I have begun reading The Hobbit for our class, and I have not yet been able to truly enjoy it. I have found it very cumbersome to keep up with the various characters that I am unfamiliar with, and I am not sure where to expect the story to take me. It has also not described everything in any great detail, so I have found it difficult to feel as though I am actually in the land of the Hobbits. I recognize a few of the characters (especially Gandalf) from the Lord of the Rings movies.

While I have not been enjoying the book yet, I can appreciate Tolkien's immense creativeness. It takes an absolute creative genius to make up entire new races and languages as he has done in The Hobbit. I only wish I was half as creative as Tolkien. Even coming up with names for each of the dwarfs was a task that I would probably not have been up to.

I am hoping to enjoy the book as I delve deeper into it (I am so far only about 50 pages in), and I will post an update at a later time!

I read Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass as one of my outside reading assignments. His second book was every bit as nonsensical as the first, and even more so in parts. I wish I had known a little more about the game of chess before reading the book, because I think I would have understood several more of the subtleties in the story.

The plot is basically that Alice climbs through her mirror above her mantelpiece to get to a world of nonsense where a checkerboard dominates the pace of the book. She meets characters such as Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, Humpty Dumpty, talking flowers, and the Red Queen (a living chess piece). The Queen told her that she had to get to the 8th square where she would then be crowned as queen. She succeeds (after meeting many strange characters along the way), and is crowned queen. She checkmates the king and eventually wakes up back in her living room.

I really enjoyed the book, and I love how Lewis Carroll never ceased to think outside of the box. Alice and the queen ran as fast as they could to stay in the same spot; what a novel idea! I would liken him to J.K. Rowling as she also thinks completely outside of the box (i.e. moving photographs). I am glad that I have read both, and I now see where Disney got many of the other characters for Alice in Wonderland.

As I have been studying for our exam, I have created a study sheet for all of the poems we discussed in class. I have decided to post them as one of my blog entries for the week. This includes all poetry for the class except Robert Louis Stevenson and Christina Rosetti.

Nonsense and humorous verses
“Although it is difficult to distinguish between humor and nonsense, one might say that in humor the real is absurd, whereas in nonsense the absurd is real.”

Jabberwocky – Lewis Carroll
· From Through the Looking Glass
· A mock heroic tale of a possible prince who must defeat a jabberwocky
· This poem is recognized as the greatest nonsense poem in English
· Opening and closing paragraphs are the same – peaceful and pastoral – while the middle is all about fighting
· Sentence structure is correct for English
· Standard poetic forms are observed (quatrain, ABAB rhyme form, iambic meter)

Experiment Degustatory – Ogden Nash
· “it tastes like chicken”
· Personal narrative
· Degustatory is a mixture of disgusting and gustatory (taste)

Adventures of Isabel – Ogden Nash
· Reminds of Little Red Riding Hood (the Thurber and Dahl version)
· Zwieback crackers show she is a child (those are crackers given to children as they learn to eat whole food)
· 1st four lines describe villain
· Next two lines – villain tells Isabel what they are going to do
· Next two lines is the same in all stanzas
· Last two lines – Isabel does to the villain what they wanted to do to her.

The Spaghetti Nut – Jack Prelutsky
· Plays with words and sounds
· Gustatory images
· Slip stick or visual humor
· Nettie Cutt vs. Nettie cut (name versus action)
Sick – Shel Silverstein
· 1st person narrator
· He misuses words like children would do
· Things that aren’t problems are presented (like having blue eyes)
· Hyperbole – blows something out of proportion to lunacy (the list is huge)
· Last four lines is the turn in the poem (it’s actually Saturday)

Boa Constrictor – Shel Silverstein
· Took something supposed to be scary and made it funny
· Starts out like a nursery rhyme and then moves into rhymed couplets
· Poem told in first person narrative – which makes the last funny line possible

The Witch of Willowby Wood – Rowena Bennett
· The witch is much like that out of Hansel and Gretel
· Free verse without rhyme scheme which makes it feel more like prose or conversation

Macavity: The Mystery Cat – T.S. Eliot
· Again, a narrative
· He is a con man hero

Mother’s Nerves – X.J. Kennedy
· A punch line poem

Narrative Poetry

The Highwayman – Alfred Noyes
· Listened to the song from you tube
· A ballad tradition, even though it isn’t in the usual ballad form
· The rhythm of the poem causes one to speed up when getting ot the action parts (the language makes you speed up).

Cremation of Sam McGee – Robert Service
· Not originally written for children, but they picked it up very quickly
· The poem is very dark and ends up being almost lighthearted and slightly funny
· The opening stanza is repeated at the end and gives the feel of a ghost story
· First person narrative
· The language is very commonplace (i.e. “he’d sooner live in hell”)
· The last two stanzas take us from a near ghost story to a turn where it ends humorously.

