Of course, with books, there are all different levels and different areas of interest. I'll be doing four more lists: General easy, General difficult, Books for Girls, Books for Boys. Here are our General easy chapter books.
1) Winnie-the Pooh! My favorite! Of course, it is classic Pooh, not Disney, and includes Winnie-the Pooh, the House at Pooh Corner, and poetry books (loads of fun!) When We Were Very Young and Now We are Six.
2) Charlotte's Web. This is the #1 bestselling children's paperback worldwide. It's a must. Along with that is E.B. White's other children's books, Stuart Little and The Trumpet of the Swan.
3) Basil of Baker Street. These are the stories the The Great Mouse Detective was based on. They are a mouse community that lives belowstairs from Sherlock Holmes. Basil models himself on Holmes!
4) The Rescuers. More anthropomorphic mouse stories that created Disney spinoffs. It is wonderful how the mice consider it to be their mission in life to support and encourage prisoners, just like St. Valentine in ancient Rome.
5) The Cricket in Times Square. More mice. But, it gives a taste of the inner city in New York along with classical music and the natural history of crickets!
6) William Steig. He writes stories about anthropomorphic animals such as Abel's Island, Sylvester and the Magic Pebble and -- Shrek!
7) The Littles. For everyone who has ever imagined little people running around the house.
8) The Borrowers. More of the above.
9) Little Bear. This should probably go in the easy reader category, but it works here, too. Lovely pictures, simple stories.
10) Time Cat. Lloyd Alexander wrote a bunch of wonderful books, but this one was the first that I ever discovered. It is about a time-traveling cat who takes his master into nine different historical places. I learned so much out of this book. I still read it with my kids.
Wednesday, January 22, 2020
The Best Books for Kids -- Early Books
A friend recently asked me for a list of girls' books because she has one daughter in houseful of boys. As you may know from my previous articles, I am nuts about books! The best books came from my grandmother, who was an English and Speech teacher. I either found them in her house or she gave them to me. So, I am going to give you my ten favorite books by category, either by author or title.
The first category is Easy, but I'm assuming your kids are pretty good readers.
1) Mother Goose. Can't top this. The kids love the rhythm and rhyme. I saw Mother Goose's grave in Boston at the age of nine and was completely thrilled. I didn't know she was a real person!
2) Grimms' Fairy Tales. Don't get the Disney version. The import is lost if Little Red Riding Hood doesn't get eaten.
3) Ferdinand. I discovered this as a child. I just love the artwork and the "sit just quietly."
4) James Arnosky. He writes non-fiction about nature and does the watercolor illustrations himself. It is quiet and beautiful.
5) Robert McCloskey. Remember Blueberries for Sal? Make Way for Ducklings? That's him.
6) Thomas the Tank Engine. The early days. It is fun with flawed characters and a message about pleasing God. The later books dropped away from the message to simple entertainment.
7) Llama, Llama, Red Pajama. My daughter loves reading this with her kids. The rhythm, rhyme, and typical conflict (going to bed) are wonderful for developing relationship with your kids.
8) Beatrix Potter. Of course! Greatest adventure stories in the nursery!
9) ABC books, especially Handmade Alphabet. I started teaching my kids reading from a curriculum. By kid number 4, I was teaching them just with ABC books. Handmade Alphabet has no words but has beautiful colored pencil drawings of hands in the International Manual alphabet. My later kids learned the manual alphabet along with the printed alphabet and it helped their decoding tremendously.
10) Dr. Seuss. We couldn't do without him. The first books I remember reading were Green Eggs and Ham and Hop On Pop. Historically, he rejuvenated the phonics method of reading and got us out of the purgatory of Dick and Jane.
}/
The first category is Easy, but I'm assuming your kids are pretty good readers.
1) Mother Goose. Can't top this. The kids love the rhythm and rhyme. I saw Mother Goose's grave in Boston at the age of nine and was completely thrilled. I didn't know she was a real person!
2) Grimms' Fairy Tales. Don't get the Disney version. The import is lost if Little Red Riding Hood doesn't get eaten.
3) Ferdinand. I discovered this as a child. I just love the artwork and the "sit just quietly."
