Thanksgiving books, Delaware festival, voting

The publisher of Thanksgiving: The True Story asked me to recommend some of my favorite books for Thanksgiving. They're listed at:
http://us.macmillan.com/NewsDetails.aspx?id=9637&publisher=holtbyr

I'm looking forward to participating in the Delaware Book Festival this weekend. (http://debookfestival.lib.de.us) Saturday morning, I'm on a panel, Women in History, with Laurie Halse Anderson and Cathy Gourley. Of course, I'll be mentioning the fact that Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony addressed the Delaware General Assembly in 1881 as part of an effort to amend the state constitution to allow woman suffrage. No such luck. In 1920, Delaware had the opportunity to be the final state needed to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment, but didn't & the honor passed to Tennessee, which did, by one vote cast by a young legislator, who voted according to his mother's wishes!!

REMEMBER: The fight for women's right to vote was hard and hard; the victory narrow--VOTE on Tues, November 4, 2008

Books signing

I spent several fun hours on Saturday, signing books at Borders in Stroudsburg, PA (Route 80 to exit 302, right at the light, down the hill to the "Shoppes at Stroudsburg" mall on the left.) As always, the bookstore manager, Linda Crooks (pictured), set up a wonderful display of my books. The place was abuzz with excitement as people poured in(there was a fierce rainstorm outside) to join in the fun and games of a Halloween event Linda had organized--"Spooktacular."

Podcasts, students, booktalks

A middle school librarian, Kristy McCarthy, recently gave an interesting presentation in one of my classes at Queens College, about how she uses podcasts in her library. There are two useful examples on her library website: 1. samples of podcasts that she helped students create are found under "Student Projects"; 2. her personal podcast booktalks are found under "Podcasts."
http://westburyschools.org/middle_school/library/Welcome.html

Music, Art, Reading & Writing

Re my 10/16/08 post: The teacher, Marie Russell, who uses Vivaldi's Four Seasons" in her classroom sent me this picture of the autumn results, "Turning Nature into Art: Inspired by Vivaldi's 'Four Seasons'" (click on picture for larger image). She wrote, "The culminating activity was putting all four seasons plus the Vivaldi report together into a book which they were able to take home." The second picture is of her students' project about Pablo Picasso that included using a recycled water bottle in a sculpture.
"As you might have gathered," she wrote in her e-mail," I love to bring in music and art into the curriculum and always try to find a way to incorporate reading and writing."

Students and scientific reasoning and Sue Kirch

Here is a link to a short video in which Sue Kirch, a science educator at New York University, discusses the question: Can elementary school students engage in scientific reasoning? See my 9/29/08 entry, for a summary of Sue's recent presentation at the Nonfiction Institute at the University of Maine.
http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/videos/susan_kirch

Click on "comment" at the bottom of the entry to read Sue's response to questions I emailed her after I viewed her video. If you have questions for Sue, feel free to post them on the comment page & she'll respond.

Music, Teaching, Writing

Last night in my Issues in Children's Literature class at Queens College, a teacher described how she plays Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" throughout the school year & ties in lessons & activities. She said that her students love the whole experience. I love the idea!

I grew up in a musical family (raised one, too): I remember going to sleep to the sounds of my father, Norman Morgan, playing the piano. My mother, Maritza Morgan, played the cello & was the music editor at the Chautauquan Daily, the newspaper for Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua, New York, for years. My tastes range from country (love Dolly) to soul/blues to classical--right now I'm listening to a new recording of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto--so gorgeous, perfect antidote to worrying about the state of the country & the world.

There's a sound track for everything I've ever written, i.e., I write to music. What kind? Depends & I never know until some mysterious process kicks in & the "right" music "reveals" itself to me. And I mean mysterious, e.g. I'm writing Stirring to Nanci Griffith's CD "Clock without hands." Here's what's mysterious about that: I've never particularly responded to her music. In fact, I only have that CD because it has her song, "Pearl's Eye View (The Life of Dickey Chapelle)," one of the women I wrote about in Where the Action Was: Women War Correspondents in World War II. (My son Jonathan told me about the song.) In April, I had retrieved the CD to include it in "Celebrating Women," my PowerPoint presentation about my 20-year quest for monuments, markers, and memorial to historic women. During a multi-tasking moment, I was listening to it & working on Stirring & they glommed (now there's a good Scrabble word). Now, in a Pavlovian way, when I've carved out writing time--I put on "Clock without hands" & play it over and over and over until my writing time is up. Note: Recently for my b-day, my son David & his wife Crystal gave me Emmylou Harris's CD "All I Intended To Be"--hummmm, Emmylou may nudge Nanci aside--I'll keep you posted.

I'll write another post detailing the sound track for my other books. During school visits, I used to bring a tape of 4 excerpts & 4 books & ask kids to listen & match the excerpt with the book. It was always lively & fun. Not sure why I stop, probably because I like to keep myself, thus my presentations, fresh.

Writing, Words, and Scrabble

The act of writing is putting one word after another. That's why we should start teaching writing by teaching youngsters--to LOVE words, one by one.
We play Scrabble most every night at bedtime, even when that means starting a game at 11 p.m. Last night I started the game with a 7-letter word--"touring." Also check out "zygote"

"You just can't be afraid."

What an intense time--I'm writing about the Civil War & I'm following the worldwide financial meltdown & I'm noting the ugly crowd reactions to inflammatory rhetoric by SP, J & CM. To keep focused and steady, I turn, as always, to the life lessons I've learned from historic women. For this situation, I've turned to Frances Perkins (1880-1965) secretary of labor during the Great Depression and World War II, and the architect of some of the most far-reaching and important reforms and social legislation ever enacted in America, including the establishment of Social Security. Here's an excerpt from my biography of Frances Perkins (A Woman Unafraid: The Achievements of Frances Perkins):
Several years before her death, Perkins had talked about the state of the world. 'I hear people say that the world is in a crisis . . . . I think crisis has occurred in the world's history many times, I'm glad to say that in those other crises we didn't have radio, television, and the movies to run it up until everybody died of terror . . . . You can't do any of those things we did in the early part of the century in you're afraid . . . . You just can't be afraid . . . if you're going to accomplish anything.'"
Although A Woman Unafraid is out of print, I have copies. If you'd like one, send me an email & I'll send you an autographed book for the price of postage and handling.

On Writing & Usefulness

After a break for my son Jon's electrifying performance of his powerful songs Monday night (you can find him of FaceBook), I've been hunkered down in my basement office working on Stirring Up The World. Since last week, I've been "piling up pages," to quote Linda, in large part because my Wed. night classes at Queens College, CUNY, haven't met for two weeks, due to religious holidays--having a stretch to immerse myself is such a treat.
A couple of weeks ago, I met a retired New York City librarian who told me--insisted, in fact-- that applying the word "usefulness" to a book is the "kiss of death" for librarians, a "code" in a book review that indicates that the reviewer didn't want to write something negative, but couldn't write something positive. Whoa! If that's the case, then it seems to me that there is a huge gap between what many readers seek & teachers need and librarians who shun "usefulness."
No school for Sophie today so we're off to the Bronx Zoo!