A visit from St. Nicholas – Clement Clarke Moore
· Clement Moore wrote this poem for his family and read it for the first time on Christmas Eve.
· The Santa that we now envision came straight from this poem
· In the first few lines, the language is full of nouns and adjectives and the words are longer
· Then, the language is more focused on verbs and the reader speeds up.

Casey at the Bat – Ernest Lawrence Thayer
· Written in 1888
· Made famous by DeWolf Hopper (recited over 10000 times)
· A mock heroic poem
· Tragic comedy
· Ballad (4 line stanzas, etc.)
· In medias res: it starts in the middle of the story
· Casey is the hero going into battle

Pied Piper of Hamelin – Robert Browning
· Poem written especially for a little boy
· “Modern rendition” of a traditional tale (the story is a well known story throughout Europe).
· He is dealing with a pretty sad concept, but he made it fairly humorous (injected little bits of humor)
· Rhythm of the words is important
o Lots of action verbs (short and to the point), thus moving the speaking quickly (stanza II)
o The words are used to portray a building of the intensity when the rats are pouring out of the houses (stanza VII)
o Same kind of effect with the children, but you get a different feel because it is children rather than rats (stanza XII)
· In stanza XV he gives a moral (he was a good Englishman, and thus, had to give a moral)

Lyric Poetry

The Creation – Cecil Alexander
· A Christian didactic poem
· Alexander was a 19th century author from the British Isles

William Blake
· Similar to Cecil Alexander (written at the same time and also British).
· Illuminated works – etched illustrations into copper
· Set the exemplar as to what children’s literature should be (i.e. beautiful and thought invoking).
· Wrote poems on Innocence and Experience
· All poems in Sword except Tyger are from the innocent side
· He pairs the innocence poems with troubling issues (i.e. child labor laws)
· Because the illustrations are inherent to the story, they are the front runners to picture books
· Many of the poems do have religious contexts
· Most have simple vocab and easy syntax
· Use familiar imagery
· Use repetition and refrain
· His poems also deal with social issues of the day
· He draws upon the oral tradition and also pulls in parts that are not necessarily appropriate for children’s literature (verbal ambiguity, covert satire, and sexual imagery).


Incident – Countee Cullen
· Expression of the African American experiences of the US
· From the point of view of an eight year old child
· Cullen felt that he should write on more universal topics than Hughes
· Cullen was a huge figure in the Harlem Renaissance.

Mother to Son – Langston Hughes
· Expression of the African American experiences of the US
· The point of view of the mother talking to the son
· The metaphor of the stair is carried through the poem. It is an amazing metaphor juxtaposing a poor black woman and a rich white woman
· Hughes felt he should write to the black experience.
· Hughes was a huge figure in the Harlem Renaissance.

Life Doesn’t Frighten Me – Maya Angelou
· A much more universal poem and doesn’t have to be the black experience strictly (although the child is most probably urban)

Hunchback girl: She Thinks of Heaven – Gwendolyn Brooks
· Again, a more universal poem. She could be in Heaven where everything is straight and she can live like a proper princess.
· The poem is a prayer
Emily Dickinson
· Tended to have four major themes in her poetry
o Nature
§ Scenes (look at nature and describe)
§ Meaning (look at something in nature and use a creature to explore other life meanings)
o Poetry, Art, Imagination
§ Looked at a book and the beauty of it
o Friendship, love, society
§ Relational issues of life
o Death, Immortality, Religion
· Her poems used compression (a type of writing with brevity)
o Short stanzas (many were quatrains)
o Short lines
o Usually, 2nd and 4th lines rhymed
· Will see a lot of nature images, domestic activities, industry, warfare, the law and economy
· The speaker is a “supposed person,” and not Emily Dickinson herself

I Met A King This Afternoon – Emily Dickinson
· She enjoys the play-acting of the children
· She seems to say that these children at play are at least as important as actual royalty

There is No Frigate like a Book – Emily Dickinson
· The power of a book can allow even the poor to travel
I am Nobody! Who are You? – Emily Dickinson
· Most famous of Emily’s poems
· Appears in many children’s collections
· She was a recluse, and all her poems were published posthumously, so she really was a nobody
· She rejoiced in being a nobody and not having to show herself to everyone (not a negative thing)


Hope is the Thing with Feathers – Emily Dickinson
· The bird is always there (even during the storm) just as hope is always there
· Hope doesn’t take anything from us

E.E. Cummings
· He played with typography and did not use capital letters and doesn’t use punctuation very much.
· Plays with white space to give a special image on the page
· Deals with nature, love, the relationship between the individual and the masses, and satire

In Just-Spring – E.E. Cummings
· Plays with the way kids run kids’ names together
· Images of spring (balloonman, puddles, etc)
· Looks strange on the page