4) James Arnosky. He writes non-fiction about nature and does the watercolor illustrations himself. It is quiet and beautiful.
5) Robert McCloskey. Remember Blueberries for Sal? Make Way for Ducklings? That's him.
6) Thomas the Tank Engine. The early days. It is fun with flawed characters and a message about pleasing God. The later books dropped away from the message to simple entertainment.
7) Llama, Llama, Red Pajama. My daughter loves reading this with her kids. The rhythm, rhyme, and typical conflict (going to bed) are wonderful for developing relationship with your kids.
8) Beatrix Potter. Of course! Greatest adventure stories in the nursery!
9) ABC books, especially Handmade Alphabet. I started teaching my kids reading from a curriculum. By kid number 4, I was teaching them just with ABC books. Handmade Alphabet has no words but has beautiful colored pencil drawings of hands in the International Manual alphabet. My later kids learned the manual alphabet along with the printed alphabet and it helped their decoding tremendously.
10) Dr. Seuss. We couldn't do without him. The first books I remember reading were Green Eggs and Ham and Hop On Pop. Historically, he rejuvenated the phonics method of reading and got us out of the purgatory of Dick and Jane.
}/
Wednesday, January 1, 2020
The Oldest of Old-Fashioned Lessons -- Read Great Books!
A liberal education, where one is exposed to all manner of views should confirm whatever is right and good. In college, studying Plato confirmed my faith because it lined up in its arguments with the Bible. Studying the Buddhist scriptures confirmed my Christian faith because it seemed very far-fetched that a real man would have been born to a princess with 200 ladies in attendance and a white elephant passing by at the very moment of his birth. Talk about a fairy tale! Books postulating strange sociological experiments, such as Walden II, proved useless me practically and emotionally when I got pregnant during my freshman year of college. But, the Bible comforted me and Christians supported me.
Allan Bloom's concern as expressed in The Closing of the American Mind back in the 1980s was that students were coming to college not to have their minds broadened through the great thought of the millenia but to be confirmed in their own agendas by dismissing those great thoughts out of hand simply because the authors were white and male and, ergo, privileged. I have had discussions with my scary-smart teenage niece who said, in so many words, that because the classic authors came from a privileged class of white men, they should be dismissed as irrelevant to our culture.
Her argument in 2020 is not new. Bloom was running into it forty years ago. But, culture is transient. The 2020s American culture is different from the 1980s culture, which is different from the 1950s, from the 1920s, from the 1880s. But, morality, which is the subject of all great thought through the ages, is universal in every culture. How do I relate to God? How do I relate to my fellow man? What is the nature of good? Is man capable of being good? No matter where or when you live, these questions govern our lives and must be studied if we are to be more than animals. Classic literature, old lessons, address these, no matter who wrote them. Questions of race or sexism are secondary to those issues but progressives would make them primary. Why do you think they would skip over the primary issue -- "how should I behave toward my fellow man?" -- to the secondary issue -- "how should others behave?" Isn't it so that they can continue to do as they please while other people are required to change?
Alan Paton was a white South African who wrote anti-apartheid novels while running a reformatory for black South African youth in the 1960s and 70s. He was addressing how people should treat one another -- an issue of morality -- and, as a white man, his books admitted a need for whites to treat all humans equally.
Ghandi, in a famous speech givin in South African (you can see it in the 1982 film, Ghandi) said, "I am willing to die for what I believe. I am not willing to kill for it." While he was trying to change how society treated each other, the most important issue for him was, "How do I behave toward my fellow men?"
