Journey, Quest, Return

It took me a while to warm up to the idea of wordless books.  Mostly because of laziness.  At the end of a day filled with endless questions and drama, I simply have no energy for inventing my own bedtime story.  I count on the words on those pages to guide me through that home-stretch until lights out time.  BUT I saw a preview of the book Journey by Aaron Becker when it won the Caldecott, and I was entranced.  The pictures are simply stunning.  I could live in this book.  I immediately bought a copy for our then 2 and 4 year olds.  They loved it too.  It is simply too beautiful not to love. 


And I came to realize the genius of these books is not in the parent telling the story- it is the child discovering the story.  I really really try to only ask questions when we "read" this book.  (But I cannot help oohing and aahing here and there too)  The kids eyes light up when they discover the plot and I love watching them page back and say "Wait, was that on the last page?" They truly enter the book in a way they don't when I am reading to them. 

So when I stumbled across Quest and Return, the sequels to Journey at the library yesterday I actually squealed with delight! My 2nd grader was so excited when he saw them after school, he chose to read them before playing minecraft.  Quite an endorsement! 

Titles: Journey
           Quest
           Return

Author: Aaron Becker

Ages: While our 18 month old is taken with the pictures, and our 2 year old enjoyed them,  I think the target ages are 3-10.  By 3 they can really discover the story on their own, which is such a beautiful process!

Summary: The book opens with a girl trying to get her family to play with her- but they are busy.  She finds a red crayon and draws a door that opens like a portal to a beautiful, magical world.  The plot builds through each of the books as she uses her magic crayon to escape and rescue friends.  Along the way she meets a boy who also enters the world, a king, and ends up building a relationship with her father.  The story is empowering and full of imagination, magic, heroism, and beauty.  

dino sensory tub

We picked up a book on dinosaurs from the library a week or so ago.

I wouldn't qualify it as a great book, but it had some good information about dinos woven into its slightly awkward story, and it was good enough to elicit 20 or requests for it to be read by our little man.  Since I've been wanting to revamp our sensory bin for a while, so I used it as a launching point for a new set-up.

I cleaned out the rice and lentils that have been living with some small dump trucks and bulldozers in our under the bed storage box for the past year or so.  (I saved the rice/lentil mix in some ziplocks to be used later) and the box was now usable for a dinosaur habitat.

I dumped a bit of sand from our sand-box in with our dinos and then collected a bunch of other stuff for Jonathan to add or not as part of his play:

I mixed up some mud-playdough by using this recipe and adding some instant coffee to the water for color. (I think next time I would use food color since the coffee gave it sort of a funky, musty smell).  I put out a tub of way out of date couscous that has been haunting the back shelves of our pantry, some leaves, some pine cones, a cut-up egg carton, and an easter egg with a small lizard inside (to hatch as a baby dino).

When he woke up from his nap, I read the dinosaur book to him again and then told him that I had a special project for him to build a habitat for the dinosaurs to live.  He was excited to have new things in the bin and spent a long time using the play-dough and sand alone and then gradually incorporated each of the other elements.  When he was done he was so proud of it that he would show it to anyone who came over and refused to move the elements around more- he just wanted to talk about what the dinos were doing and eating and how the t-rex looked scary, but was actually friendly.

Alphabet Zookeeper

In my attempt to organize/purge  our out of control toy situation, I began noticing just how many toy animals we have.  Stuffed, wooden, rubbery, bath-toys, finger-puppets, noise-making.  For example we have 5 zebras, 4 lions, 6 elephants, etc.  And while this is ridiculous, it also gave us a great opportunity for sorting.

So I made "cages" for each of our types of animals labeled with the letter they start with and their names:

I laid the cages and all of the animals out on the table.  I explained that Jonathan was the zookeeper and had to put all of the animals back in their proper cages.  It gave us a chance to talk about the letters and what sounds they make and to practice thinking about words and the way they correspond to those sounds.

It was not exactly a game he could play all by himself yet, since he seems to have a set himself against knowing his letters.  BUT we did this yesterday and he wanted to play it again today and was upset when some of the cages got chewed on.

alphabet matching

When I first saw foam stickers, I have to say I was a little cynical.  They seemed like a terribly inefficient and excessive way to design stickers just so that they would have 1/8" of hight above the page.  But over the past few months doing stickers with my 2 1/2 - 3 year old boy, I have become a convert.  Not because they are extra special and pretty- but because he can peel the back off by himself.  Maybe other 3 year olds can do this with flat stickers, but not my boy.  He can do the foam stickers, but it still takes him FOREVER.

So when I found packages of number and letter foam stickers in the dollar bins at Target, I snapped them up.  I didn't know for what, but I figured I would come up with something.

I stashed them away until I figured out what would be the perfect thing to do with them.  And then, of course, Jonathan found them while was cooking dinner and holding a screaming up baby.  He wanted to play with them NOW.  So I had to come up with something fast and dirty- and here it is.  I drew the letters on graph paper (because it was what was handy).  And pulled out one sticker for each letter of the alphabet.

The goal was for him to match the letters and then stick the sticker on the page at the proper spot. Simple.  Easy.  Low time commitment for me; high engagement for him.  It got him thinking about the exact shape of each letter and having to distinguish between T and J and I;  O and Q; R and P and B; etc.

It was a hit, so I think I might try to come up with a more permanent game that doesn't require me to keep buying more stickers and re-drawing the letters.  I am thinking about rigging something up with magnetic letters and an old cookie-sheet.  Also I would like him to start recognizing the lower-case letters since most of the text we read is in mostly lowercase- so when I start paining my cookie-sheet I think I will be paining those instead of the caps.

