posts tagged with 'picture book'
hardcrabble for real
One of our favorite picture books is Hardscrabble Harvest, by Dahlov Ipcar. Leah bought it for me at a bookstore in Maine on vacation a few years ago; she could have bought Ipcar's Lobsterman, to be more thematically appropriate, but when she saw Hardscrabble Harvest she knew I had to have it. It starts, "Farmer plants early in the spring. He'll be lucky if he harvests a thing." It's hard for me to refrain from quoting the whole thing; many of the lines are favorites, and we bring them out as the situation demands. "Chickens in the garden, scratching up the row. Run farmer run, chase them with a hoe" is one that sees frequent use. The story runs through one farm season as a young farming couple deals with one setback after another. Because that's what farming is, setbacks. Maybe my favorite couplet is, "Summer almost over, harvest drawing near. Most of the cauliflower eaten by the deer."
Ipcar knew what she was talking about: in her twenties, she and her husband survived for a few years as subsistance farmers in Maine. The daughter of artists William and Marguerite Zorach, she was also painting in between farm jobs, and she had her first MoMA solo exhibit at the age of 21 (art doesn't pay much better than farming, even for "the first woman and the youngest artist to be featured in a solo exhibition at the museum"). She illustrated Hardscrabble Harvest using only mixes of red and green (and black and white) which gives it a unifying feel, and the pictures are a blend of symbolic and realistic.
Leah thought the book would appeal to me because of how much I moan about things going wrong in the garden. It's interesting, now that I think about it, how well-constructed the story is: the first three-quarters are a series of things going wrong—all kinds of animals eating the crops, mostly—then the last part is the farmers' amazing bountiful harvest, capped with their Thanksgiving feast. Because that's what it's like: all my attention is focused on the trouble I'm having with seedlings, and meanwhile we're getting as much asparagus and rhubarb as we could ever hope to eat. Yesterday I made some rhubarb syrup, and today I'm doing the second rhubarb pie of the season. After all, what's all this food for but to eat up? As the book ends:
Stuffing in the turkey,
cranberry sauce.
Sit down to eat it,
hungry as a hoss.Sit down to eat it,
hungry as a pup.
Here come the relatives
to gobble it up!
the last page
unschooling texts
So I finally pulled the trigger on the Amazon order I started back in January—I'm not good at spending money. One of the three books came today: I Learn Better By Teaching Myself, by Agnes Leistico. I'm about half way through it and I'm enjoying it for what it is, which is an early description and defense of student-led learning. It's not really telling me anything I didn't already know, but it's still nice to be reminded that other people have done homeschooling the way we're doing it. And it works! Stops me from busting out the worksheets or whatever when I start getting nervous. At 1¢ (plus $3.99 S&H) I consider it totally worth it.
Besides that and John Holt's How Children Learn, I also ordered a picture book called Frank and Lucky Get Schooled, by Lynne Rae Perkins. We got it from the library a couple weeks ago and all loved it, so it's totally worth owning. It's not a homeschooling book necessarily, but it's all about how life is full of learning opportunities—just like we unschoolers always say. It's about a boy (who goes to school, though not in the pages of the story) and his dog, and what they get up to together. All the adventures are described in terms of school subjects: math problems, science experiments, geography lessons. And it's super funny. Highly recommended by the Archibald family.
If you want to read or talk about any of these books (or any other of the thousands we own) just stop on by most any time! We're always learning around here.
hippy picture book suggestion
In a world full of kindergarten stories and princess-dress stories and robot-boy stories, I take note when I come across a picture book that I think shows off good counterculture values. Take mental note, that is... unfortunately, when I don't actually write down any of the titles that particularly catch my attention, I can't remember them later when anyone asks. If anyone were ever to ask. That changes now!
In Building Our House, Jonathan Bean describes, from his older sister's perspective, how his parents and their friends built a timber-frame house for themselves. The watercolor illustrations beautifully portray the passage of the seasons as the work goes slowly forward—though significantly faster in the book than in real life, as an author's note at the end explains! The narration is wonderfully matter-of-fact, just as you'd expect from a child of parents who could ever conceive of such a thing. Wiring and insulating mid-winter "while the drifts pile up"? Sure, isn't that just what you do?
Bean and his family aren't all-out back-to-the-landers: the first step they took towards developing their property was to hook up to municipal electricity, and an electric range is pictured (along with a cookstove at the center of the house). So they aren't as hard-core as some people we know. But they sure aren't taking the typical route to home-ownership!
Harvey and Zion love the book, which we got from the library, and we've already read it six or seven times. It might be worth buying, though I may prefer to save my Jonathan Bean dollar for another book of his that I learned about while searching for an image to include with this post. Called This Is My Home, This Is My School, it features the house whose construction we just lived through serving both those roles.
In the Author's Note that ends Building Our House, Bean closes:
Of course, a homestead would not be complete without a large garden, fruit trees, pets, woodland, and a stream flowing through a mysterious marshland. Add to that the wise love of two parents, the companionship of three sisters, and a practically lived faith, and it's hard for me to think of a better place to have grown up.
Sounds good to me!