Unforseen Side Effects of an Expensive Education

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, I had the opportunity to spend 6 years of my life pursuing advanced degrees in English. This is an opportunity for which I am grateful--and for which I am still making monthly payments. Upon the completion of said degrees, I chose to make a career shift. Now I stay home with my children. Despite the inherent challenges, I love it. However, early on I encountered an unexpected problem: while reading books to my young daughter I had to repeatedly suppress the urge to make edits to the texts with a Sharpie. I am grateful for my daughter's love of books, but after being nearly driven to distraction several times by the repeated reading of books I couldn't stand, I started making lists. I noted various authors and titles that I could read over and over without being overcome with the urge to poke out my eyes. Now, with this blog, I endeavor to share these eye-poke-less (in my opinion) books with my other Mom and Dad friends. Hopefully this will help to make story time more enjoyable for everyone. Perhaps it will even save you from finding yourself spinning a web of white lies in order to cover up the fact that you hid that one book you couldn't stand to read even one more time under the couch...

Friday, February 25, 2011

birdsongs

By Betsy Franco and Steve Jenkins

I have a very active and precocious 4 year-old. If she is left with too much unstructured time, mayhem ensues. In order to combat this, I have taken to planning various activities at the start of the week. I also have a very active 15 month-old, so I have to plan these things and gather the supplies beforehand so I can just whip them out at strategic intervals in order to ward off chaos and destruction. Being a book nerd, I like to have books to supplement and support these activities. One of the things we did this week was to watch birds at our bird feeder (a favorite activity, as is evidenced by the quantity of face and finger prints on the window by the feeder...) and look up each bird in an old book I got from my parents. My 15 month-old pointed to each bird and shouted "quack, quack, quack!" and my 4 year-old got so interested in looking things up that she eventually abandoned the birds and looked through the entire Reader's Digest Guide to North American Wildlife (which is actually pretty cool). In both cases, I deem it a success.
I've read birdsongs to my oldest several times before and thought of it again as I was preparing the above activity. I love Jenkins's illustrations (I wonder if I am supposed to use a different word for them since they are made out of paper instead of drawn or painted?) and have read many of his books to my daughter. I am continually astounded by the intricacy and variations achieved by laying little bits of paper on top of one another. The story is great too--it exposes children to different birds, what they look like, and their calls (this part also provides a fun opportunity for some spirited reading aloud!). It also involves counting and ties it all together with a simple story of a day passing. In the back of the book there are some great facts about each species of bird mentioned. My daughter is always asking me if we can "check up on the computer" about various random topics, and this book provides a great starting point for such explorations. It was also a great supplement to our little birdwatching endeavor.

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