(txt)On Family Reading: Celebrate Poetry with Children 4/07

Volume 4, No. 4: April 2007
by Julie Douglas, Family Program Specialist

Poetry begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
Robert Frost

Have you enjoyed a poem today? Has your child? Hearing poetry is an important stepping stone on the path to learning to read. According to Mem Fox in her book Reading Magic: Why Reading Aloud to Our Children Will Change Their Lives Forever, "Experts in literacy and child development have discovered that if children know eight nursery rhymes by heart by the time they're four years old, they're usually among the best readers by the time they are eight."

What is it about a simple poem that is so powerful? T.S. Eliot described poetry as being "the perfect words in the perfect order." For children, that seems especially true. Young children take great pleasure in hearing the rhyme and rhythm of poetry. Poetry provides a structure and orderliness to language, which is appealing to a little one who is just beginning to make sense of words. In Poetry Aloud Here, author Sylvia Vardell states, "Poetry is primal: it speaks to a basic human need for expression and is made from the basic building blocks of language."

Think of poetry as the superhero of language development. Where else can a child be exposed to such rich vocabulary and imagery? What can sharpen her phonological awareness better than a rhyme? Through poetry, the child is introduced to sophisticated word play that isn't found in our everyday conversations. Poetry invites the child to clap and move along to the beat, to imitate the rhythm and inflection with her own voice, and to eventually recite the words. A poem is meant to be heard and spoken.

Surrounding a child with poetry comes quite naturally. Singing lullabies to a baby, bouncing a child on our knee while chanting, and reciting nursery rhymes with a child are examples of how parents participate in the oral tradition of poetry. How can parents take that next step into the world of poetry with their children?

The Academy of American Poets recommends 30 Ways to Celebrate Poetry at www.poets.org. Several of their suggestions are easily adapted to the under five set.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

Take a poem to lunch. When your child is perched in his high chair or booster seat and enjoying a meal, pull out a book of poems and read a few. Or let your inner poet loose and make up some rhymes about the food the child is munching.

Recite a poem to family or friends. Find a poem that you love and make it part of your child's daily routine. Read or recite a poem at bath time or to signal the beginning of the bedtime routine. Read a special poem as part of a birthday or holiday celebration.

Start a "commonplace book." A commonplace book is a book where one copies down favorite poems and quotes to keep as a personal anthology of words they love. Create a notebook of poems, song lyrics, chants, and wordplay that you and your child enjoy. Jot down funny rhymes that you create together.

Put a poem in your child's pocket (or book bag or lunch box). Surprise your young reader with a poem tucked into her pocket.

Participate in Young People's Poetry Week. Sponsored by the Children's Book Council, Young People's Poetry Week is held the third week of April. Visit www.cbc.org for ideas on how to celebrate poetry in your home, daycare, or classroom.

Read a book of poetry. Here a few to get you started.

Read Aloud Rhymes for the Very Young by Jack Prelutsky (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 1986)

The Random House Book of Poetry for Children by Jack Prelutsky (Random House, 2000)

My Very First Mother Goose by Iona Opie and Rosemary Wells. (Candlewick, 1996)

Welcome, Baby! Baby Rhymes for Baby Times by Stephanie Calmenson (HarperCollins, 2002)

My First Action Rhymes pictures by Lynne Cravath. (HarperCollins, 2000)

The Baby's Playtime Book by Kay Chorao (Dutton Juvenile, 2006)

There's a Wocket in my Pocket! Dr. Seuss's Book of Ridiculous Rhymes by Dr. Seuss (Random House Books for Young Readers; Board edition, 1996)

Where the Sidewalk Ends: Poems and Drawings by Shel Silverstein (HarperCollins; 1st ed edition, 1974)

A Family of Poems: My Favorite Poetry for Children by Caroline Kennedy (Hyperion, 2005)

Love to Mama: A Tribute to Mothers by Pat Mora (Lee & Low Books; Bilingual edition 2004)

Poems and Prayers for the Very Young by Martha Alexander (Random House Books for Young Readers,1973)

Splash! Poems of Our Watery World by Constance Levy. (Orchard, 2004)

Happy Reading!

