Poetry Friday: A post for my father, who thinks I fell off the blogging earth

Written in Marchby William Wordsworth
(from our copy of Favorite Poems Old and New, selected by Helen Ferris and illustrated by Leonard Weisgard)
The cock is crowing,The stream is flowing,The small birds twitter,The lake doth glitter,The green field sleeps in the sun;The oldest and youngestAre at work with the strongest:The cattle are grazing,Their heads never raising;There are [...]

Festival report

We spent most of yesterday at the first day of the town’s arts festival. The boys each recited a poem in the morning for Speech Arts, and in the evening Laura performed her musical theater number, “I Have Confidence” from The Sound of Music.
For the past few years, the kids have entered just the Speech [...]

March issue of The Edge of the Forest

has been out now for a bit. Hurray, and thanks to Kelly Herrold and all the contributors. Features that have caught my eye so far, since I just started reading through it:
Liz’s interview with Kirby Larson, author of Hattie Big Sky (historical fiction set in 1918 Montana, and a 2007 Newbery Honor book)
Nonfiction reviews of [...]

Hot to trot tots and their pole-dancing mamas

A couple of months ago, after seeing the Macleans magazine cover story about “dressing our daughters like skanks”, I wrote,
What continues to surprise me is how many mothers around here, and remember, I’m far away from liberal east coast urban types, so your experience may be wide of my mark, are the ones who choose [...]

St. Patrick’s Day: One thing leads to another, and the mist that do be on the bog

Last year’s more conventional entry
This year’s less conventional one, from ‘Tis by Frank McCourt, which I’m rereading while awaiting the arrival via ILL of his Teacher Man:
I walk through Woodside to the library to borrow a book I looked at the last time I was there, Sean O’Casey’s I Knock at the Door. It’s a [...]

Project Beagle (and Science in School)

I’ve added a new button to the right for Project Beagle, which I discovered at the Beagle blog. You can read more there and at the Project Beagle website; the actual ship plans are here. As the website notes,
we aim to provide the most compelling event of Charles Darwin’s 2009 bicentenary by [...]

Poetry Friday II: A new(ish) resource for literature

With many thanks to the person on one of my Sonlight groups for posting the link to the American literature page at AOL@School (with some interesting looking literature guides), which led me to these Emily Dickinson links (here, here, and here). Though I wonder what Ms. Dickinson would think about her modern transformation.
And AOL’s [...]

Poetry Friday: A unicorn for spring

Laura, the one child who isn’t reciting anything in the speech arts part of the arts festival next week (because she’s up to her eyeballs in 4H public speaking), selected this because “it makes me think of Spring”:
Unicornby Anne Corkett
Unicorn, Unicorn,where have you gone?I’ve brought you some silver dewout of the dawn.I’ve put it [...]

New from the Edmonton Public Library system

I heard on the radio this morning that the Edmonton Public Library system has started offering OverDrive, so that patrons can download hundreds (I think 700 or so) of audiobooks and music CDs from home: “Browse and search hundreds of great titles from OverDrive and download them to your computer, transfer them to a portable [...]

What not to wear

to court for Lord Black of Crossharbour’s trial, starting Wednesday. (Though perfectly lovely for taking the March air.)

Poetry Friday: The Friday whirl

The kids and I dashed off to the Goodwill shop yesterday after lunch to find a few things to add to the kids’ “Fiddler on the Roof” wardrobes. In addition to two vests for the boys, and a polyester lace tablecloth from which I plan to cut a shawl for Laura, I found a small [...]

A child’s introduction to classic art and classical music

New to me, from the March 2007 issue of Canadian Family magazine, found yesterday at the library:
Can You Hear It?, book and accompanying audio cd, by William Lach of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (published by Abrams); suggested for ages four to ten. From the Met Store website:
A bustling cityscape full of cars and people; [...]

A Landmark decision

While starting to put together a list of children’s books set in and around Boston (what I really want is what doesn’t exist, the Boston version of Leonard Marcus’s Storied City), I came across some good news (requires free registration) in last week’s Boston Globe, “An adventure in finding books for boys” (emphases mine, as [...]

Rendered edible?

As disturbing as the news that 8,000 cattle and farmed deer in Saskatchewan are under quarantine after receiving tainted feed containing now-banned* ruminant meat meal and bone meal is the fact that what they were supposed to receive was “feather meal”**. The newspaper article in the previous link describes feather meal as “a protein source [...]

Children’s entertainment that isn’t prechewed

One of the joys of traipsing in and out of Toronto’s Pearson Airport over a weekend is being able to stock up on the Saturday editions of The Globe & Mail and National Post, and the Sunday edition of The New York Times. In the G&M book review, I found a brief mention of the [...]

Trip snaps

Palm tree (friend’s garden)
[...]

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (1917-2007)

From his obituary in yesterday’s New York Times:
Young Arthur first attended public schools in Cambridge, but his parents lost faith in public education in his sophomore year after a civics teacher informed Arthur’s class that inhabitants of Albania were called Albinos and had white hair and pink eyes. He was shipped to the Phillips Exeter [...]