and regularly enclosed poems in letters to friends, she was not publicly recognized during her lifetime. The first volume of her work was published posthumously in 1890 and the last in 1955. She died in Amherst in 1886.
Upon her death, Dickinson's family discovered 40 handbound volumes of more than 800 of her poems, or "fascicles" as they are sometimes called. These booklets were made by folding and sewing five or six sheets of stationery paper and copying what seem to be final versions of poems in an order that many critics believe to be more than chronological. The handwritten poems show a variety of dash-like marks of various sizes and directions (some are even vertical). The poems were initially unbound and published according to the aesthetics of her many early editors, removing her unusual and varied dashes and replacing them with traditional punctuation. The current standard version replaces her dashes with a standard "n-dash," which is a closer typographical approximation of her writing. Furthermore, the original order of the works was not restored until 1981, when Ralph W. Franklin used the physical evidence of the paper itself to restore her order, relying on smudge marks, needle punctures and other clues to reassemble the packets. Since then, many critics have argued for thematic unity in these small collections, believing the ordering of the poems to be more than chronological or convenient. The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (Belknap Press, 1981) remains the only volume that keeps the order intact.

Poem from I Never Saw Anothe Butterfly

The Butterfly

The last, the very last,
So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow.
Perhaps if the sun's tears would sing
against a white stone. . . .
Such, such a yellow
Is carried lightly 'way up high.
It went away I'm sure because it wished to
kiss the world good-bye.
For seven weeks I've lived in here,
Penned up inside this ghetto.
But I have found what I love here.
The dandelions call to me
And the white chestnut branches in the court.
Only I never saw another butterfly.
That butterfly was the last one.
Butterflies don't live in here,
in the ghetto.


Pavel Friedman 4/6/1942

I Never Saw Another Butterfly

I Never Saw Another Butterfly is a collection of poems and drawings done by children who resided in Theresienstadt. Theresienstadt was the model ghetto the Nazi's used to show the Red Cross that they were trying to give the Jewish people a their own settlement, that they could run as they saw fit. In reality Theresienstadt was little more than a way-station for Jews that were later sent to Auschwitz.

Many of the people sent to Theresienstadt were prominant artists and writters, who saw it as their jobs to teach the children of the ghetto. One artist in particular, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, taught the children drawing, it is because of her that so many of the children's drawings have survived: before she was sent to Auschwitz she hide over 4,000 drawings in two suitcases.

A total of 15,000 children under the age of fifteen passed through Theresienstadt between the years 1942-44; less than 100 survived. On my trip to the Czech Republic over spring break I got the chance to see the ghetto as well as many of the drawings done by children. I think what shocked me the most was how graphic some of them were, one drawing was of the shower rooms where people were forced to stripe and then shower in groups. I can't imagine what it would have been like to live through something like that.

What you can do about book banning in your school

Before a Challenge

• Develop a policy for selecting school materials, and establish criteria and procedures for the selection.
• Establish a method for communicating with the community. Keep the community informed of the selection policy as well as educational objectives, curricula, school programs. Provide opportunities for public review and comment on materials being considered for selection.
• Define clear procedures for dealing with complaints.
• Establish guidelines to be used for a formal review of challenged material.
• Create a detailed form for complainants to request a review.
• Identify who will comprise a committee of parents, school personnel, and other community members to review challenged material.
  

After a Challenge

• Meet with the complainant to hear the reasons for the challenge and the complainant's recommendations.
• Explain to the complainant how and why the challenged material was selected.
• Try to resolve the complaint informally. Provide a formal request-for-review form if the complainant still wants to challenge the material.
• Start review procedures immediately upon receiving a written request for review. Inform the school board of the details of the complaint.
• Follow established procedures throughout the review process.
• Communicate openly with the community throughout the review.

Nim's Island

Lately I've been reading Nim's Island by Wendy Orr. I had watched the movie trailer for Nim's Island and never relized that it was a book, so I was super excited when I found it in the children's section of Hastings. It's not a very long book, maybe 150 pages, but it's really good. Just from watching the trailer I can tell that the movie will not be exactly like the book but that it will have the some differences, like the villian for instance.
For anyone interested here's the summary:
A girl. An iguana. An island. And e-mail. Meet Nim–a modern-day Robinson Crusoe! She can chop down bananas with a machete, climb tall palm trees, and start a fire with a piece of glass. So she’s not afraid when her scientist dad sails off to study plankton for three days, leaving her alone on their island. Besides, it’s not as if no one’s looking after her–she’s got a sea lion to mother her and an iguana for comic relief. She also has an interesting new e-mail pal. But when her father’s cell-phone calls stop coming and disaster seems near, Nim has to be stronger and braver than she’s ever been before.

And here's the trailer:

Spring Break

I am soooooooooooooooo excited right now! I leave for Poland/Czech Republic in less than 11 hours. I guess that means I should to pack or may be sleep....

