Daisy Between a Rock and a Hard Place is a short book written by Janis F. Kearney, about Daisy Bates. Daisy Bates was an activist who helped mentor the Little Rock Nine during the Integration Crisis of 1957. Nine black students had enrolled in the previously all-white school and
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Another Step to Take: WWII and the idea that stories have a story behind them.
I found the book The Journey that Saved Curious George by Louise Borden at the library, and borrowed it thinking it would be a good way of encouraging the children to think about stories as having authors and authors as having their own stories. It also opened up a way of talking
Continue readingAnother Step to Take: poverty as a product of social relations
“In the humanitarian view, poverty is a quantitative problem, not the product of social relations. Although development work seeks to attack the enduring, “root causes” of poverty, these causes are assumed to be primarily material. Poor people, the story goes, are poor because they lack various things: money, education, credit,
Continue readingAnother Step to Take: What I want my children to practice through computer programming
My seven year old is back to computer programming, this time using Scratch, an easy programming language developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. It is a free easy program to use, and children can share the programs they make with it on the Scratch community
Continue readingAnother Step to Take: Christmas Time Fun
So what did we do this Christmas time? We tobogganed, experimented with computer programming again, played board games and much more. Here are a few of our holiday projects. We had learned about the different types of levers earlier, including the mnemonic “ple” to remember which type of lever is
Continue readingAnother Step to Take: responsibility, the ability to accept criticism and pit bulls.
I’ve written about some of the questions around bullying, and whether individuals need to grow thicker skins or be treated gentler, and about boundaries and people’s different abilities to accept criticism. In all of these there are questions of what is normal acceptable behavior, what to do when different people’s behaviors cross those lines (is
Continue readingAnother Step to Take: Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Books I Want to Read in 2013
Today I thought I’d participate in the Top Ten Tuesday meme, hosted by the Broke and the Bookish. Today’s topic is the top ten books I’d like to read in 2013. Paved With Good Intentions by Nikolas Barry-Shaw and Dru Oja Jay. A friend lent me this book, so I need
Continue readingAnother Step to Take: Book Review: The Goodbye Baby: A Diary about Adoption
The Goodbye Baby: A Diary About Adoption by Elaine Pinkerton, was sent to me by a publicist. My review of the book The Aventures of Baylard Bear by Lucinda Sue Crosby had caught his attention and he wondered if I would be willing to look at another book on adoption. I said yes. Elaine Pinkerton
Continue readingAnother Step to Take: Making the most of the holiday time
Holidays can be days with more, less or different work or they can be days to be refreshed. I’m trying to figure out what exactly refreshes me. What makes life seem even better? Yesterday I had moments of feeling refreshed when I was thinking about what changes I would make in the
Continue readingAnother Step to Take: More Christmas books
For three years now, we’ve made it a tradition to sing Christmas carols every evening of advent. Some nights we read Christmas stories, and sometimes we watch Christmas movies as well, but always Christmas carols. As a result my children have learned some of the Christmas carols they would not have
Continue readingAnother Step to Take: Why those who liked The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard should be supporting First Nations rights, right now.
If you were one of the millions of people who watched The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard and you thought, “yes, we need to take action to reduce the destruction we are doing on this planet,” then one way to do that is to support the First Nations in their
Continue readingAnother Step to Take: Climate Change, Northern Ontario & Chief Theresa Spence
My last post was about a children’s book on climate change and polar bears. This post is going to be about climate change and Northern Ontarians. There are communities in Northern Ontario where the roads drive over ice. This news article from almost a year ago describing how the roads
Continue readingAnother Step to Take: Tears for Nanertak – a children’s book about climate change
I received in the mail an absolutely stunning hard covered picture book to review. It is called Tears for Nanertak and it is written and illustrated by Skip Hofstrand. As I look through it I can imagine myself wandering the halls of an art gallery admiring an arctic exhibit. The
Continue readingAnother Step to Take: Bullying is still a challenging topic.
Way, way back when I was in university I tried to write an paper about bullying for an ethics class. We were supposed to be writing about something controversial and I remember classmates being skeptical that bullying could be a controversial subject. Of course bullying is wrong, right? Of course
Continue readingAnother Step to Take: Thoughts on a City Council Meeting
I went yesterday to a city council meeting. I was there with just over 30 people to watch the passing of a motion to have our city council request that the provincial government reverse the cuts to the Community Start Up and Maintenance Benefit. So the part I was there
Continue readingAnother Step to Take: 5 Reasons to Make a Set of Napier’s Bones
Napier’s bones are easier than slide rules,” my seven year old announced the other day. I had found extra-wide wooden craft sticks (popsicle sticks), shown him how to write the multiplication table on them, dividing the one’s digit from the ten’s digit with a diagonal line. Each stick contained the first
Continue readingAnother Step to Take: Homeschooling
Savannah of the website Hammock Tracks has included an email interview with me on her website as part of her “Who Homeschools” feature. Check it out right here and then explore other parts of her site. Speaking of homeschooling, it’s been funny recently some of the responses I’ve had when talking with
Continue readingAnother Step to Take: Romance and Rape in Historical Fiction
How would you write a romantic novel about a historical time-period where the most likely relationship would be at best bordering on rape? Could you write a romantic novel about the love a slave owner felt for his slave mistress? What about the Biblical Abraham’s relationship with Hagar, or Dinah’s relationship with
Continue readingAnother Step to Take: Review: Cooking without Measuring by Rachel Wizenfeld
Several years ago I went through a phase where I obsessively borrowed cookbooks from the library. I poured over them never to ever attempt to follow them. I couldn’t follow them. I was trying to eat seasonally with food from local farms, and I avoid white flour and sugar. Very,
Continue readingAnother Step to Take: Personal Responsibility in the Age of Unlimited Choices
Have you ever heard of “cafeteria religion”? The term refers to the idea of people treating religion like a buffet table where they can pick and choose what parts they want rather than accept someone else’s menu. It is an idea I’ve had trouble with for a while. On one
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