Book Sale Pt.1

The county Friends of the Library is having their book sale this weekend, so we went over yesterday and will likely go again tomorrow. We came away well, with several additions to my collections (including the ever-elusive Carolyn Haywood!) and some for our homeschool and general reading shelves. We also got two cds, one of Christmas music and one of carousel music. All in all, a successful time. I hope we'll find more.

I love these books!

The artist we're learning about in our homjeschool right now is Ruth Heller. When I went looking in the library I only found one book under her name in the Easy Books section,and then I recognized the artwork as the same ase in the books about the parts of speech. Behind a Mask, Up Up and Away, and several others are books she's written and illustrated that ewxplain the parts of speech, done in rhyme. I was framiliar with them beforehand, obviously, and then I found several in the junior non-fiction section. I would highly recommend those books for any homeschooling family. Parents will learn something, as well as everyone enjoying the pictures. I imagine they could serve as a good introduction in grammar.

20 years. Right.

I've been following the CPSIA debacle pretty closely, thanks greatly to Deputy Headmistress over at The Common Room and a few others. The latest absurdity is that the commission claims that children's books have a useful life of 20 years. If, which is not specified, that means that a given copy might wear out after that much time, I can see an in-some-cases point. But just as the whole rest of this mess, nothing is spelled out as being so narrow.
The Headmistress' response was extremely well done, as always. She included a book called The Story of the Bible. This is a retelling of the Bible, as the name implies, but at an older reading level than the Children's Story Bible
by Catherine Vos. It was first printed before the turn of the twentieth century.
We have in our posession a copy of that book, which I think is the 1911 printing, that is the one and only thing I've ever seen, let alone that I have, that belonged to my great-grandfather John Towson. (This would have been Father's maternal grandfather.) It's beautiful, bound nicely, and a very good book for teaching Bible. Guess what: I fully intend to use it when Bluebonnet is older. We have my mother's copy of the Catherine Vos book, which we've been using for Bible since she was born (we're on our third read-through already). As a matter of fact, the 1950s Vos book is in less-pristine condition than the older one; evidently Mother et al used hers more. (A good problem to have with a book of Bible stories!)

Congress- have a reality check.

Books With Bluebonnet

We've been reading some very good selections in our homeschool this week. For starters, the artist we've been looking at for the last two weeks is a favorite of mine, Tasha Tudor. We have several volumes of hers ourselves, and we also checked out Thistly B from the library. It seems to be one of the less-available Tasha Tudor books, but it's just as pretty as any of her others. It's the story of a canary and his mate, raised in a nursery by a brother and sister.

We also have read The Hullaballoo ABC by Beverly Cleary, and Round is a Mooncake by Roseanne Thong. The two choices are nothing alike and both very good! In the first, farm children have more clean and grubby, noisy fun than you could imagine, going from "Aha! I see you" to "Z is for Zoom!". This looks like a great choice to read to a group of children.
The second shows vignettes of the life of a Chinese-American family, with the narrator identifying things in several shapes, from both cultures. My favorite is the part where both a pizza box and dim sum are described as square.

Home Economics Course

Elizabeth, whose blog A Merry Rose I've followed for a while, has begun a new one devoted to a thorough course in home economics for keepers-at-home. I highly recommend joining in, before it's progressed much farther and you find yourself missing out. We all need some chances to take stock and get re-organized, which is where she has begun thus far. I think even older girls who are not yet the keepers of their own homes may get something valuable from this course.