Celebrating New Learners

     Celebrating with Ruth Ayres and others today. Come visit to see how wonderful it is to celebrate the good things in one's life! This week especially, I want to celebrate Ruth's new book Enticing Hard-to-Reach Writers. It is a special book!

The view out the window.

A view of part of the store. There is more and a
full basement of shelves of books, too.

Just a glimpse of what's on the
shelves today.

      Working at the bookstore with the volunteers and the customers is a lot like working with a class. Each person is unique in what they need, each one tries to be kind and helpful. I'm beginning to know certain customers. Some like to talk about books, while others give me a wave, and move on past me into the store to browse or to look for a specific book. There are quite a few volunteers, some work weekly on one shift; others work only once a month, and for those really new, it's a challenge to remember so many details every four weeks. Today I stayed with a volunteer for the final part of her shift, did some other needed work, but sat and visited, answered questions, gave tips, and asked for her opinions too. I remember how nervous I was at the beginning. I had never run a charge machine before. I didn't know all the areas/topics in the store and didn't know the pricing either. There are so many details to know, just as students must navigate new expectations. Students at least get to know their teachers, but those "selling" at the store even once a week struggle to learn it all fast. Although they can call or email me most any time, and I send an email once a week to the group, they are on their own most of the time, learning how to run a bookstore! 
      Many of the volunteers are retired, although some who work on weekends are not. I celebrate the volunteers today because they give their time and energy to keep the store going, and they are willing to take new learning challenges. I am grateful for them all.

Poetry Friday - It's Personal

          Jama Rattigan of Jama's Alphabet Soup is hosting today, delighting us with tasty, yes!, donuts! If you do not prefer this sweet or partake only once in a long while, she offers a poem and an entire book of donut poems! Thanks for hosting, Jama!

          As most of you know, Michelle H. Barnes at Today's Little Ditty hosts another poet nearly every month who then offers a poetic challenge to anyone who wishes to write to it. Here is the post for this month and the challenge from Carol Hinz, Editorial Director of Millbrook Press and Carolrhoda Books, divisions of Lerner Publishing Group: Returning to my favorite quote from earlier, I would like your readers to write a poem that finds beauty in something that is not usually considered beautiful. The quote Carol refers to is "It’s startling how I start to see the beauty in things that I was taught not to see beauty in."
                                 —STEiNUNN

      Here is one idea: 

It’s Personal

Denied - appreciation until - the respiration

of a baby’s gasp and cry,

when we wheeze and gulp and sigh,

or in loss, we say goodbye.

We ignore this bashful beauty -

a mistake we shouldn’t make.

Whisper “thank you” when you wake

for every breath you take.

Linda Baie ©All Rights  

photo credit: megan leetz via photopin (license)

Learning From The Past

    Visit Alyson Beecher on Wednesdays for Non-Fiction Picture Books at Kidlit Frenzy.  From Alyson and others, you will discover terrific nonfiction picture books!
       

         Frida Kahlo and Her Animalitos is based on the life of one of the world's most influential painters, Frida Kahlo, and the animals that inspired her art and life. Written by Monica Brown and illustrated by John Parra who also created Waiting for The Biblioburro, it's a new look at Frida from an imagined childhood and then adult perspective. The afterword says that Frida really didn't have her most famous pets until adulthood, but Monica Brown explains she has tried to show the magic and creativity that sustained Kahlo in her early challenges, and then throughout adulthood. Frida contracted polio at age six and had a terrible bus accident as a teen, both of which kept her bedridden for months.

         Brown's story tells of Frida's beloved pets—two monkeys, a parrot, three dogs, two turkeys, an eagle, a black cat, and a fawn—and shows the imaginary connections she made in art with those animals. For example, when sick as a young child, Brown tells that Frida drew a door in the window mist, and pretended she could walk right through that door and play "like a kitten," thus showing the playful side of Frida's personality. Parra's bright, full-color pages show a curious girl,  and then a woman enjoying and loving her animals, nature, and painting.

       I didn't know very much about Frida Kahlo before reading this book, but looked for her paintings, especially with her beloved animals and there are many. There are several with parrots, one of which is called Bonito. In this story, Brown shows that Bonito slept with Frida sometimes and begged for butter pats at the dinner table. I'm wondering if all of the things told in the story are true, at least at Frida's young age that Monica Brown wrote or John Parra showed, but her gifts of art demonstrated in the book are illuminated beautifully by showing the influences of these 'animalitos' on Frida.