This is all part of the Synthesis that your children will go through as they determine what is important to them and how they will live their lives. And, our job as parents is to be an example that change starts with me, not the other guy. Whether it is Socrates' argument to his disciples against escaping Athens illegally when he had been unjustly condemned to death, or Tolstoy's juxtaposition of a life lived for others as opposed to a life lived for self in Anna Karenina, Shakespeare's argument for mercy in The Merchant of Venice -- because if we live by the law, every letter of the law must be followed -- Jane Austen's observation that the more prideful one is, the more prejudiced one is both for and against his fellow man, or Tolkein's lesson that even the smallest person doing the right thing can change the world, the classics address this question: "What must I do?" It is the greatest of all the Old-Fashioned Lessons. If someone makes the point of their education all about them -- "How should the world treat me?" -- what a small world it would be! "How should I treat others?" causes us to look out instead of in. It broadens our world. How I treat my fellow man is a pertinent question anywhere in the world, on a farm in Wisconsin, in downtown Tokyo or in the Amazon jungle. But, progressives of all stamps are only pertinent in their own environments. Racism against blacks or hispanics disappears if they move to different countries where the majority of people are black or hispanic. Radical feminism is the most prevalent worldwide in countries where women have the most freedom to express themselves. I have not heard of a huge movement of American feminists taking action in Saudi Arabia or Iran for those women's rights. Switzerland, the last country in the western world to grant women the right to vote, was the only country to do so by referendum -- which means that MEN voted for women to have the right to vote. The point being that culture as a focus of education is destined to become irrelevant wherever it is.
Allan Bloom asked his Introduction classes, "What books really count for you?" A few people said, "The Bible," but the students rarely studied it after leaving home. Books don't matter to us, anymore. But, they should. We know what someone means when they call someone, "a Scrooge," or "Eeyore-ish." This is because of a common literary tradition that gives depth of feeling as well as of moral understanding. Allan Bloom says that classic literature gives students models of good and bad and, ". . . a fund of shared experiences and thoughts on which to ground their friendships with one another." (Bloom, Allan; The Closing of the American Mind; Simon and Schuster; New York; c. 1987; p. 344.) We can't communicate with each other on a deeper level if our entertainment is limited to pop culture through TV, movies, pop music, the latest vampire romance, dystopian novels or agenda-steeped social media. All those things are light, shallow, fleeting. Unless your media has passed the test of time, its influence on the world is insignificant. It is the difference between dipping out a puddle with a spoon or dipping out a pool with a bucket.
But, look how much time we spend on all that fluff! It's not as if people haven't been writing or painting or composing fluff over the millenia in dozens of languages. But, only the great lasted, the stuff that truly is life-changing. Even great authors rarely produce uniformly great books. Shakespeare's hack-and-slash lay Titus Andronicus, simply doesn't match up to Hamlet or Julius Caesar. Herman Melville wrote a couple of popular sea adventures, then wrote Moby Dick, which Mark Twain considered to be the only great book of world literature ever produced in America. It was a financial failure, none of his other books were worth much and he died in poverty working as a customs agent. Even Jane Austen's books, which are unusual in that they are all still in print, include Northanger Abbey, a farce on contemporary gothic novels which is a little bewildering to the modern reader.
How many great French books can you name? Les Miserable and The Hunchback of Notre Dame? Spanish? Don Quixote. German? Mostly poets -- Goethe and Schiller -- and philosophers such as Kant and Nietzsche. Russian? A little more there: War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov. There is just not a lot of literature that can be called great. So, instead of spending our lives on mountains of trash that add nothing to our lives, we should study great literature, the lives of great people and see what we can learn from them. They will give us a solid foundation.
Allan Bloom's concern as expressed in The Closing of the American Mind back in the 1980s was that students were coming to college not to have their minds broadened through the great thought of the millenia but to be confirmed in their own agendas by dismissing those great thoughts out of hand simply because the authors were white and male and, ergo, privileged. I have had discussions with my scary-smart teenage niece who said, in so many words, that because the classic authors came from a privileged class of white men, they should be dismissed as irrelevant to our culture.
Her argument in 2020 is not new. Bloom was running into it forty years ago. But, culture is transient. The 2020s American culture is different from the 1980s culture, which is different from the 1950s, from the 1920s, from the 1880s. But, morality, which is the subject of all great thought through the ages, is universal in every culture. How do I relate to God? How do I relate to my fellow man? What is the nature of good? Is man capable of being good? No matter where or when you live, these questions govern our lives and must be studied if we are to be more than animals. Classic literature, old lessons, address these, no matter who wrote them. Questions of race or sexism are secondary to those issues but progressives would make them primary. Why do you think they would skip over the primary issue -- "how should I behave toward my fellow man?" -- to the secondary issue -- "how should others behave?" Isn't it so that they can continue to do as they please while other people are required to change?