Maggie and Millie and Molly and May – E.E. Cummings
· No punctuation
· Looks more normal on the page
· A bit of truth found in the poem (i.e. the little girls can find themselves at the beach no matter what they’ve lost)
· An alliteration

William Carlos Williams
· A doctor
· Imagism – uses short poems, ordinary language, and free verse to create sharp, exact, and concentrated pictures. All about what an image can say

This is Just to Say – William Williams
· The image is terrific
· The plum is a deep purple and it is cold

The Red Wheel Barrow – William Williams
· You can picture it perfectly
· He wrote this poem after having been to help a very sick little girl

Spring and All – William Williams
· He is at the beginning of spring where the first little buds are beginning to pop through the ground
· Very different images than those of E.E. Cummings

I was struck by the sadness of Countee Cullen's poem Incident. It spoke of a small child that was so hurt by a racist comment that they could think of little else for the remainder of the summer. While only African Americans could have had Countee's exact experience, I think everyone could relate to the poem by remembering that one incident that sticks out in your mind above everything else. That one time that a boy called you ugly or that one time that your friend had to stop playing with you because you lived on different sides of town. The poem was extremely touching, and I immediately became drawn to the poem. It was short, and straight to the point. In only 68 words, Countee was able to paint a picture in my mind of the day that he was insulted by a boy of his same age.

I stated previously that I had a story about Fred Gipson (the author of Old Yeller), and I will now tell you about him. Fred Gipson grew up and lived in Mason, Texas, and my mother's mother was also born and raised in Mason. My mother's mother (whom I never got to meet because of her early demise), was good friends with Fred Gipson's family, and my mother's best friend going up was a boy by the name of Richard Polk. Richard Polk is Fred Gipson's nephew. My mother spent many summers in Mason at Fred's ranch, and she knew Gipson and the Polk's very well. The part in the book where the boys are throwing rocks at each other was written after Fred saw Uncle Nurd (the name by which my sister and I call Richard Polk) and his brother throwing rocks at each other. Also, we have autographed copies of both Old Yeller and Savage Sam written to "my dear, sweet Nancy" (my mother's name is Nancy). I wish I had been able to meet Fred Gipson, but he died long before I was born. However, we spend every summer with his nephew, and we visit Mason, Texas every few years to visit the places of my mother's childhood.

I read the book Into the Land of the Unicorns by Bruce Coville for an outside reading. The book is the first in a series called THE UNICORN CHRONICLES. In 5th grade, we were encouraged to read books off of the Sequoyah list and vote on our favorite one. This book was my favorite, and the one I voted for (it did not win). When reading it again, I realized that it was part of a series, and I am now going to have to find the second one (the third will be published later this year).

The story centers around a young girl, Cara, who is thrust into the world of Luster after she and her grandmother are chased by a hunter. In Luster, the world is full of unicorns, dragons, and other mysterious creatures who all speak languages other than English. She makes friends with a unicorn named Lightfoot, a bear-like animal called a dimblethum, a man named Thomas, and a squirrel-like character called a squijum. They set out on a quest to find the queen and inform her that a hunter is after Cara and trying to enter the land of Luster to kill all of the Unicorns.

The amulet that Cara's grandmother gave her to help her enter Luster is the key to the hunters' entrance into the land, and must be kept safe. The book is a fairy tale adventure full of fun creatures and beautiful scenery.

I am definitely going to have to find the second book in the series, and then read the third this summer!

I am currently reading Into the Land of the Unicorns for an outside reading, and it reminded me of a children's book list that I was very familiar with when growing up. I am from Oklahoma, and the Sequoyah book awards was an important children's literature competition for school children. During my fifth grade year, we were given an incentive to read the books on the list, and were taken on a special trip if we read 20 out of 22 of the books. I read 20 books and voted on my favorite, but the winner for that year was, of course, one of the two books I did not read.

I have found the website detailing the past winners, the past contenders, and the history of the award. The website for the Official site of the Oklahoma Sequohya Book Awards is http://www.oklibs.org/sequoyah/

I was able to find the list of books that I read when I was in 5th grade by going to the master lists and finding the list of books for the 1996-1997 year. I also learned that the award is the third oldest children's choice award in the nation.

Another interesting side note is that the very first Sequoyah winner was Old Yeller written by Fred Gipson. This book has a special connection to my life, but I will save that story for another post.

I highly recommend checking out the Sequoyah website to learn more about the award, and to see what books have been on the lists.

I watched the movie Enchanted for the second time, and fell in love again with the fun story and the great satire found throughout the plot. The story is that of a girl from a fairy tale who is sent to the real world (New York City) by an evil witch/evil stepmother. It begins with all the great makings of a classic Disney Fairy Tale, and ends up with a girl lost in the crazy life of a New Yorkian. Giselle, the fairy tale princess, is completely naive and lost in the ways of life of New York. She immediately tries to make friends with an old man, and he simply steals her tiara and runs. Her prince attempts to follow her to New York and rescue her, but he is thwarted by his evil stepmother's footman and his own naivety. Giselle meets a divorce lawyer with a daughter and shows him how wonderful the fairy tale story can be. They, of course, fall in love and live happily ever after in New York.

