New read-aloud

In thinking about what children's books to take to Fresno (I hate baggage restrictions--I am sure to have to pay for extra!), I quickly had to pare down to just the skinny ones and the paperbacks. It is important to have fun reading to children, so that was a criteria too.

A couple of the new ones I am taking are by Anne Dewdney. Llama, Llama Red Pajama and Llama Mad at Mama. Red Pajama is a bedtime book and will be very familiar to parents with young children. The newest, Llama Mad at Mama shows Llama Llama and Mama going to Shop-A-Rama on Saturday. It too will touch some lives. The best thing about these books is the expressions Dewdney has given Llama Llama throughout. These are not out in paperback yet, so I had to borrow my grandchildren's copy of Red PJ and buy the new one.

I am also using some cartoons copied out of Mem Fox's Reading Magic: Why Reading Aloud to Our Children Will Change Their Lives Forever. One shows a mother hen reading to her egg; one depicts the Nativity scene with the the magi lined up with their gifts--Jesus turns to Mary and says, "I was really hoping for books."

It will be fun. I will try to innoculate everyone I see with the joy of books.

Children are the same

I have seen too many pictures lately of dead and wounded children in Bagdad. Why, oh, why can we not do something about this dead-end (no pun intended) war? It seems as if our administration were frozen in some Alice in Wonderland scenario--both weird and hard to escape.

Mem Fox is one of my favorite children's authors and critic of current education. She coined the term "to ache with caring" in regard to teachers in her book Radical Reflections. If we all ached with caring maybe we could stop the war.

I recently discovered one of Fox's latest books Whoever You Are in which the proposition (certainly no new discovery) that children all over the world are laughing and crying, playing and learning, eating and sleeping. While they may not look the same or speak the same language or live the same life--they are the same inside.. Kirkus Reviews said the book acknowledges in the simplest of terms our common humanity. I wish all adults could acknowledge that and quit trying to kill their young.