THREE LITTLE WORDS: A MEMOIR- Ashley Rhodes-Courter

When Ashley Rhodes was about three years old, the Florida Department of Human Services determined her mother unfit, and took custody of Ashley and her younger brother. The two children spent the next ten years bouncing from foster home to foster home. Some of the situations were passable, several, however, were absolutely horrific. In one particularly unbearable situation, Ashley lived in a trailer, approved for two children, with eleven other foster children. The children were made to drink hot sauce or crawl around the dirt backyard on their knees for punishment.

When Ashley was about twelve, she was adopted by Gay and Phil Courter. Gay and Phil had already raised two biological sons. When they survived the crash of a private plane, they decided they had been left on Earth to do something special. They adopted Ashley and took on all of the complications of life with a child who had never experience a normal, loving home (not to mention all of the regular teenage issues).

I adopted my sons out of the foster care system when they were seven and nine. Although I had known my boys for several years, nothing prepared me for the length of the adjustment period, or for the depth of the heartache they had gone through. I wish this book had been available to me, then, because I think it would have made our journey a lot easier. This memoir is a must read for anyone involved with children in the foster care system.

"Broken promises crippled me for many years. As the Courters kept their promises to me, my faith in others were expanded. Day after day, they were there for me; until one day, I not only felt safe, I did not want to leave. Maybe that is one definition of love" (p. 289).

COMPUTER ISSUES

I have not given up blogging. My hard drive crashed. Hopefully I will be back on line soon.

TWO NEW BABY/TODDLER PRESENTS

People who invite me to baby showers know, without a doubt, that I will bring books. Let other people bring the onesies, and diapers, and nose-sucker-outer thingies, I will bring the important stuff- food for the heart and the brain. Last week, while I was at the library (please note, I did not say bookstore!) I found a couple of really fun baby or toddler read alouds.

GOOD NIGHT BABY RUBY- Rohan Henry

Baby Ruby has had her bath, and should be headed off to bed, but no one can find her. She travels throughout the house, stopping to visit various family members and pets along the way.  This book is destined to be a classic, kind of along the lines of GOODNIGHT MOON. The illustrations are very simple- black line drawings with just a little color, just like the cover. I know kids will ask for this book again and again.

PEEKABOO BEDTIME- Rachel Isadora

PEEKABOO BEDTIME features an African American toddler preparing for bed by playing peekaboo with everything in her line of vision, e.g. "Peekaboo, I see my daddy" OR "Peekaboo, I see my cat."  The book begins with a right hand page with the phrase, "Peekaboo, I see…" When you turn the page, you see the object the child is seeing. It would only take kids a couple of pages to realize that clues in each large, brightly colored illustration allow the reader to predict what is coming next.

An aside: OK, I said these books would be good baby presents, and that's definitely true, but I could also see using the books to teach primary grade students how to use pictures to predict text or how to be good picture detectives. If I was teaching ECE, kindergarten or first grade, I would also want these books in a basket of trade books students could easily read, those NO DAVID kind of books that kids return to again and again.

POETRY FRIDAY

The last couple of years, Denver has been dry, dry, dry and everything has been brown and crispy. This summer, we have had a thunderstorm almost every afternoon. I love the green!

RAIN IN SUMMER

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

How beautiful is the rain!

After the dust and heat,

In the broad and fiery street,

In the narrow lane,

How beautiful is the rain!

How it clatters along the roofs,

Like the tramp of hoofs,

How it gushes and struggles out

From the throat of the overflowing spout!

Across the window-pane

It pours and pours;

And swift and wide,

With a muddy tide,

Like a river down the gutter roars

The rain, the welcome rain!

****

In the country, on every side,

Where far and wide,

Like a leopard's tawny and spotted hide,

Stretches the plain,

To the dry grass and the drier grain

How welcome is the rain!

Read the rest of the poem here.

Poetry Friday is at Crossover Books.

THE MOSTLY TRUE ADVENTURES OF HOMER P. FIGG- RODMAN PHILBRICK

Last weekend, my blogging friend Mary Lee (Year of Reading) was in town. I asked her about novels she had read recently, and she recommended THE MOSTLY TRUE ADVENTURES OF HOMER P. FIGG. On Monday, when I was at the library (notice I did not say bookstore!), I picked it up. I have to agree with Mary Lee, it's a good one.

Homer P. Figg is an orphan. He lives with his brother Harold Figg and a wicked step uncle, Squint, on a farm in Pine Swamp, Maine. After an unforunate incident involving pig slop, Squint becomes angry with the boys and finagles a deal so that Harold is conscripted into the Union Army, even though he is seventeen and not technically old enough to serve. Homer sets out to find his brother and bring him home. And so begin the adventures (or perhaps the misadventures) of Homer P. Figg…

In his hunt for his brother, Homer is captured by evil bounty hunters Smelt and Stink, meets Jebediah Brewster, a Quaker whose home is a station on the Underground Railroad, and travels as the "Pig Boy" with Professor Fenton Fleabottom, an elixir salesman with a few secrets of his own. His adventures (or misadventures) with these characters are funny and fun to read, but also include a great deal of information about life during the Civil War era.

A couple of parts toward the end felt a little forced and were a little hard to believe. Mostly, though, it's a really good read. I'd use HOMER P. FIGG in a unit on the Civil War, maybe in a text set with ELIJAH OF BUXTON. 

PRINCESS AND THE PEA- Rachel Isadora

I am always on the lookout for new versions of fairy and/or folktales, and especially those with a bent toward diversity. While I was at the library tonight (did you notice this does NOT say bookstore?), I found a new to me version of the Hans Christian Anderson folktale, PRINCESS AND THE PEA. It's actually a couple of years old, so maybe everyone in the world has seen it, but I hadn't and I fell in love immediately. The story is set in Africa. The illustrations are one of my favorite genre, collage. This would make a fabulous addition to any folk tale collection.

RETURN TO SENDER- Julia Alvarez

Tyler Paquette is an eleven-year-old boy, growing up on his family's dairy farm in Vermont. When his father is seriously injured in a tractor accident, the family is faced with hiring extra help or losing their farm. They hire three Mexican workers, who move into a trailer on the Paquette farm. One of the men has three daughters. Mari, the oldest, is about Tyler's age and the two children soon become friends.

Although the workers are a godsend in keeping the Paquette family farm afloat, there are many questions. First, and most pressing, although the workers have papers, no one is convinced that they are in the United States legally. Will "La Migra" (Homeland Security) come and take them away?Secondly, Mari's mom left for Mexico to visit her sick mother in  a year before and never returned. Where has she gone? Is she still alive? Finally, there are issues of culture and language. Mari writes about these issues, and others surrounding her family through the genres of letters and diaries (I love that aspect of the book).

As someone who teaches many children whose families have immigrated from Mexico (some legally but many illegally), I learned a great deal from reading RETURN TO SENDER. I have always known that my students worry about their families being split up or sent back to Mexico. I know that their families have less to live on because they send a portion of their salaries to relatives back home in Mexico. I know that my students often go without medical or dental care because of their immigrant status. This book helped me understand these issues at a much deeper level. For those reasons, I'm really glad I discovered RETURN TO SENDER.

At the same time, I don't know very many elementary kids, even upper elementary kids, that would enjoy this book. It's a book I would try with my most advanced elementary readers, or maybe as an after school book club with some of our older girls. Or, I might just encourage students to read the book in middle school…