Order any of these titles online (or anything through amazon or ebay using this portal) and support the work of the Missouri Humanities Council:
http://giveness.com/mohumanities

(audio) Reflections on Guerilla Season by Pat Hughes

Reflections on Guerilla Season
by Michael Bouman

Two months ago I met Eric Langhorst, a history blogger in Liberty. Eric teaches 8th grade history, and he weaves his students' work into his blogs. He was sitting in on a workshop I was conducting at the Clay County Museum, where his students had created new labels for the objects. I thought this museum was very lucky to have someone of Eric's talent on the board. You can view his blog at http://speakingofhistory.blogspot.com

Eric told me about assigning a Civil War novel titled Guerilla Season to his class. It's written by a woman named Pat Hughes, who lives in Philadelphia and works for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Using the internet, Eric arranged for Pat Hughes to engage the 8th grade students in the study of her story. Eric told me that an 8th grade class somewhere in California got wind of his class's assignment and began an internet "correspondence" with his class about Guerilla Season. USA Today ran a story on this project last November:

http://www.usatoday.com/life/2006-11-14-blogs-education_x.htm

The day after I met Eric, I ordered Guerilla Season and assigned it to myself. My book report follows:


April 9, 2007

Guerilla Season by Pat Hughes is about the friendship of two 15-year-old boys who live in a dangerous time and place. Matt and his friend Jesse are almost old enough to become fighters in the Civil War. The story is also about the way that love blossoms between Matt and Jesse's sister, Susie. And it is about the adults who are neighbors on three farms somewhere near Liberty, Missouri in 1863. And it is about missing your father.

I was absorbed by this story all the way. I have been a brother, a friend, and a parent; and I have been fifteen. I remember moments of my fifteenth year as if they happened yesterday. I also remember what it was like to find the balance of rules and freedom when my own son was fifteen. I brought all of that experience to this wonderfully-told story of Matt Howard's coming-of-age.

Guerilla Season is about identity. Matt thinks he is Southern because his late father came from Kentucky. He thinks his mother is Nothern because she came from Pennsylvania. His mother, however, has insisted on their family's neutrality. Their nearest neighbor sides with the Union. Further up the road, Jesse's family is "Secesh."

In that time and place, boys of 15 are old enough to slaughter animals, to manage farms, and to be hunted as possible combatants. Suspicion and fear color everyday life. Night riders may be Federals disguised as Quantrill's men, or they may be the raiders themselves. If they demand to know which side you're on, what do you say?

I admired the way Pat Hughes differentiates the children, teens, and adults. I sense her complete life experience has been poured into these characters. The teens are portrayed as people with life-and-death choices and responsibilities. The character development of Matt's mother is especially poignant, and it rings so true! She must discover how to lead her family as if there will be no safe choices and no second chances.

For Matt, the sense of devotion to his father's heritage looms over him like Destiny. He wonders if the family's neutrality is a betrayal of his father's memory. He wonders what loyalties are due the neighbors, regardless of their politics. He wonders what risks are the dues of true friendship.

These are not juvenile matters. In this book we see the anguish of our Civil War brought home to one small neighborhood on the prairie. More than once, Matt is in a position to bring a terrible fate on his family or the family of his friend. He must find his way to the justice of each situation and each relationship as Fate closes in on them all.

I thought of Plato's Republic as I read this story, so after I finished Guerilla Season, I reached for the translation by Richard Sterling and William Scott. After the quick page-turning of Guerilla Season, Plato required a strolling pace. If you try to hurry through a scene of Plato, you can easily miss the flow of an idea or the nuances of humor.

Anyway, The Republic begins as a friendly, sociable conversation about what makes life worthwhile, and almost instantly, Socrates asks what people mean when they talk about "justice." And one of the men says that he believes a just man is one who benefits friends and injures enemies.

