Children, Teaching

Winding down

The school year is almost done, and I only have four more lessons with one of my students (her family goes away for the summer), and one more lesson with my other student (she’ll be attending summer school).  Both girls have made great progress this year, and I’m very pleased with how much they each have learned.  In an ideal world, I’d love to continue tutoring the first girl over the summer, to get her in the best possible position for fourth grade next fall, but it’s not an option since her family won’t be in town.

And then there’s the idea of having my evenings to myself again.  I’ve gotten accustomed to getting home late each evening, devouring a late dinner cooked by Jim, and having only an hour or so before bedtime.  It’s going to be truly lovely to get home at dinner time, relax out on the deck, read a book, enjoy Jim’s guitar playing…as much as I’ve enjoyed tutoring both of these students, it will be a real treat to have some free time this summer.  It will feel like a vacation, though I’ll still be working full-time at my day job.  Pretty good trick.

Summer reading

Ready to go live…I think…

After a long day yesterday setting up our preferences on the summer reading software, I think – hope – that we’re ready to go live with it.  This software should be a good addition to our summer program, since it allows kids to log their reading time (the number of hours they’ve spent reading) from a computer at home or from their vacation destination.  Then when the kids come to the library, the library staff can easily look up how many hours each child has spent reading.  No more shuffling through pages of colored clocks, no more worries about lost clock pages (though, of course, we still have hundreds of the clock pages available for those kids who would rather keep track that way).  It’s pretty cool, and will be linked from the library’s home page for ease of use.  I can even update the messages on the front page of this summer reading site to reflect upcoming events and other pertinent summer reading information.  And best of all, I’ll have some really great statistics at the end of the summer, easily transfered to Excel format (now that I’m an Excel devotee, this totally excites me; the Abby of ten years ago is rolling her eyes at the me of today).

So today I’ll write up the parent information letter for the school packets, to be delivered starting on Monday, and will include all the news and necessary links for this new program.  Hopefully the kids who participate this summer will be as excited about this as I am!

Librarianship, Summer reading

Summer

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Last year was my first summer reading program, and I was very, very stressed out in the weeks leading up to the start of summer reading.  I had thought that this year would be completely easy, since my worries of changing the prize structure and adding a charitable donation would be gone (everyone loved those two elements last summer), and the scheduling of events would be much smoother.

In truth, though, I’m still quite stressed out this year.  All of the performers were booked in January, all of the prizes were ordered & delivered & are sitting in boxes in my office, the calendar is complete and in the process of being printed (only 100 copies at a time so the copier doesn’t overheat); but I’m still stressed.  Moving into the new building threw me off schedule in some ways, and I haven’t been able to jump back on that schedule track yet because of the increased business at the new library.  A happy problem, to be sure, but for an organized person like me it’s a bit torturous to know that I’m not completely up to date with my work tasks.  And then we throw summer reading into the mix: the flurry of activity necessary before the summer starts would have thrown me off schedule for other things anyway, and in this case it’s just throwing me further off schedule.

Ack, I’m getting stressed out just writing about it.  Hopefully it will be quiet at work today so that I can check many, many things off of my “ongoing list extraordinaire.”  Or else there won’t be much sleeping tonight for me…

Library events, Picture book review

Coming in the fall…

I just received a confirmation email from Random House that Tad Hills will definitely be coming to visit the library in the fall (exact date yet to be decided).

For those of you who don’t know, Tad Hills has written and illustrated two great picture books, Duck and Goose and Duck, Duck Goose.  I absolutely LOVE these books, and have used Duck and Goose more times than I can count for storytime.  Duck and Goose, the two main characters, have so much personality, and the pictures are funny and the colors are fantastic.  The storyline alternates masterfully from pages with a lot of text to pages with very little text, making it a long story that is easy to read aloud, even to a young group. 

And I love hearing the kids tell Duck and Goose, with amused exasperation, “That’s not an egg!!  It’s a BALL!!!!!”

Blog administration

The nightmare that is my blog: a cautionary tale

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As some of you may have noticed, there have been some funky things going on with my blog of late.  It all began when I decided to sit outside on the deck one afternoon with my laptop to write a blog entry.  Since we have dial-up service at our house (dark ages, I know), I wrote the entry in Word, then later went into the house and cut-and-pasted the entry into my blog software. 

Now, it should be noted, I had done this before – several times before, though not recently.  Mostly I write my blog entries directly into the WordPress software, but I had successfully used the Word technique in January and February of this year.

But the most recent time I used it, for an ill-fated entry titled “Yellow Star,” I managed to cause the death of my blog.  Apparently there are some hidden Word commands that WordPress can’t understand, and the end result of these communication issues for me was that I could no longer log on to my blog.

Dennis of Deerfield Hosting did all that he could to help me, and went way above and beyond the call of duty to help.  When Dennis figured out what had happened to my blog, and told me that it couldn’t easily be fixed, I dialed 1-800-call-Dan and begged my ever-patient, ever-wise big brother for help.

