Hello Book Bums families!
This week in the newsletter we have offerings to help you prepare and enjoy your holiday gatherings. From place settings to poetry, we've got you covered.
We are so grateful for all of you who open the newsletter each week and join us on our word-loving, bookish, learning adventures. Happy Thanksgiving!
Word of the Week
formal (for-mull) adjective/describing word - according to the established customs or rules
If you sit down to a formal dinner with more than one fork at your place, remember to use them from the outside in.
Literary Calendar
- One corner of the internet has renamed this month Dinovember.
- The creators call it "a month-long imagination invasion."
- If you have a dinosaur lover in your home, or just need a fun distraction, check out their website to see how they bring Dinovember to life.
From our Bookshelves
When it gets to be this time of year, I tend to enter “Little House mode” and am thinking about making all things comfy-cozy inside. It’s also when I begin dreaming about making the holidays truly delightful—like Ma and Pa did in The Little House in the Big Woods. That was surely a time when little things done with big hearts yielded treasured memories, and oh, how I hope that’s still true today!
When I learned that The Birchbark House by Louise Erdrich was a “must read” if you love the Little House books, I went straight to my Amazon account. (Sorry Joseph Beth and Barnes and Noble. I’ll make it up to you, soon!)
The Birchbark House is the story of Omakayas—which means little frog. Omakayas is a young Native American girl who lives on an island on Lake Superior in the mid 1800s. Like Little House, this book series shares one family’s experience in history. Like most families, Omakayas experiences great joys right alongside great heartbreaks.
I believe children should read lots and lots of books—even those that could make them cry. However, because of some of the content and the challenging text that includes lots of authentic Native American language (There’s a glossary and pronunciation guide at the end of the book.), I recommend sharing The Birchbark House with kids ten and up. In every way, this series is more challenging than Wilder’s Little House series, but both are absolute treasures.
81% of the reviewers on Amazon gave this book 5 stars.
Tips for Raising Readers and Writers
Every year at Thanksgiving time, I tease my granddaughter about there being “No Turkeys at the Table” except the one we’re going to eat! I loved hosting (and she loved attending) the No Fowl Manners workshop at Book Bums where we taught kids how to make a placemat, use good manners, set the table, and even fold a fancy napkin. It may not sound like fun, but it was a blast!
I remember, our final year of hosting this event, there were very few Euro-American faces gathered around me. Rather, there were twenty-some smiling faces representing other countries. Do you know why? Their families were eager to learn our customs when eating a formal meal. Parents were actually taking notes! Cool, huh?
In the image above, you can see a baggie with a plate. What you can’t see is that inside the baggie I had also placed plastic cutlery, a napkin, and a small plastic cup. Using those tools, step-by-step, I taught the kids where to place each item on their placemats for a “proper placesetting.” I asked them to try really hard to remember all I’d taught them about where each item is to be placed for a more formal meal. Then, I asked the kids to put all the items back inside their bags. They thought they were finished, but I surprised them by asking them to set their place setting again—with no help. They loved the challenge! And most kids remembered. By the third try, we were all experts.
You could do that too. You could make baggies of the needed items and teach your kids to set a proper table. Kids like learning when we combine information with fun-focused activities that are deliberately designed to feel special.
If you want a fun crafty activity to do with some kids you adore, try making super sweet (chocolate) place cards for your holiday dinner.
Wordology Workshop
- The Greek root pan means all.
- You can find it in words like panacea (which means a cure-all solution), panorama (which means a view in all directions), and pantheon (which refers to all the gods).
- Can you think of one more pan word from recent history?
Tips for Readers and Writers
I was working with a student and needed a practice activity that would cause him to lean into his phonics knowledge, practice his spelling skills, and think deeply about what he’s reading. I decided to share the activity I chose with you. Maybe a child you love could benefit from it, too. I created this “categories” activity for my second graders, but I use it with older kids as well.
It’s simple, really—just a list of words for kids to decode. But, as they read the words, the kids are to try to determine how some words might go together. Then they are to create categories and list all words from the list in the appropriate columns.
For this activity, the student might see that frogs and snakes and toads seem to go together. You would then ask, “What title could you give that category?” My student wrote animals. That works.
As you do the activity, take every opportunity to add information to what the child already knows. I made sure to notice aloud that these were all cold-blooded animals, and I shared that cold-blooded animals have blood temperatures that change according to their surroundings. If your child already knows about cold-blooded animals, you could prompt him or her to narrow animals to a more precise category name. What do they notice about these particular animals?
Notice that my student didn’t have the fourth animal listed right away. That’s okay. Through the process of elimination, we’ll have the opportunity to determine which word is missing from our list of animals. That’s part of the magic of this activity. Kids learn to draw conclusions from the process of elimination.
As your kids are completing this task, be sure to “coach them to correct.” At Book Bums, we know that too often kids are being quizzed—not taught. Coach your kids to use capital letters for languages. Don’t wait for them to mess up. That’s frustrating. Remind them, as they’re writing, that proper nouns require uppercase letters.
I hope you’ll print this activity and tuck it away somewhere. Then, when you have a few minutes with a reader you adore, you can pull it out for a puzzle-like activity that absolutely promotes excellent reading and writing skills.
Want even more fun? Encourage your child to come up with four different categories, think of four words for each one, and then create a similar puzzle for you to solve. My students LOVED making their own categories games and their friends enjoyed solving them!
Pause for Poetry
The Thanksgiving Turkey
by Jack Prelutsky
The turkey shot out of the oven
and rocketed into the air,
it knocked every plate off the table
and partly demolished a chair.
It ricocheted into a corner
and burst with a deafening boom,
then splattered all over the kitchen,
completely obscuring the room.
It stuck to the walls and the windows,
it totally coated the floor,
there was turkey attached to the ceiling,
where there'd never been turkey before.
It blanketed every appliance,
It smeared every saucer and bowl,
there wasn't a way I could stop it,
that turkey was out of control.
I scraped and I scrubbed with displeasure,
and thought with chagrin as I mopped,
that I'd never again stuff a turkey
with popcorn that hadn't been popped.
Practical Grammar
Idle (adjective) means “not moving” or “inactive” and idol (noun) refers to an object that is admired or worshipped. But have you seen or heard the word idyll (noun)? I bet you’ve heard the related word idyllic. An idyll is an extremely happy, peaceful, or picturesque scene—typically an idealized or unsustainable one.
Is it really possible to create the Thanksgiving idyll I’m imagining?
Just for Fun
Want to get into the Christmas spirit and have your day MADE? Please watch this video. It gets us every time. (sigh)
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