Plato puts this notion of justice at the beginning of his book because it represents a commonplace notion that he thinks is dead wrong. This same commonplace notion of justice is the starting point, also, for Matt Howard's conversations with Jesse. Both Matt and Jesse are just months away from turning sixteen. The looming question in Matt's life is, "will I honor my father by farming or fighting?" Jesse already knows what he will do. He will wear the guerilla shirt his mother is sewing for him and he will ride with Quantrill. Matt must search for his own answer. At each station of his harrowing journey, Matt must acknowledge and follow the prompting of his heart. Events force him to come of age ahead of time.

I use the term follow his heart with some reservation. A contemporary word might be center. Matt has to listen to and trust the guidance from his center. Another image, from The Republic as well as from the biblical heritage, is light. There is a source of "light" that is not of our making, but which is ours to own and see by.

Jesse is a bible-reading lad, more so than Matt. Jesse suggests readings that he hopes will help Matt see the present difficulties in the proper light. Matt has a religious crisis when he attends a church service at a Union church and hears the Battle Hymn of the Republic. One of his choices is made right there: he will have to tell his mother that he will never again set foot in a church that condemns the heritage of his father.

This is probably the smallest of Matt's realizations of what he must do with himself. In this neighborhood of farms, the lives of family and neighbors hang under a terrible sword. Matt's age makes him especially vulnerable. During his journey through peril, Matt finds and follows his light. He moves toward an idea of justice that belongs at the end of The Republic. Guerilla Season, after all, is a book about moral complexity.

The final scenes of the book include a farewell, lit by campfire, inside a cave. I am not sure that Pat Hughes had Plato's cave in mind when she placed Matt and Jesse in there. I certainly didn't make that connection until just now. Isn't it funny, the way books seem to communicate across centuries and cultures?

Guerilla Season closes on the prairie at the break of dawn. One friend speeds away on a horse, waving good-bye as the other walks home in the other direction. I had to imagine which one of the friends was moving toward light, and which one moving away.

(txt) 4/07 Sac and Fox, Bus-eum, Pettis County Museum, Blog-in-progress, Preserving Family Treasures

Missouri Passages
Volume 4, No. 4: April 2007

Monthly E-News from Michael Bouman, Executive Director,
and the Missouri Humanities Council



Sac and Fox Heritage Exhibit in Versailles

The Morgan County Historical Society Museum is a fascinating place to visit. This month it's all the more so because of the touring exhibit designed by the Sac and Fox people with the help of Greg Olson. The exhibit opened last June at the Mark Twain Museum in Hannibal. Tribal elder, Henrietta Massey, is pictured below giving an invocation in the Sac and Fox language on opening day. The exhibit has traveled in Missouri, Iowa, and Illinois since then. You can see it in Versailles until the end of April, and then it moves to the Kirkwood Library for the month of May. It is currently booked through the end of 2007.

The Morgan County Museum is a fascinating place. Gradually, "Do Not Touch" signs are disappearing as Curator Carl Morgan figures out ways of letting people get more enjoyment out of the collection. These days the visitor is able to read the newspaper account of the sinking of the Titanic. It's one of many old pages that Carl thought to make available to visitors by using clear plastic casings for the fragile paper.

The museum occupies the former hotel. Some of the rooms upstairs are furnished as hotel rooms would have been in various historical periods. In the main lobby, you can see a traveling clothing salesman's display book showing the latest fashions for gentlemen in 1921.