The movie was fantastic because it really poked fun at the ridiculousness of all previous Disney fairy tales. The characters were spot on, and the plot could not have been written better. I love the movie, and I plan to buy it as soon as it goes on sale!

It was so much fun for me to get to hear "The Highwayman" during our last class. My sixth grade literature class presented the poem as a dramatic reading to the rest of the school, and it was an event that will remain with me forever. The second stanza was assigned to me to read, and reading it again for this class was a trip down memory lane. However, reading it now shed new light on the actual meaning of the poem. When I read it in sixth grade, I did not understand the consequences and reasoning behind each of the actions. I did not even realize that the poem was ultimately about lovers who were parted when the woman killed herself before the highwayman reached the household. It never fails to amaze me how much I read as a child and did not understand the meaning behind each of the pieces we have read.

I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis.

I heard many children say that they had read this book, but it wasn't until late high school that I actually picked up the book for the first time. Reading it again this time, was every bit as fun. I also own the movie that recently came out on video, and I found the movie version to be extremely similar to that of the book. Most of the time I find myself disappointed with the movies created from books, but I was pleasantly surprised to enjoy this movie every bit as much.

The book is about 4 siblings who are sent to live with a man in the country to escape the battles of WWII. The youngest child, Lucy, plays hide-and-seek and ends up in a wardrobe that transports her to a far off land called Narnia. In Narnia, she meets new characters and finds the world breathtakingly beautiful. She returns back through the wardrobe to show her brothers and sister the wonderful world of Narnia. When they go back to Narnia, Edmund makes friends with the White Witch, and wants to do her bidding because he was promised prince hood if he was loyal to her. The story then revolves around the siblings' quests to overthrow the White Witch and convince Edmund that she is actually a bad person.

This book is a wonderful fantasy book that lets one escape to a far off land that we can only dream of. Reading the book again was a pleasure, and I will soon be rewatching the movie!

While I was home for a friend's wedding, I went through some of the books that I loved as a child, and I ran across this gem. When my parents found out they were pregnant with my sister (I was 2 at the time), they bought me this book as a part of the "Little Golden Books" set. It is entitled The Bears' New Baby, and was written (and illustrated) by Joan Elizabeth Goodman. The story is written from a child's perspective as they wait for the baby to arrive, and then how they have to wait for the baby to grow old enough to play with. It was so perfect for a small child because time seemed to drag on much slower, and nothing ever seemed to happen fast enough. Waiting nine months is like an eternity to a child, and having to wait even longer after the baby is born is excruciating! I also remember being slightly disappointed with my baby sister when I found out I couldn't really play with her when she came home, so it was nice to see it written in a book for children.

I loved the book as a child because I felt like I could identify with Amanda (the big sister), and I felt like the author must have written it with me in mind. I will definitely be keeping this book for my children to read as their sibling(s) are born.

These humorous/nonsense poems are an absolute blast to read. I read many of them as a child, and I love hearing them again. I especially enjoyed the one about mama's nerves. I remember reading many of the poems as a child in "Where the Sidewalk Ends" and "A Light in the Attic." I always hated writing poetry as a child, but I could have spent hours upon hours reading these nonsense poems. The poems are nice to calm your nerves on a busy day or just relax on a lazy day. Even if you only have a few minutes, I would highly recommend keeping a book of humorous poems near you so that you can whip it out and brighten your day just a little. I have never done so myself, but I believe I will be putting that into practice now.

Yet again...

I have read Wayside School is Falling Down by Louis Sachar. As a child in elementary school, I read this book over and over again. Each chapter is its own individual story, but the characters remain the same throughout the book, and a few of the storylines carry over to other chapters.

The book is about a classroom full of children and a teacher named Mrs. Jewls. Each child has its own personality (albeit crazy personalities). Reading the book as a child, I do not believe I found the children's thoughts and actions so very crazy. I think all children find a little bit of themselves in at least one of the characters. The book is about a school that has 30 stories (but no 19th story), and Mrs. Jewls' class is on the 30th floor. To settle the children down after recess, Mrs. Jewls rings a cowbell, and all the children immediately get into their seats. If a child is disobedient, they must write their names on the blackboard under the word "Discipline". If they disobey twice more, they have to go home on the kindergarten bus (and once, Mrs. Jewls herself had to go home early on the kindergarten bus). The various chapters show the children forgetting their socks, reading stories backwards, pulling each other's hair, finding thousands of dollars, getting tattoos, and other crazy antics.

Rereading this story was a complete joy, and each of my roommates are so glad that I am finished so that they can start reading the book themselves.