Dan set me up with a new blog (you’ll notice that the address is now abbykingsbury.org/books, not /blog), and gave me specific instructions on how to transfer over entries from my old blog to my new one.  But I’m the youngest in the family, and a bit stubborn and impetuous at times, and I didn’t fully obey Dan’s wise instructions.

Once I saw that it was going to take weeks, if not many months, to transfer my old entries over, and once I figured out that my own family members (husband, father, and sister included) had not yet found the blog’s new location, I sent an email to Dennis to see if he could put a note on my old blog to send readers to my new blog.

Bad Abby.  Bad, bad Abby.  Dan told you to wait to do this until AFTER moving all the entries over!!

Dennis very kindly responded to my request by redirecting all traffic from my old blog over to my new blog address.  Wonderful!  Now people can find me!  But wait – oh, no!  Now I can’t access my old entries!!!  All is lost, lost I tell you, a year’s worth of writing gone – fffttt – into cyber-oblivion!  Oh, woe is me, why didn’t I listen to my brother???

You guessed it: I called Dan again.  Dan is amazing, and I owe him BIG TIME.  He suggested that I google my blog and search for cached entries.  And that I do this fast, since those cached entries won’t last forever.

At first Dan’s advice didn’t seem to work.  My jaw clenched, some bad words came spitting out of the corners of my mouth, and my husband beat a hasty and well-timed retreat to an early bedtime.  Smart man. 

But after 3 hours of fusting around, doing some creative google searches for my blog, I’ve finally been able to copy all of my archived entries (I think) into several Word documents that I’ve titled “desperate,” “desperate 2,” “desperate 3,” and so on.  There’s no rhyme or reason to the order of the entries I’ve copied, since I searched by categories, months, and finally exact dates, and there are many duplications along the way.  Sorting this mess out will be much like untangling a large skein of kite string after the kite has gone crashing down into the ocean and dragged and sputtered across the beach. 

And, of course, I’d be a fool to use those Word files to reinstate my blog entries into WordPress.  My plan is to retype everything directly into the blog software (luckily I’m a fast typist) over the next few months.  Tedious, to be sure.  And, sorry to say, I’ve lost many of your comments along the way, since the links from each entry to the comments no longer function.  My apologies, and my regret: the reader comments are usually the best part of this blog.

At any rate, let my experience be a lesson to you.  Never let Word and WordPress communicate with each other, and always listen to your big brother. 

Man, am I going to be tired tomorrow.

Book groups, Children's book reviews, Children's literature

Green Glass Sea

Yesterday was the last fifth grade book group of the school year (though we’ll have one meeting in July), and it was the best yet.  This group of kids has evolved so much over this year, and they are now the most thoughtful, well-spoken, intelligent, and respectful bunch of fifth graders that I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing. 

Our book was The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages, a piece of historical fiction about the building of the atomic bomb in Los Alamos.  Dewey, the main character, is ten when the story starts in 1943; we begin with her being transported out to Los Alamos to join her scientist father who has been working there for a while.  The story continues up to the dropping of the first bomb on Hiroshima, and a sequel is in the works.

The kids loved the book.  And I mean LOVED the book.  This really surprised me, since I had kind of pulled a fast one on them to even get this book into the mix for a group discussion (they had summarily rejected this book in favor of a cowboy story, and I was regretfully going along with their choice until I figured out there weren’t enough copies of the cowboy story available, and I snuck The Green Glass Sea back in).  The group is half girls, half boys, and everyone really liked the misfit, nerdy character of Dewey.  The girls loved that Dewey is a pioneer, a girl who excels at science and experiments, and that she doesn’t care about what other people think of her.  The boys respected Dewey’s intelligence, and one commented extensively on how being a “nerd” isn’t necessarily a bad thing.   

Another member of the group, who I swear is better educated and more intelligent at the end of fifth grade than I am now, got us into a conversation about the differences between boys and girls.  The conversation arose because I mentioned the tension between the pair of married scientist characters in the book (the wife begins to have serious misgivings about using the bomb on civilians, while her husband is too wrapped up in the excitement of scientific success to see her point), and Aaron commented that boys grow up playing with soldiers and loving war, while girls are more peaceful.  There was some bristling of other group members as he said that, but eventually we were able to discuss that yes, there are some differences between men and women, and that we also need to be careful not to make blanket, stereotypical statements about any group.

Peter, another group member, then said: “It’s really not fair that men can get drafted to go to war, but women can’t.  Everyone’s equal, so drafting should be equal, too.”  A lot of eyes opened wide, as the truth of that statement hit home.  Then Peter started to talk about the cruelty of the atomic bomb, and how hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed.  Which started an excellent conversation about war and why the atomic bomb was created in the first place.

We covered so much ground in our conversation that it would be hard to remember all of the group’s insightful comments; and this post would become more than long.  So let me just finish with a comment from Jill:  she told us that her teacher had informed her that this book was too difficult for her, and that the fifth grade library book group shouldn’t be reading it because it would be too hard for fifth graders to understand.  Jill was incensed by her teacher’s comment, and so she finished the book that weekend and then wrote a voluntary two-page summary and critical analysis of the book, which she turned in to her teacher on Monday morning.

