Happy New Year's Eve!

After spending most of the day driving, we're back in North Carolina for New Year's Eve.  However, we're not spending the evening having a big night on the town.  In fact, as soon as we got home, my son raced in and put on his pajamas.

However, as always, I look at these events as a learning or growing experience.  And I tend to associate New Year's Eve with an Italian culture.  This is based on two things:
1.  The research I've done indicates that it was the Romans who changed our calendar so that the "new year" started on January 1 rather than the spring equinox.  They named the first month after Janus, the Roman god with two faces that look forward and backwards, the god of doorways, gates, and beginnings and ending.  And so it is that on New Year's we look back over the past year and forward to the new one.
2.  I had an Italian boyfriend (OK, he was from Queens, NY, but from a very Italian family), who said the Italian tradition was that whatever you did on New Year's Eve, you would be doing for the rest of the year.

So what is our family doing this New Year's Eve?  A few years ago, Cool Papa and Miss Nancy (the self-selected names my father and his second wife chose for us to call them when my son was born) gave us a pizza stone, wooden paddle, and pizza wheel for making our own pizzas.  A year or so after that, Grandaddy (the name we used for my husband's father) gave us a bread machine.  And so, Voila!  A blending of the families resulted in a quasi-tradition of making personal pizzas for New Years.  So that is what we are having tonight--dough created in the bread machine, then personal pizzas baked on the pizza stone in the oven.

And as far as the Italian tradition goes.....well, besides posting my blog and cooking, tonight I will be working on a lesson plan, reading an educational policy book, and then reading some fiction.  My son will write on his blog, play on his Wii, and read some books.  My husband (who studies with a Blackfoot traditional Native American teacher) will participate in a sweatlodge (a traditional American Indian spiritual ceremony).

So if that is how we end up spending the new year, well, we'll be doing pretty well, I think.

PS--There is one other thing I did tonight... but I'll share about that tomorrow.

Book Review: The Search for WondLa

Since I'm still basking in yesterday's celebration of the library, it seems right to do a review of an interesting new book, The Search for WondLa by Tony DiTerizzi (he of The Spiderwick Chronicles fame).  This is a good book for middle schoolers to read, but also raises some more involved issues for those of us who might be more mature readers of children's books.

Tony DiTerizzi is one of those talented individuals who most of us wish we could write as well as he does, or draw as well as he does, and would never consider the ability to do both!  And he does both well in this book.  It is the story of a 12 year old girl, named Eva Nine, who is raised without any other human contact and trained by a robot for eventual transition from the underground environment where Eva has spent her entire life to life on the surface of Earth (presumably).  But when Eva is forced above ground prematurely, it looks nothing like the situation she has been learning to survive on.  Her computers don't recognize any of the life forms, the promised contact with similar beings does not come to be, and she is being pursued by an unknown creature for unknown purposes. 

So, as I said in the beginning, it is a great story for middle schoolers.  A heroine of the right age is on a quest--for friend, for family, for connection, and for understanding her place in the world.  It is a combination of science fiction and mystery, with lots of cool technology and fantastic creatures, all illustrated with wonderful pictures (and a 3-D map if you access the resources via the Internet).  My almost-12-year-old son really enjoyed it; he found it complex enough to be interesting without getting lost, and enjoyed the creatures and the world DiTerizza had created.

There is another component of the book.  DiTerizza has added some Internet connectivity through graphics in the book.  Using a technology he calls "Wondla Vision," if you download the softwear, you can scan the graphic pages in the book into your webcam to access a 3-D map of the planet with a visual script of what happens where.  DiTerizza called this "Augmented Reality."

I have to admit that this was one of the reasons I was particularly interested in this book (confession:  I haven't read or seen the movie of The Spiderwick Chronicles).  But this feeds into one of my big interests--the evolution of the book in the world of multimedia information.

So we downloaded and installed the software, and eventually figured out how to make the graphics works, and got to see the "Augmented Reality."  And I have to say that I didn't think it was worth the bother.  My son was similarly unimpressed; he pronounced it all "OK," and he wasn't the one who spent the time getting the software to work (as always, it didn't go as smoothly as promised on the website).

So whatever the enhanced book turns out to be, I don't think this is it.  But I still appreciate DiTerizzi for trying out something new.  It was at least an interesting experiment.  And perhaps those who are as strong readers as both my son and I are would find the computer information more interesting and helpful.

But there was another aspect of this book that I found REALLY interesting.   However, to discuss it, I have to refer to specific character and plot actions.  So if you haven't read the book, but intend to do so, I would suggest you stop here, read the book, and check back later to see if you agree with my analysis.


LAST WARNING:  SPOILER ALERT


OK, so what I think is REALLY interesting about this book is that while it is a science fiction book, and fools around with computerized "Augmented Reality" and all that, it also beckons back to that wonderful century-old book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (originally published in 1900).  DiTerlizzi suggests that he was inspired by the illustrations in that book by W.W. Denslow, and they are kind of traditional images for a space-age novel.  (Which is not a criticism--they are lovely.)  And (if you've read the book), it refers to the Wizard of Oz as one of the major plot devices.  But while I haven't read this in any of the reviews, this book seemed to me to be almost a jazz riff on the original story.  Is not the orphan Eva a substitute for Dorothy, Rovender the Scarecrow, Muthr the Tin (Wo)man, and Otto the Lion?  With Besteel the Witch, and a journey to Solas to find the duplicitous Curator Zin?  Or am I reading too much into it?

So this is really my favorite thing about the book.  To me, DiTerizzi is experimenting with how to combine the best of the old--the Wizard of Oz, and even beyond that, the Hero's Journey a la Joseph Campbell--with the possibilities of the new--the computer, web cams, and the World Wide Web.  Maybe it is not fully realized, but I appreciate the attempt to combine the two, which at least raises the issues in my mind about how to best approach this challenge.

Book Club: Reading Children's Literature Through the Decades

This summer, I organized a summer book club for our homeschool group in honor of the 50th Anniversary of our local library.  The idea was that we would spend three weeks at a time reading children's books from each of the five decades that the library has been open--that is, three weeks on books from the 1960's, three on the 1970's, etc. up to the decade of 2000-the present.  We had meetings and also ran a private wiki where students could post their reviews or comments on the books they read.  When the three weeks were up, students nominated and voted for their favorite books in different categories, such as best picture book, best reading book, best series, etc.

For the culmination of the project, we had two tangible products.  First, we ran a book drive to get people to donate new children's books to the library (which, like most public institutions, has had some severe budget cuts in recent years).  Secondly, we created a banner where students drew their versions of the books voted in as the favorites in each decade that could hang in the library as part of the anniversary celebration.

We delivered the books and the banners to the library at the end of September.  Here is a picture of some of the readers, banner artists, and book donors as we prepared to turn our work over to the library staff:

Here is a close-up of some of the panels:

And here is the final project hanging over the circulation desk at the library:

Though it was a good bit of work, and none of us read half as many books as we intended to, those who participated all said this book club was so much fun!  It was really great to introduce our children to our favorite books from our childhood, and to have a reason to go back and read some of those great books from earlier times that we've never gotten around to reading.  Plus, it was very interesting to look into the trends in children books through the years and to notice the similarities within a single decade and the differences between the decades.  We're thinking of doing it again in a couple of years, just to get in some more of those great books that we never quite made it around to this past summer.

Anyway, I recommend it as a focus for a reading program.  Having a library to celebrate the years of great children's books is just the icing on the cake!