Strollerderby : children’s books

Children's Choice Book Award Winners

Amy Kuras — Thu, 14 May 2009 20:04:00 GMT

Tuesday we told you it was Children’s Book Week this week. Well, today we’ll tell you the winners of their annual Children’s Choice Book Awards, voted on by young readers nationwide.

The envelope, please?

Kindergarten to Second Grade: The Pigeon Wants a Puppy, by Mo Willems

Third Grade to Fourth Grade: Spooky Cemeteries, by Dinah Williams

Fifth Grade to Sixth Grade: Thirteen, by Lauren Myracle

Teen Choice Book of the Year: Breaking Dawn, by Stephenie Meyer

Author of The Year: Stephenie Meyer, for Breaking Dawn

Illustrator of the Year: Jon J Muth, for Zen Ties

I admit I haven’t read any of them , but if The Pigeon Wants a Puppy is as funny as the original Don’t Let The Pigeon Drive the Bus, it ought to be book of the year for the little-kid set. As far as Breaking Dawn? There’s a sudden outbreak among women I know who are getting hooked on the Twilight series, even though many of them admit the writing s crap. What do you think? Worth picking up for someone who loved the Harry Potter series?

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Children's Books You Will Never Read

Celebrate Children's Book Week

Amy Kuras — Tue, 12 May 2009 15:01:00 GMT

You may not be aware of this, but it’s Children’s Book Week this week.
Founded in 1919 by Fredric Melcher, the editor of Publisher’s Weekly and Anne Carroll Moore, Superintendent of Children’s Works for the New York City Public Library, and a legendary figure in the library world, it’s now run by Every Child a Reader, the philanthropic arm of the children’s book industry.

On of the marquee events is the Children’s Choice Book award, which will be announced tomorrow.

Ina timely coincidence, I was cleaning out my basement this weekend in preparation for a garage sale and found a box I’d forgotten all about. When my parents moved out of my childhood home, I packed up a box of books I had loved in my youth, in hopes of someday passing them on to a child of my own. Now, of course, I have two of them and while they are a bit too young for Anne of Green Gables, I’m so glad I saved these and rediscovered them.

One of the best parts of parenthood for me is sharing books I loved as a child with my kids, and even better is discovering new ones together. The Olivia books, for example, and the whole “if You Give…” series were not in existence when I was a child, and we love them around here. And of course there is “Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus” which makes both my daughter and I howl with laughter.

What are some favorites you and your kids share? What are some new ones you have discovered together?

The Thermodynamics of Porridge Cooling in Goldilocks

Miriam Axel-Lute — Tue, 05 May 2009 19:00:00 GMT

If you thought I was a nitpicker when I went after science errors in children's books that were trying to be realistic, you'll have a conniption about this: some of bloggers over at scienceblogs.com have started taking on fairy tales: the thermodynamics of cooling porridge in Goldliocks and the physics of hair rope-ladders in Rapunzel. (hat tip: Jake)

In each case, much like with my own post, the commenters make it all worthwhile, kibbitzing about mother bear's potential drinking habit (adding whiskey cooled her porridge down faster) and whether it matters if the hair ladder would hold if it would take 180 years to grow.

Of course there is the question of where do we start to critique fairy tales. I'll admit (or brag) that I'm nerdy enough to have noticed and been bothered by the porridge cooling anomaly myself on one Goldilocks-reading marathon. ("Again!") Likewise the wolf falling into a pot of boiling water at the end of Three Little Pigs and just being hurt enough to be mad and jump up and run out the door howling. (Granted the Richard Scarry tome I'm working from clearly contains cleaned up versions for kids, not the originals.)

Matt Springer, who wrote about Rapunzel, says "Suspension of disbelief requires that we grant the story the ability to say wild things so long as it does so in an internally consistent way." I agree.

They are internally consistent in that animals talk, for example, and we don't complain about that. But even before you get to the laws of physics, there's a whole lot of non-hard science issues in fairy tales to deep breathe through: In the Wolf and the Seven Kids, the kids are fooled into mistaking a wolf paw for their mother's hoof because he gets it dusted in flour? How does that work? It's a paw. In the Three Little Pigs, how is it that the bricklayer just gives away a house's worth of bricks?

In the end, of course, I do (mostly) suspend disbelief when we're in the realm of fairy tales. I know the value of a metaphor and an archtypal story line. But sometimes it does feel good to step back with other nitpickers and catalog the bites on our tongues.

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Obama Reads One of His Favorite Children’s Books

SunnyChanel — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 05:04:00 GMT

It turns out I have something in common with Barack Obama. We share a love for the same classic children’s book. Barack and I, we both site “Where the Wild Things Are” by Maurice Sendak as one of our all time favorites. It's nice to know I'm in some good company.

