Melissa Wiley's Blog, page 68
December 9, 2013
The 12 Days of Christmas (Bookstore Style)
Look for a cameo from two (not) best friends!
December 6, 2013
Me gusta Cat Spanish (so far)
A peek at the new “Cat Spanish” app from Memrise. We’ve only just begun playing with it. Will report back later when we’ve worked with it for a while (mainly Rose; she’s the one learning Spanish), but it’s safe to say it’s a hit so far. Conversational phrases with amusing kitty photos: you have us at hello.
December 5, 2013
Homeschooling Books: A Wish List for Libraries
This is a quick-and-dirty list of homeschooling how-to and reference books I’d love to see in libraries. I’ll prettify it later. Throwing it up hastily now during #ReadAdv (the Reader’s Advisory Twitter Chat) and will probably add to it during the discussion.
Charlotte Mason’s Original Homeschooling Series
Sandra Dodd’s Big Book of Unschooling
Year of Learning Dangerously by Quinn Cummings.
Free Range Learning by Laura Grace Weldon
Project-Based Homeschooling by Lori Pickert
The Unschooling Handbook by Mary Griffith
As much John Holt as possible (How Children Learn, How Children Fail, Learning All the Time, Teach Your Own)
Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto
Also his Underground History of American Education
Homeschooling Books I Like
This is a quick-and-dirty list of homeschooling how-to and reference books I’d love to see in libraries. I’ll prettify it later. Throwing it up hastily now during #ReadAdv and will probably add to it during the discussion.
Charlotte Mason’s Original Homeschooling Series
Sandra Dodd’s Big Book of Unschooling
Year of Learning Dangerously by Quinn Cummings.
Free Range Learning by Laura Grace Weldon
Project-Based Homeschooling by Lori Pickert
The Unschooling Handbook by Mary Griffith
Quinn Cummings and I will be on Reader’s Advisory Twitter chat today
From Liz Burns re the #ReadAdv Twitter chat for librarians and interested parties:
Our next chat takes place on Thursday, December 5 at 8 P.M. EST.
Sophie and Kelly and I were tossing around possible topics for our next chat, and homeschooling came up. Seems like librarians are always asking about and wondering about working with homeschoolers. What can they do? What should they do? What works?
So I said, oh, we should have guests. And I had a short dream list of possibilities: the two people who, in talking about homeschooling, makes me want to have kids just so I can homeschool them.
They are, of course, Melissa Wiley and Quinn Cummings. And both these terrific women said YES. So Melissa Wiley (@melissawiley on Twitter) and Quinn Cummings (@quinncy) will be joining us on December 5.
Got anything you’d like me to share with librarians who are wondering how best to serve homeschoolers? Wish lists, etc? Send me your questions and I’ll share them this evening, 8pm EST, 5pm here on the West Coast. Follow #ReadAdv to see the discussion unfold.
December 2, 2013
I feel it is my duty to let you know
…that a whole slew of Dorothy Sayers mysteries are $1.99 on Kindle today. (Sixteen, to be exact.)
And a giant bunch of other books (it’s their big Cyber Monday sale) including:
my beloved Muriel Spark (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie among others)
Lois Lenski (Strawberry Girl and others)
Jean Craighead George (Julie of the Wolves is $1.99; some of her American Woodland Tales are only .99!)
Mary McCarthy (I recently read The Group and would like to read more of her work)
a lot of Rebecca West (Family Memories and many more—some are $2.99)
a bunch of Boxcar Children books
several Tomie de Paola picture books including Early American Christmas, Fin Mc’Coul, and some of his saint books
some Barbara Pym, whom I have not yet read!
and a gajillion more.
Note: the above are affiliate links, which means I’ll earn a few cents on each book you purchase. TO SPEND ON MORE BOOKS.
December 1, 2013
My work here is done
Me: I need to buy some seeds to fill in the places where the drought killed everything off.
Scott: Done!
Me: I mean, I’m going to need a LOT of seeds.
Scott: Dude. Like you have tell me that. I haven’t read Miss Rumphius 7,685 times for nothing.
Booklog November 2013
• The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert
• Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (my college friend Beth Malone is starring as grown-up Alison in the Off-Broadway musical and I decided it was high time I read the book)
• Everyone’s Reading Bastard by Nick Hornby (Kindle single)
• More Baths, Less Talking by Nick Hornby (another collection of his Believer columns on his reading life, every one of which I’ve enjoyed immensely, as you can see in my Hornby archives)
• Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion (selected essays)
• and many, many picture books for the Cybils (178 so far, but some of those were read earlier in the year)
In progress: Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks (after listening to her seminar in the Coursera class I’m taking on historical fiction, as discussed here)
November 30, 2013
Hijinks ensued
So I was too busy enjoying the company of my home-too-briefly college girl and my beloved pal Kristen and her hubby and my goddaughter and the rest of my rowdy, riotous gang to REMEMBER TO TAKE ANY PICTURES (*smoke comes out of ears*)—but it seems Scott was clicking away during the frantic final moments of our feast preparation. (Who am I kidding. I was in the kitchen: all moments were frantic.) These just made me laugh and laugh. Which is exactly how I spent the holiday.
This last one is ridiculous but Scott made me include it because he likes how I go tharn. Which, too, is a fair representation of my state of mind while cooking: train rushing toward me and I’m frozen in my tracks. Help! Hrududu ain’t got nothin’ on gravy about to scorch.
(It didn’t. Whew.)
November 25, 2013
The Monarchs are in trouble
I’ve been blogging about Monarch butterflies practically from the moment this blog began. I’ve been growing milkweed, the only host plant for monarch caterpillars, in our yard for over a decade—first in Crozet, Virginia, and then here in San Diego after our move seven years ago. When you leave a comment on this blog, if you don’t happen to have a WordPress avatar set up, the default avatar is a picture of milkweed from my garden. I made a very dopey video, once, showing some of our butterfly plants, and was lucky enough to catch a Monarch in the act of laying an egg on the underside of a leaf. We’ve been a family wrapped up in bees and butterflies for a very long time.
We had a fair number of caterpillars last year, enough to eat our five plants to the ground. But this year may be different.
This year, the giant Monarch migration that takes place in the mountains of Mexico has been, well, not exactly giant.
…for the first time in memory, the monarch butterflies didn’t come, at least not on the Day of the Dead. They began to straggle in a week later than usual, in record-low numbers. Last year’s low of 60 million now seems great compared with the fewer than three million that have shown up so far this year. Some experts fear that the spectacular migration could be near collapse.
The reasons aren’t a mystery:
A big part of it is the way the United States farms. As the price of corn has soared in recent years, driven by federal subsidies for biofuels, farmers have expanded their fields. That has meant plowing every scrap of earth that can grow a corn plant, including millions of acres of land once reserved in a federal program for conservation purposes.
Another major cause is farming with Roundup, a herbicide that kills virtually all plants except crops that are genetically modified to survive it.
As a result, millions of acres of native plants, especially milkweed, an important source of nectar for many species, and vital for monarch butterfly larvae, have been wiped out. One study showed that Iowa has lost almost 60 percent of its milkweed, and another found 90 percent was gone. “The agricultural landscape has been sterilized,” said Dr. Brower.
This article touches, too, on the dire plight of the honeybee, about which I’ve had much to say on this blog over the years.
I don’t often feel helpless. But with this, I do. What can I do beyond the small acts I’ve been doing? Planting milkweed, singing the joys of bee-and-butterfly gardening, avoiding pesticides and herbicides even though that means I have a weedy garden. Keep on singing, I guess?