Alan Paton was a white South African who wrote anti-apartheid novels while running a reformatory for black South African youth in the 1960s and 70s. He was addressing how people should treat one another -- an issue of morality -- and, as a white man, his books admitted a need for whites to treat all humans equally.
Ghandi, in a famous speech givin in South African (you can see it in the 1982 film, Ghandi) said, "I am willing to die for what I believe. I am not willing to kill for it." While he was trying to change how society treated each other, the most important issue for him was, "How do I behave toward my fellow men?"
This is all part of the Synthesis that your children will go through as they determine what is important to them and how they will live their lives. And, our job as parents is to be an example that change starts with me, not the other guy. Whether it is Socrates' argument to his disciples against escaping Athens illegally when he had been unjustly condemned to death, or Tolstoy's juxtaposition of a life lived for others as opposed to a life lived for self in Anna Karenina, Shakespeare's argument for mercy in The Merchant of Venice -- because if we live by the law, every letter of the law must be followed -- Jane Austen's observation that the more prideful one is, the more prejudiced one is both for and against his fellow man, or Tolkein's lesson that even the smallest person doing the right thing can change the world, the classics address this question: "What must I do?" It is the greatest of all the Old-Fashioned Lessons. If someone makes the point of their education all about them -- "How should the world treat me?" -- what a small world it would be! "How should I treat others?" causes us to look out instead of in. It broadens our world. How I treat my fellow man is a pertinent question anywhere in the world, on a farm in Wisconsin, in downtown Tokyo or in the Amazon jungle. But, progressives of all stamps are only pertinent in their own environments. Racism against blacks or hispanics disappears if they move to different countries where the majority of people are black or hispanic. Radical feminism is the most prevalent worldwide in countries where women have the most freedom to express themselves. I have not heard of a huge movement of American feminists taking action in Saudi Arabia or Iran for those women's rights. Switzerland, the last country in the western world to grant women the right to vote, was the only country to do so by referendum -- which means that MEN voted for women to have the right to vote. The point being that culture as a focus of education is destined to become irrelevant wherever it is.
Allan Bloom asked his Introduction classes, "What books really count for you?" A few people said, "The Bible," but the students rarely studied it after leaving home. Books don't matter to us, anymore. But, they should. We know what someone means when they call someone, "a Scrooge," or "Eeyore-ish." This is because of a common literary tradition that gives depth of feeling as well as of moral understanding. Allan Bloom says that classic literature gives students models of good and bad and, ". . . a fund of shared experiences and thoughts on which to ground their friendships with one another." (Bloom, Allan; The Closing of the American Mind; Simon and Schuster; New York; c. 1987; p. 344.) We can't communicate with each other on a deeper level if our entertainment is limited to pop culture through TV, movies, pop music, the latest vampire romance, dystopian novels or agenda-steeped social media. All those things are light, shallow, fleeting. Unless your media has passed the test of time, its influence on the world is insignificant. It is the difference between dipping out a puddle with a spoon or dipping out a pool with a bucket.
But, look how much time we spend on all that fluff! It's not as if people haven't been writing or painting or composing fluff over the millenia in dozens of languages. But, only the great lasted, the stuff that truly is life-changing. Even great authors rarely produce uniformly great books. Shakespeare's hack-and-slash lay Titus Andronicus, simply doesn't match up to Hamlet or Julius Caesar. Herman Melville wrote a couple of popular sea adventures, then wrote Moby Dick, which Mark Twain considered to be the only great book of world literature ever produced in America. It was a financial failure, none of his other books were worth much and he died in poverty working as a customs agent. Even Jane Austen's books, which are unusual in that they are all still in print, include Northanger Abbey, a farce on contemporary gothic novels which is a little bewildering to the modern reader.
How many great French books can you name? Les Miserable and The Hunchback of Notre Dame? Spanish? Don Quixote. German? Mostly poets -- Goethe and Schiller -- and philosophers such as Kant and Nietzsche. Russian? A little more there: War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov. There is just not a lot of literature that can be called great. So, instead of spending our lives on mountains of trash that add nothing to our lives, we should study great literature, the lives of great people and see what we can learn from them. They will give us a solid foundation.
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