Obama read the book, complete with throaty monster roars, to the kids at Monday’s annual White House Easter egg roll. He asked his young audience if they’ve ever been in a “wild rumpus” and told the kids, "You guys look like you have a wild rumpus all the time.”

Obama has talked about the love of the book before. The site Literary Obama had a transcript of Obama stating:

“I can’t say as a child what book influenced me most. My favorite book - and it continues to be one of my favorite books - was “Where the Wild Things Are.” I love that book. My wife still thinks that I’m Max, that I’m getting into mischief all the time.”

The artist Dan Lacey, who is known for his paintings of famous figures accessorizes with pancakes, even did a portrait of Obama as Max.

After his reading, Mrs. Obama and her mom took turns reading theLaura Joffe Numeroff book, “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie” with Sasha and Malia turning the pages of the oversized printing of the book.

Are you part of our 'club'? Is “Where the Wild Things Are” one of your favorites too?

You can check out the video of Obama reading the story here

Source

Heather Has Two Mommies = "Adult Content"?

Miriam Axel-Lute — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 19:30:00 GMT

"Protecting" children (and adults with paper-thin sensibilities) by hiding/filtering/censoring content deemed "adult" has a long history of not working very well. My mother was a children's librarian for a long time in a town in Essex County, NJ, and remembers when the filtering software blocked searches of kids trying to research their county government.

But it takes an ambitious effort to fail quite as spectacularly has Amazon has in its attempts to remove the sales ranking from books deemed "adult." (via Jezebel). (Sales ranking determines placement in searches and inclusion in the recommendation alogrithms, which is why it matters.)

If this just covered hardcore porn DVDs, there would likely have been not much outrage. But the curious decision-making process determining what is labeled adult appears to be (1) wildly broad, yet inconsistent and (2) extremely anti-gay. Petitions have been started and customer service lines flooded. The charge of it being a "glitch" has been dismissed outright.

Parents, in particular, may be surprised and troubled to learn that while heterosexual porn (books of Playboy pinups, for example) and sex toys have not been affected, the classic children's book Heather Has Two Mommies, a history of gay rights written for teens, and a book about anti-gay bullying in high school were disappeared (at least for a while — as of this writing, Heather's sales rank has been returned. It seems the ranks are coming and going with some frequency).

But never fear, The Parents Guide to Preventing Homosexuality has so far stayed ranked and available.

What do think? Is this a well-meaning algorithm gone wrong, an underlying problem about tagging everything GLBT with "sexuality," or flat-out prudish homophobia? Have you been afraid of what your children might find on Amazon? And now, how about what they might not find?

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Dinos and Dragons: On the Scientific Method for Kids

Miriam Axel-Lute — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

On my post about errors about the natural world in kids books, a few people piped up to say that the social biases in kids books bother them more—stupid fathers, prissy girls, everyone white, etc. I wish it were as easy to dispatch those with a simple top ten list, but they're far more insidious and numerous.

However, here's one tiny stab at the overlap: A bit of a commentary about the blinders that social biases put on scientists.

The book in question is called Boy, Were We Wrong About Dinosaurs. It was recommended to me by a commenter on my previous post, and billed as an introduction to the scientific method, a window into the process of making theories based on the evidence you have, testing them (when that’s possible), and changing them based on new evidence.

And, of course, it’s about dinosaurs, which hold a not entirely explicable fascination for a massive proportion of kids, mine included.

It is in fact, a pretty great book, full of neat stories such as people mistaking Iguanodons’ massive conical thumb bones for horns until they found a complete skeleton, or how some bone cross-sections look more like those of warm-blooded animals than of cold-blooded ones—which is part of what spurred the whole movement toward dinosaurs-as-bird-ancestors and away from dinosaurs-as-big-lizards.

But the book also is a better example of how science works than it really set out to be: It contains two glaring examples of how, for all the real power of the scientific method and (most) scientists’ genuine commitment to objectivity and open-mindedness, science is carried out (and interpreted and written about) by people who are subject, to a greater or lesser extent, to all the biases and assumptions of their day. Those blinders creep into their conclusions far more than they would like to admit.

For example, one of the points that the book makes is that we used to think of dinosaurs as having reptile-like parenting skills—i.e., none; they lay eggs and leave. But then paleontologists found evidence (such as nests with older hatchlings in them) that dinosaurs may have been more active parents.

Except the book doesn’t say parents.

It says mothers. Over and over.

I have no need to project egalitarian parenting onto other species, where it often doesn’t exist. But since it does exist among birds quite often, I would have been pretty slow to make such a massive assumption and present it as a “discovery.”

And in fact, last December a flurry of articles about active dinosaur dads came out—some researchers think in some cases they were the primary parent.

Boy, was the book wrong—not in a scientific way though, in a lazy way.