My favorite poem...EVER

Peanut-Butter Sandwich by Shel Silverstein

I’ll sing you a story of a silly young king
Who played with the world at the end of a string,
But he only loved one single thing --And that was just a peanut-butter sandwich.
His scepter and his royal gowns,
His regal throne and golden crowns
Were brown and sticky from the mounds
And drippings from each peanut-butter sandwich.
His subjects all were silly fools
For he had passed a royal rule
That all that they could learn in school
Was how to make a peanut-butter sandwich.
He would not eat his sovereign steak,
He scorned his soup and kingly cake,
And told his courtly cook to bake
An extra-sticky peanut-butter sandwich.
And then one day he took a bite
And started chewing with delight,
But found his mouth was stuck quite tight
From that last bite of peanut-butter sandwich.
His brother pulled, his sister pried,
The wizard pushed, his mother cried,
“My boy’s committed suicide
From eating his last peanut-butter sandwich!”
The dentist came, and the royal doc.
The royal plumber banged and knocked,
But still those jaws stayed tightly locked.
Oh darn that sticky peanut-butter sandwich!
The carpenter, he tried with pliers,
The telephone man tried with wires,
The firemen, they tried with fire,But couldn’t melt that peanut-butter sandwich.
With ropes and pulleys, drills and coil,
With steam and lubricating oil --
For twenty years of tears and toil --
They fought that awful peanut-butter sandwich.
Then all his royal subjects came.
They hooked his jaws with grapplin’ chains
And pulled both ways with might and main
Against that stubborn peanut-butter sandwich.
Each man and woman, girl and boy
Put down their ploughs and pots and toys
And pulled until kerack! Oh, joy --
They broke right through that peanut-butter sandwich.
A puff of dust, a screech, a squeak --
The king’s jaw opened with a creak.
And then in voice so faint and weak --
The first words that they heard him speak
Were, “How about a peanut-butter sandwich?”

Shel Silverstein Bio

Shel Silverstein began writing when he was twelve years old. He would have preferred to be playing ball with children his age, but he had no athletic ability. Also, girls showed no interest in him, so he began to write. He was not familiar with the style of any famous poets. Since he had no one whom he could mimic, he began developing his own technique. In the 1950's, Silverstein enlisted in the armed forces and served in the Korean War. During his time in the military, Shel Silverstein worked as a cartoonist for "Pacific Stars and Stripes," a Pacific-based U.S. military publication. After completing his military duty, he was hired as a staff cartoonist for "Playboy" in 1956. Silverstein contributed several poems including "The Winner," "Rosalie's Good Eats Cafe," and "The Smoke-off" (see links below to read some of these) and wrote the books "Playboy's Teevee Jeebies" and "More Playboy's Teevee Jeebies: Do-It-Yourself Dialogue for the Late Late Show." In 1963, at the suggestion of fellow illustrator Tomi Ungerer, he was introduced to Ursula Nordstrom who convinced him to begin writing for children. One of Silverstein's most popular books, "The Giving Tree," was published in 1964. Ironically, just a few years prior, editor William Cole rejected this book, claiming that it would never sell because it fell between the interests of children and adults. In 1974, Shel Silverstein wrote "Where the Sidewalk Ends," which won the New York Times Outstanding Book Award, 1974, and went on to win the Michigan Young Readers' Award, 1981, and the George G. Stone Award, 1984. He wrote "The Missing Piece" in 1976, a non-traditional books which Silverstein himself sees as being a little "disturbing" because of the unique ending he chose for the book. "A Light In the Attic," a collection of poems and drawings, was published in 1981, and won Best Books, School Library Journal, 1981. This book also won the Buckeye Awards, 1983, and 1985, the George G. Stone Award, 1984, and the William Allen White Award, 1984. The 1981 publication, "The Missing Piece Meets the Big O," a sequel to "The Missing Piece," won the International Reading Association's Children's Choice Award in 1982. His most recent book, "Falling Up: Poems and Drawings," appeared in bookstores in 1996, and has been praised by critics everywhere. Silverstein currently writes and draws for "Playboy," which published his poem "Hamlet as Told on the Street," in the January 1998 issue. Shel Silverstein was drawn to folk music in 1960 and later became a respected composer. He wrote the lyrics for and composed "A Boy Named Sue" in 1969, which became a number one hit for Johnny Cash. He appeared in and composed music for the film "Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Such Terrible Things About Me?," which opened in 1971. In 1980, Mr. Silverstein released a country music album that he recorded entitled "The Great Conch Train Robbery." Shel Silverstein co-wrote the soundtrack for the 1990 film "Postcards From the Edge," which was nominated for an Academy Award for best song in 1991, and for a Golden Globe for the same category and year. Silverstein began writing plays in 1981. One of his best known scripts, "The Lady or the Tiger Show," was a one-act play first produced in New York City in the same year. It was a satire about a game show in which contestants risked their lives by choosing between two doors: behind one is a beautiful woman, and behind the other is a tiger. He also collaborated with David Mamet on the screenplay for the 1988 Colubmia Pictures film "Things Change." He wrote the drama "The Devil and Billy Markham" (see link below for poem and illustrations), which was combined with David Mamet's play "Bobby Gould in Hell" under the collective title "Oh, Hell! Two One-Act Plays," and was produced in New York at the Lincoln Center in 1989.
Shel Silverstein passed away on May 10, 1999 from a heart attack in Key West, Florida.

Found at:http://faculty.weber.edu/chansen/humanweb/projects/MeghanUng/biography.htm

Dr Seuss Quotes

Becasue I'm in a Seussian mood right now.

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.

I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, It's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, And that enables you to laugh at life's realities.

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not. ~ The Lorax

Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.

Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. ~ Oh, The Places You’ll Go!

Today was good. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one.

When beetles fight these battles in a bottle with their paddles and the bottle's on a poodle and the poodle's eating noodles...they call this a muddle puddle tweetle poodle beetle noodle bottle paddle battle. ~ Fox in Socks

So be sure when you step, Step with care and great tact. And remember that life's A Great Balancing Act. And will you succeed? Yes! You will, indeed! (98 and ¾ percent guaranteed) Kid, you'll move mountains. ~ Oh, The Places You’ll Go!