No word on the teacher’s reaction…

Spare time - Culture

A beautiful day

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Today’s weather was fabulous:  clear, dry, not too hot, blue sky.  Jim and I spent the whole day outside, working on the latest projects.  I got all of the plants from Hutchins Farm in the garden, and even bought a few more from Idylwilde Farm for some container gardens.  Can’t wait until they start blooming.

 Jim had been working on the siding of the house while I planted the plants.  Once I was done, I joined him.  And we got ambitious: we ripped off the vinyl siding on most of the remainder of the house, finding some fairly good clapboards on the dining room exterior walls, and finding some absolute nightmare clapboards on the north wall by the back door, foyer, and bathroom window.  Blech.  Too short clapboards had been terribly pasted together, and over the years water from the incorrectly installed gutters had poured down between the vinyl siding and the clapboards, making for a rotten, moldy, disgusting mess.    Blech.  I held the ladder as Jim ripped the old siding off, and I’ve never been dirtier.  Floods of dirt and dead bugs and spider webs and rotted leaves poured down on my head (thank goodness for the baseball cap) and – until I learned better – into my mouth.  Blech.

Jim and I are fans of Christopher Guest’s movies, most especially Waiting for Guffman, Spinal Tap, A Mighty Wind, and Best in Show.  As we surveyed the damaged house that we had uncovered today, we both thought of one of our favorite lines from Best in Show, as Cookie and Jerry Fleck pull up to a “friend’s” house:

“What a shitbox!  I thought you said they got a better place?”

“They did…” 

Blog administration

Dear Readers…

Well, my blog chose a terrible time to crash:  right before the start of summer reading.  Without a doubt, this is my most stressful time of year, as I finish all the last minute preparations for the summer program. 

Please bear with me as I try to juggle my huge schedule right now; I’ll do my best to add some new entries here, and to also move older entries over from my original blog.  🙂

Blog administration

A new home for “Children and Books”

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A week ago, my blog stopped functioning. I couldn’t add new posts, and couldn’t edit old ones. My administration team and I finally figured out that the old site could not be saved, so we installed an entirely new blog. Gradually, I’ll be moving old posts over to this new site. And of course I’ll be adding new posts here as well.

Stay tuned for more “Children and Books”!

Book groups

Yellow Star

Last Tuesday the Teen Book Groups met.  My group had read Yellow Star by Jennifer Roy, with the option to also read Day of Tears by Julius Lester.  In the end, only three of the seven girls enrolled were able to attend the meeting (it’s softball season), but those three and I had an involved, serious, deep discussion about Yellow Star (only one of the three had read Lester’s book) and the broader issues of prejudice, war, and the Holocaust. 

In Yellow Star, Roy relates the story of her aunt’s childhood in the Lutz ghetto in free verse, portraying the thoughts and experiences of a little girl who was one of only twelve child survivors of that ghetto.  Mesmerizing and intense, the incredibly moving story is a read-in-one-sitting book, because there is no way to stop once you’ve been sucked into the vortex of its horror and beauty. 

As we discussed the book, I noticed a couple of things: that it is virtually impossible to snack on Munchkins and pretzels while talking about a book that concerns starvation and deprivation, and that it can be very hard to have a detailed conversation about a book like this one.  We talked how and why Roy had chosen to write in free verse, and we brought up our feelings about certain specific incidents in the book, but our discussion was far shorter than the one we had about the mystery novel Blackthorn Winter.  How to critique an excellent, but spare, piece of historical fiction?

In the end, our conversation turned to the Holocaust in general, films that the girls had seen in classes, books that they had read prior to this one.  One girl brought up The Diary of Anne Frank, and we spent a good portion of the group meeting discussing Anne Frank.  The girl who had brought up the topic is totally frustrated by Anne and her human foibles, such as that Anne wasa still thinking and writing about makeup and boys while others were being tortured and killed in concentration camps.  “How could that be?” questioned this girl, “How could Anne be preoccupied with things like that while in the midst of the Holocaust?”

To me, the natural answer is that, despite the Nazis, Anne was still a teenage girl.  I tried to explain how I thought that I probably would have been the same way if I had been in those circumstances while a teenager, but I know I didn’t make myself clear.  Don’t we all have idealized notions of how brave we could be, how superhuman we could be, how kind and clear-headed and generous we could be, if we were put into a trying circumstance?  I’d like to think that I’d be exemplary, but in truth I’m sure that I’d disappoint myself in my human pettiness.  It was interesting to see a smart, kind, thoughtful teenage girl’s idealism, and to realize the effect that idealism had on her reading of The Diary of Anne Frank. 

So we solved no issues, but we did have a discussion that left all of us feeling like we had accomplished something.  The next three books we’ll be reading for this group are not as serious, but perhaps we’ll sneak a serious book in again next fall and see where it leads us.

Reflections on children, literature, libraries, and life…and cats.