This kind of assumption can actively bog science down. In the 1990s, cultural anthropologist Emily Martin described how researchers working on new forms of contraception were incredibly slow to recognize key information about how human fertilization works because they were so wedded (unconsciously) to their culturally influenced assumptions of mighty aggressive sperm and passive eggs. (Turns out sperm are weak uncoordinated swimmers and have to be entrapped and engulfed by the egg while they try to get away.)

The other bias in Boy, Were We Wrong About Dinosaurs strikes even closer to the heart of scientists and their self image. It starts off with a description of how the ancient Chinese found dinosaur bones and, in trying to figure out what they came from, came up with the creature we now know as the Chinese dragon. It shows a picture, says that they figured they must have been magic to have been so big, and thought they might be still around. “Boy, were they wrong!” Then it says, “Now we think many of our own past guesses about dinosaurs were just as wrong as those of ancient China.”

Toward the end of the book we come back to this theme, but less diplomatically: “Perhaps today’s ideas about dinosaurs will someday seem just as silly as the magic dragons of long-ago China.”

Interestingly, instead of “Boy, were they wrong,” everyone else, starting with European scientists from hundreds of years ago gets “Boy, were we wrong!” (emphasis mine). The message is clear: real scientific inquiry began after those initial discoveries, with the “we” of the rest of the book (all white by the illustrations).

Let’s pause and consider for a second. What did the ancient Chinese think those bones belonged to? A large, long, scaly reptilian creature. What did the first Europeans to try to make a theory about the same sorts of bones—a long time later and with far more technology—come up with? A large, long, scaly reptilian creature. They gave it a different name. They came up with different wrong embellishments. They placed it into a different cosmology. But the ancient Chinese were basically doing the same thing, with fewer tools, and had remarkably similar results. They weren't right, but they were hardly silly.

I understand and support what the book’s authors were trying to do: show how early scientific hypotheses can turn out to be as off-base as something that even a child can recognize as untrue. Only in the process of doing so, they revealed their own ethnocentric biases: They feel that dragons were an obviously silly, superstitious theory, while gray, reptilian brontosauruses dragging their tails through the mud were an educated hypothesis that happened to turn out to be inaccurate.

Boy, were they wrong. But at least they gave the parents reading it a ready phrase to critique their own book with.

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Smackdown: I Won't Read That Thing Again

Miriam Axel-Lute — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:31:00 GMT

"Sheep live on farms. Sheep like to eat grass. Sheep apparently have shiny, reflective, slightly pink fleece in order to captivate small children when the text of a book is too damn inane to do so."

Do you have any books whose actual rendition when read out loud starts to sound kind of like that? I sure do. Or did. They take themselves too seriously and yet are dull, completely unoriginal, have no feel for language. Their messages, if they have them, are pointless or annoying. Some of them get basic things about the world wrong.

When faced with a demand to read one of these specimens (plenty of which have entered our house as gifts or hand-me-downs) more than once a day, I find I have two options: Sarcasm or refusal. The former is probably an unwise long-term parenting technique, but the latter meets with more protest, so obnoxious commentary usually rules the day.

After bedtime though, I have another option: That book just might quietly disappear.

I realize that what I'm looking for in a book and what an under-three-year-old is looking for are pretty gosh darn different. I realize that repetition is part of their cognitive development and I'm just going to get sick of reading even the best of books. I realize that the point of reading to my child is not to entertain me or meet my exacting literary standards.

But here's the thing: If it's totally possible to have the best of both worlds, why shouldn't I? Why should I settle for the dregs that have washed up on my bookshelves? I doubt anyone would argue that parents can't dispose of books that don't match the values they want to pass along. One my values is literary merit. And it's available in plenty.

There are thousands and thousands of really awesome kids' books out there, right down to the most simple reading level. They may not be works I would curl up with on the couch on my own (though I might with Seuss or A. A. Milne), but they have some combination of rhyming and rhythm, playful cleverness, kindness, imagination, style, and beautiful illustrations that not only don't turn my stomach, but even make me smile and enjoy myself (at least for the first three readings per day or so). Oh, and my daughter also loves them. Perhaps not always more than some of the ones I can't stand, but also no less.

Besides, kids notice subtle things, and I'm quite sure mine must notice when she asks me to read something to her and I give a shudder of horror. That doesn't keep me up at night, but it worries me more than facing down a potential fit because Spot's Thanksgiving has gone missing. "Things get lost sometimes" is a lesson that's worth learning. Kids get over it. (Though it helps if you identify the bad apples early, before any deep attachments are formed.)

Will my daughter be mad at us when she finds a couple of titles we couldn't even bring ourselves to pass along to those with different tastes hammered into the bed frame to level the lopsided mattress? She might. But I figure by that time she'll be able to read to herself and have moved on. And hopefully she will have developed better taste too.

Photo by Indie Wench.