The Sac and Fox exhibit is more thought-provoking than virtually every other exhibit on Native Americans in our local museums. Why? Because it is focused on a system of beliefs that are contained within a simple story. I often think about the kinds of stories that express a system of beliefs. There's the story of Alexander Doniphan's refusal to carry out an order to round up Joseph Smith and his band and execute them all in the public square. I saw the text of his refusal on the wall of the Clay County Museum. It struck me that I was looking at one of Missouri's cultural treasures in these words: "I will not do it, because it is murder." Another system of beliefs is embedded in the Christian parable of The Good Samaritan. The story explains who we (the people) are to look out for, and how much (everyone, and without limit). I don't think you can read the Sac and Fox story of The Twelve Boys and come away unmoved by its power of explaining what really matters. In a way, the fashion book from 1921 also asserts what matters. It's interesting to take those two forms of assertion into mind during the same museum visit.

The museum is at 120 North Monroe in Versailles. It's open Tuesday-Friday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and Saturday 9 to 12 noon. (573) 378-5530




German-American Internment, 1941-1948

Regular readers of this E-News will remember a piece by Arthur Jacobs in January 2006 on the deportation of his family during World War II. Arthur returned to live in a foster home in Kansas, he graduated from The College of the Ozarks, and served in the U.S. Armed Forces.

The internment of German-Americans during the World War II era is the subject of an exhibit that has been touring the Midwest for several years. The exhibit tours inside a bus; hence the term "bus-eum."

Our grant to TRACES: The Center for History and Culture is supporting the Missouri tour this month. From what we have heard from our neighboring states, this is fascinating material, well worth a visit. I have summarized the tour schedule on this page:

http://mohumanities.org/E-News/April07/vanished.htm




Missouri Conference on History, April 19-20

I've linked to a flyer describing the sessions and activities at the 49th Missouri Conference on History. The events will take place at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in St. Louis. I think anyone who teaches or studies history will find several things of intense interest here. For example, there's a round table discussion Friday morning about how schools can create lasting partnerships when they implement "Teaching American History" grants from the Department of Education.

The Keynote address, delivered at the luncheon on Friday by Professor James Giglio of Missouri State University, is titled Stan Musial and the Significance of Sports Biography. Great timing for this topic, eh?

http://mohumanities.org/E-News/April07/MOConfOnHist.pdf




Grand Opening of the Pettis County Museum

Who says museums are the domain of retirees? Not in Pettis County, Missouri! Charles Wise, the President of the Historical Society there, is an undergraduate. The fact that he was passionate about history got him elected to a leadership post. The Grand Opening of the new museum will be Saturday, April 14th. There will be a 10 AM ribbon cutting, followed by an open house and special displays till 5 PM. There will be a fundraising raffle in conjunction with the event, as well as a movie night the following afternoon, Sunday, April 15th. The movie is The Great Dictator, a Charlie Chaplin classic featuring Sedalia native Jack Oakie. There is no charge for the movie, though donations are welcome. For more information on this event, email Charles at cwise@murlin.com




Blog-in-progress and other modernizations

My colleagues and I are trying to help new communities of interested people come together in ways we haven't tried (or understood how to try) before. Beth Felice, whose role is like the scout who rides out ahead of a wagon train, is learning how to use internet tools none of the rest of us knew anything about a few months ago. We not only have a blog at MHC, but we have ways of finding humanities news for it. Before you know it, several of us will get the hang of "blogging." In my own small way, I'm learning to use the digital recorder to create audio downloads of my "columns" in the E-Passages. This is our baby step in the direction of actual pod-casting, which is not a form of catch-and-release fly fishing. Take a look at what happens on a blog:

http://mohumanities.blogspot.com/




"Preserving Family Treasures" Web Site

We all have them, dog-eared old photos we've been meaning to protect "soon." We may have a Family Bible or a collection of letters Dad wrote Mom while he was a soldier. Or we may have old news clippings or certificates lying around where the bugs can nest in them. Now there's help in learning how to do a better job. The Library of Congress has put up a new web site called "Preparing, Protecting, Preserving your Family Treasures."

http://www.loc.gov/preserv/familytreasures/index.html

This website provides simple instructions as well as links to more comprehensive information. So, whether you've made a New Year's resolution to take care of keepsakes or you've had some sort of household disaster, this site's for you.