Storyboarding

We recently took our first trip ever without our little man- we were flying with the baby; he was staying with Gramma and Grampa.  Since he gets his patience from his mother and still has a limited understanding of long-range planning, I didn't mention it to him until two days before the trip.  I tried to frame it as his adventure in getting to spend the night with Gramma, but his reaction to the news was tears.  "Why don't I get to go on the airplane?!?"

I panicked.  As if I was not already feeling guilty and nervous enough about leaving him.  So I broke out an idea a friend of mine who is an art-therapist had shared with me- storyboards.  The idea is that everyone, even (and especially) little people, do better when they know what to expect.  But little people also have a limited understanding of time and often limited vocabulary.  So storyboards can help prepare and guide them though unfamiliar situations with pictures and a time-line.  And they can take ownership in a situation that is beyond their control if they get to help design and make the storyboard. Plus it helps with the foundations of reading to have a story told from left to right with pictures and words.

So the night before our trip, I sat down at the kitchen table with a big (9x11) sheet of paper, our markers, and Jonathan on my lap.

You can see my artistic ability in the exquisite stick-figures.  I drew one row for each day and divided it up into a few key events- wake up, school, church, bedtime, etc.  As we talked through what his days were going to look like, I tried to give him choices in the pictures.  "When you wake up you will have breakfast with Gramma.  What do you think you will eat?"  or  "Samantha will probably be at school- what color should we draw for her?" or "What kind of toys to you think you will play with Grampa?" By the third or fourth box, he was pretty into the idea and getting more excited about the trip.  He brought the storyboard with him, and Gramma crossed off the days as they happened so he knew when to expect us to return.

I don't know how much it helped him, but the trip went well!

Family Memories

When I finally completed our family photo album for 2011 in February,  I was excited for it to be a keep-sake that would help me remember these crazy years of baby and toddler insanity where most days are just a blur.  I wanted to have a way to look back and remember the chubby curl of 2 year old toes and the gummy smile of a two-toothed baby and a handful of adorable stories without having to wade through disk upon disk of photos.  I was excited when it arrived, but fully expected to put it on a shelf and take it out in 5 years.

But it has now become one of our favorite bed-time books.  Jonathan LOVES reading it.  He wants us to tell a story about each picture and will find crazy background details and want explanation- like "what shoes am I wearing in that picture?  where are they now?"

They say real memories don't form until after about 3 years of age.  I know a lot of my own memories center on a single image that is probably in a photo-book somewhere or a rendition of a story I heard my parents or grandparents repeating around the dinner table.   And a lot of my sense of self is based the knowledge that this is MY family, that regardless of anything else I am a part of something and from somewhere.  These shared memories give me a place to belong even when I am far away and a sense of pride that goes beyond my self.

books- how novel

Jonathan has been on a book craze over the past week or so. Every day at some point the ONLY thing he wants to do is sit and read book after book after book. Yesterday we probably read 15-20 books in a row (some of them multiple times) before he lost interest. It has been so much fun not only to hear how he talks about the characters and plots and what he sees as we read, but also how it pops up in his conversation later in the day. Little phrases like "that was a big success" or "in the whole wide world" that wouldn't normally be part of a 2 year old vocabulary come popping out of his mouth and make me laugh. I love that something so simple and so cozy can be such a powerful tool in expanding his world. Here are a few of our favorites this week:

I picked One Yellow Lion up at a consignment sale. It is a pretty basic counting book, but something about the fold out pages and ways the animals interact on the last page has made this a favorite for a long time.

We picked out Flap Your Wings at the library on our last run because we have loved PD Eastman so much in the past (Go Dog Go! is amazing). Jonathan loves to be "surprised" at the alligator popping out of the egg every time we read it. He also loves the idea that the alligator is growing bigger and bigger and bigger just like him!

While the rhyme scheme in Dinosaurumpus isn't Tony Mitton's best (I think everyone in our house can sing all the words to his Airplanes book), the actions and the cute dinosaurs are great. Perfect for a kiddo who is starting to fall in love with dinos, but likes them to all be "the friendly ones".

I don't remember how An Island in the Sun came to be on our bookshelf, but it has fun, quirky artwork (including a boy with blue hair and a polka-dot dog) that is whimsical and fun. The rhyme is catchy and builds page by page. Jonathan loves that the dog is waiting for the boy and that they go fishing "till the end of the day".

I am also rediscovering the joy of books. I finished a book about a month ago, and have been putting off figuring out what to read next because I am awful at picking out books. But with my pregnancy insomnia flaring up again, I needed something to get me out of my own brain and to occupy me from 11pm-3am (instead of just roaming the house snacking). I never quite know how to pick out a new novel, but I braved the used book store down the street and came home with three: Blue Shoe by Anne Lamotte, Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver, and The Piano Teacher by Janice Lee. I just started Blue Shoe and love it. It is so peaceful to sit and read in the middle of the night with a cup of tea. Almost peaceful enough to put me to sleep. Almost. But not quite.

Jonathan Narrates "At the Beach"

One of my favorite things is to have Jonathan "read" books to me. Here is his version of "At the Beach"

"Bucket"

"Shovel"

"Hoop!! Shoot it basketball!!! Two Points!"

Either he's missing that the book has an overall theme or else believes that basketball goes with anything. I'm guessing the latter.