The Other Side:

Smackdown: A Book's a Book, No Matter How Small (or Annoying)

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5 Nature Facts Kids' Authors Should Tattoo on their Forearms

Miriam Axel-Lute — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 18:00:00 GMT

It's not just the creationists and global warming deniers who make us an anti-science society. It's also lazy children's book authors, editors, fact-checkers, and reviewers. The very popular Rachel Isadora can't tell a french horn from a tuba. Even the venerable Richard Scarry depicts corn growing from an already cooked seed and bread being baked before it has risen. It drives me crazy.

Now, before you call me a killjoy, I don’t mean that I have a problem with fantasy and surreality. I love it. The goofier the better. Animals talking, kids flying or shrinking, toys coming alive . . . great. I'm not complaining about Richard Scarry's five-seater pencil car.

But it's generally clear when books are striving to be basically realistic, even educational. You know the type: books about where rainbows come from, or things you see on a fall walk, or world animals. It's when most things are right that the glaring errors bug me. The least we could do, I figure, is not actively teach kids things they’ll have to unlearn later if they ever manage to study biology or ecology. (Cultural errors and biases get into a whole other can of worms.)

Here are five sets of nature facts that children’s book authors (and illustrators and editors) seem to get wrong over and over and over:

(1) Lions, tigers, bears, and kangaroos don’t live side by side anywhere other than a zoo. Neither do polar bears and penguins. This one is at least as old as Dorothy chanting “Lions, and tigers, and bears, oh my!” and as pervasive as the Wicked Witch’s all-seeing eye. It's so common that plenty of well-educated adults would have to pause and ask themselves where exactly tigers do live and whether Africa has bears.
(2) Bluebirds are not blue from head to toe (and similar confusions). The only bird on this continent that’s blue all over is an indigo bunting. Bluebirds have chestnut chests and white rumps. (Or, for you West Coasters, they're just white underneath.) Also, no adult duck is yellow with an orange beak and seals don’t bark or have ~~whiskers~~ ears (that's sea lions). Field guides, anyone? Or even Google images?
(3) Birds make nests for laying eggs, not for sleeping in. And they don’t build them in the fall.
(4) Bulls never have udders. Several people have told me it drives them round the bend to see an animal with a prominent set of mammary glands going by the pronoun “he.”
(5) The moon is not always/only out at night. I realize that the phases of the moon get a little esoteric, and I can never myself keep straight how to tell at a glance whether that’s a waxing halfmoon or a waning one. But I find it to be strangely symbolic of our penchant for simplifying the facts out of everything that we take a heavenly body that appears during the day half the time and during the night half the time (often then not rising until well after sunset) and persist in pairing them as opposites. (Illustrators also manage to never make the sun or moon rise or set, but just hang in the same part of the sky as a day or night progresses, and the moon stays in the same phase as weeks go by.)

I'm sure there are dozens more, many of which I don't even know enough to catch. (Bruce McMillan, author of nonfiction kids books, says there are tons, and it makes him at least as cranky as it makes me.)

What bloopers get under your skin?

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Gender Roles In Children's Literature

Hannah Tennant-Moore — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 17:40:00 GMT

Back in second grade, when I and many of my classmates were forming Harriet the Spy clubs, complete with code names and symbols to indicate various personality traits—including “suspichis” and “meanie”—brassy characters like Harriet starred in just about all the books I loved. It never occurred to me that I was behaving in ways that could be considered “unladylike.”

But when the book first came out in the 1960s, that’s exactly how Harriet’s character was received, according to an NPR segment this morning. Harriet was only the second female sleuth to appear in children’s literature, and the first, Nancy Drew, made Shirley Temple look mischievous. Harriet wore baggy jeans; was outspoken, street smart, and full of herself; and didn’t much care what people thought of her. So it’s interesting to note that Louise Fitzhugh, the book’s author, is gay. Although sexual orientation is certainly not touched upon in the book, Harriet was the first girl character to thrive as a tomboy. For many girls growing up in the 60s, it was revolutionary to realize that one could dress and act “like a boy” and survive childhood.

These days, we have a plethora of children’s books with beloved, fiesty girls: Romana Quimby, Eloise, Olivia, and Junie B. Jones don’t always mind their manners, but they win people over with their humor and strong sense of self. It’s a far cry from 1964, when Harriet the Spy was panned by traditional critics and banned in many schools.

And yet there remain few correspondingly gender-bending role models for boys. While it’s become much more acceptable for girls to do traditionally masculine activities like play sports and crack smart aleck jokes, it remains largely taboo for young boys to play house, dress up, or quietly play with dolls. Not only is this trend clearly detrimental to boys who are less aggressive, athletic, and outspoken than their peers, but it could indicate a general devaluing of traditionally feminine activities. Where are the gentler, more thoughtful characters, whether male or female?

Has this trend troubled any parents of boys? Am I overlooking non-traditional boy role models?

Image: sailsinc.org/northattleboro