         I enjoyed that Monica Brown emphasized the importance of Frida's living "in a house the color of a parrot's bright blue feather--La Casa Azul." This information is repeated in some way throughout the book because Frida lived there all her life, died there and now it is a museum of her work. Here's a picture:

Reading Pleasures

              Visit Jen at Teach MentorTexts and Kellee and Ricki at UnleashingReaders to discover books you'll love!  Thanks to Jen, Kellee and Ricki who share so much from their own reading lives and support this meme, too.

         

         This first book is a rather fun serendipity that happened to me this week. In addition to starting the book about darling mice dancers, I was trying to catch mice in my house. While I love the books that are written about tiny mice leading extraordinary "human" lives. my "house mice" simply had a wonderful time eating out of a box of dog bones that I keep for visiting dogs. They are gone, and no more need be written.

       Thanks to Candlewick for the advanced copy of this book, out just a few weeks ago.

        Young Esmeralda mouse, the main character in a new holiday story has quite an adventure while saving a production of The Nutcracker in a marvelous holiday tale from the author of The Gingerbread Pirates and the illustrator of A Series of Unfortunate Events.

         Imagine what mice really think when they learn the story of the new ballet titled The Nutcracker when mice are shown as villains. Hidden in Saint Petersburg’s famed Mariinsky Theater are the world’s tiniest ballet fans: the Mariinsky mice. Esmeralda is one of the troupe, a dancer aspiring to be a star in the Russian Mouse Ballet Company. Through a horrible accident with a trap, the lead has been injured and Esmeralda has just been assigned the lead role of Clara in a ballet debuting at Christmas: The Nutcracker. She knows that the mice of Saint Petersburg won’t support a production of this new ballet with mice as the enemy.

         On the human side of the story, nine-year-old Irina is convinced that the mice she’s seen in the Mariinsky — the mice her father, the custodian, is supposed to exterminate — are not only fans of the ballet, but dancers themselves. No one will believe her, so Irina must help save the mice others want gone . . . and perhaps to help Esmeralda save the future of the mouse company.  It is a tale for anyone who has seen and loved this holiday production. The dance descriptions and the new characters introduced, even rats as friends, created a new world that young readers will love Kristin Kladstrup’s ballet fantasy features artwork by illustrator Brett Helquist, tense drama in the mouse escapades especially, and a good bit of Christmas magic.           

           In a rhyming story, Caroline Starr Rose has written the rip-roaring story of the legendary Bill Cody who rode for the Pony Express in his teens, and it is told that he met a challenge one time out of need. He supposedly rode 21 horses in 21 hours and forty minutes straight. Joe Lillington’s illustrations fill the pages with never-ending energy as young Bill Cody, later known as Buffalo Bill, rode and rode again. The rule was that the riders changed rides at certain stations, but Bill got to the stations this time only to find there was no rider ready, so he changed horses often: “Trade a Morgan for a Pinto,/Bronco for a Thoroughbred./Racing, flying,/ever riding,/hurry, hurry on ahead.” The book will be great for anyone studying western history, Buffalo Bill or other western figures. There’s a great added piece from the author at the end.

Celebrating Ten Things

     Celebrating with Ruth Ayres and others today. Come visit to see how wonderful it is to celebrate the good things in one's life! 

      Life fills up before I know it, with good things, and then not so good. I am sad for the children of our world who hear news like the deaths this week, and those not long ago, and those from hurricanes. I know I'm supposed to be celebrating, yet on one level, I feel the stress of news and wonder how it will affect the children. One former student, now a teacher, lamented the challenge of having lockdown practice with her class, and the hard conversations necessary to help them answer worried questions. 

      And I do find much beauty too, in the people in my life, in nature, in words. Thus, I celebrate. . .

1. the smiles of children Halloween night, holding sacks up to be delighted with one more piece of candy
2. the expertise of workers helping me assess a water heater and change my car's headlight
3. the friendliness of checkers at my grocery who act as if we're old friends, ask how I've been, how everything is
4. my granddaughters' happiness when I arrive to pick them up at school, saying things like "Hurrah, it's Grandma day!"
5. customers at the bookstore needing help to find books "just right" for travel
6. co-workers at the store sharing their enthusiasm for new donations
7. beautiful books with stories of resilience, like Ruth's and others  
8. nature's beauty, every day a new discovery
9. a new group of support formed from my recent Highlights poetry retreat
10. the love and support given by my brother to his good friend when others stayed away

       "We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures." ~Thornton Wilder