Which One Is Different?

If the house caught on fire but I still had some time to rescue a toy after getting all the important stuff out, there is no question in my mind that I would take our Haba blocks. Blocks and balls are pretty much the best toys ever, and I think the kid and I could play well for years with these gorgeous building blocks.

Anyway, J got two new sets of Haba blocks for Christmas, and to my surprise, one set, the Clown Blocks, was on a smaller scale than the usual Haba blocks (3 cm for Clown blocks vs. the usual 4 cm). At first I was very mildly disappointed, but then I realized (a) who cares, they're still great, and (b) this new variety of shapes and sizes offered great opportunity for what Jackson calls a "lesson." In fact, after we did this for the first time yesterday, he come up to me today and said, "Blocks...lesson?" and we did it all over again.

Basically, I unrolled a place mat (Montessori says it focuses the child's attention), set out four blocks in a random arrangement, and asked him to point out which one is different. He did a great job, although for some reason the combination of three rectangular solids and one cube confounded him and/or made him mad. But he blasted through everything else, and I got a chance to very gently introduce vocabulary like taller, wider, diameter, cube, cylinder, cone and so forth.

Here he is pointing out that the larger triangle is the one that is different.

We compared the following sets of blocks:

• 3 large cubes, 1 small cube
• 3 small triangles, 1 large triangle (pictured above)
• 3 red cubes, 1 yellow cube
• 3 short wide cylinders, 1 narrower taller cylinder
• 3 rectangular solids, 1 cube
• 3 cubes, 1 rectangular solid
• 3 cylinders, 1 rectangular solid
• 3 rectangular solids, 1 cylinder
• 3 cylinders, 1 cylinder with a "hat" (conical tower topper thing)

When we got to the cylinders, Jackson took over and decided it was time to play/work on his own. He had a field day exploring the many dimensions of the four cylinders, including shape and sound.

Shapes, Colors, Art

Colored circle labels from the office supply store plus paper plus toddler equals art! Jackson loves playing with stickers, and according to the excellent (if oddly terrifying) book Young at Art*, this is a way for toddlers just starting out with art to engage with basic colors (red, yellow, green, blue) and the shape of a circle.

*Thank you so much for the suggestion, Crimson Wife!

Reading the New Year

The New Year seems like a perfect time to talk about calendars and months, which gives me the opportunity to read Jackson three wonderful and stylistically quite different books!

• The Berenstain Bears in the Bears' Almanac by Stan and Jan Berenstain: The Almanac, included in this case in The Berenstain Bears' Science and Nature Super Treasury, explains weather, seasons and natural cycles with the usual effervesence of Stan and Jan Berenstain. I had the Bears' Almanac as a child and I know every page like the back of my hand. The other two books in the Treasury are The Berenstain Bears' Nature Guide and The Berenstain Bears' Science Fair, which are new to me and I feel lucky to have them. Nature Guide is more my personal style than Science Fair, but Science Fair does a great job of explaining stuff like levers and pulleys and, you know, physics. So far we've just looked at the entries for winter and spring, but we'll progress as the year does.
• A Child's Calendar, poems by John Updike, illustrations by Trina Schart Hyman. This book is so unique and superlative I don't even know where to start. The month-by-month poems are pitch-perfect, but it's the slice-of-life portraits of two biracial New England kids (and in the background, their parents) that really sets this book apart. The details and nuances of the watercolors are just remarkable, and I could look at this book every day for months and not get bored. Trina Schart Hyman is one of my favorite illustrators of all time, thanks in no small part to her cover for Ronia, the Robber's Daughter, and this book just makes me happy. (Jackson liked seeing the kids sled through January.)
• The Year At Maple Hill Farm, by Alice and Martin Provensen: This is another one from my childhood. I have read it literally hundreds of times. The spread for July is burned into my soul, and the bit about feeding animals their medicine is something I think about strangely often. It's a sequel to another even more wonderful book called Our Animal Friends At Maple Hill Farm, which I just read for the first time this year with Jackson. We both love Animal Friends dearly and can page through it for hours, and now that I know both books, I love finding the connections between them and knowing more about scenes and animals I feel like I've known my whole life.
• Last but not least, we're reading the New Year's page from the ever-reliable Illustrated Treasury of Poetry for Children, which seems to always have a note-perfect selection for an occasion on the calendar. In this case there is an old-year poem, a new-year poem and Tennyson's evocative "Ring Out, Wild Bells," which I reprint here for your reading pleasure:

    Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
        The flying cloud, the frosty light :
        The year is dying in the night ;
    Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

    Ring out the old, ring in the new,
        Ring, happy bells, across the snow ;
        The year is going, let him go ;
    Ring out the false, ring in the true.

   Ring out the grief that saps the mind
        For those that here we see no more ;
        Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
    Ring in redress to all mankind.

    Ring out a slowly dying cause,
        And ancient forms of party strife ;
        Ring in the nobler modes of life,
    With sweeter manners, purer laws.

    Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
        The faithless coldness of the times ;
        Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
    But ring the fuller minstrel in.

    Ring out false pride in place and blood,
        The civic slander and the spite ;
        Ring in the love of truth and right,
    Ring in the common love of good.

    Ring out old shapes of foul disease ;
        Ring out the narrowing lust of gold ;
        Ring out the thousand wars of old,
    Ring in the thousand years of peace.

    Ring in the valiant man and free,
        The larger heart, the kindlier hand ;
        Ring out the darkness of the land,
    Ring in the Christ that is to be.

Toddler Trays, Including No-Choking-Hazard Bead Stringing

Now that Chrismukkah is done and the New Year is almost here, I thought it was time for some new trays:

Open-close tray items, clockwise from top: Rocket-pop popsicle mold, travel-size Infusium 23 bottle (this one's a double-header, technically, since the bottle top both flips open and screws off), a card-like mints box with a paper-fold opening, a USB thing with a flip-out cover, and a jewelry box with a love note for the kiddo inside.

Squishy sparkle pom-poms and "novelty beakers" from the dollar-stuff section at Target, aka our first attempt at a "dry pouring" exercise.

I've been looking for a way to do a bead-stringing thing, but I am a child-safety paranoiac and the commercial stringing beads sets are totally a choking hazard (every stupid thing is a choking hazard, but the beads stress me out extra for some reason). As such, I've been looking for a DIY alternative. I thought  thread spools might serve as a bead substitute, but I could never find any that were affordable and easily available. Then I was in Bed Bath & Beyond and stumbled across "Cedar Hanger Rings" and thought "Aha!" They totally pass the toilet-paper roll test, plus they're fabulously chunky and substantial for little fingers learning how to do this work. I tried strangling myself (as you do) with various lengths of shoelace, and cutting a 45-cm shoelace into quarters resulted in a cord a little less than 5 inches long (~11 cm), which like it's a less risky length that still provides some room for the kid to work.

Meanwhile, Jackson wants a "lesson" by which he means a proper sit-down thing where I unroll a work mat and demonstrate something, three-period-lesson-style. Mostly he loves the rolling and unrolling of the mat, but I think I'm going to use some of new Christmas blocks to explore same and different sizes and colors. I'll try to photograph it if it happens.

Montessori-Style Upcycled Locks & Latches Board

Montessori-style locks and latches board (with bonus switches and wheels and magnets and geegaws)

Much much love to my mom for helping me make this activity board for Jackson. Inspired by these pins on Pinterest, we went through Sylvia's Wondrous Garage Hardware Store and found a collection of old hardware stuff that seemed to fit the bill. Some of it we screwed on, and some of it we glued on with silicone, but everything is firmly and safely attached. FWIW, the board was almost free and totally recycled/reused but we did have to spend .59 to buy one extra box for the second light switch.

Here's what's what on the board, just because I made my mom tell me the names of everything:

Barbara Leonie Picard's Stories of King Arthur and His Knights

I've had more than a few visitors to this site stop by via Google Images wanting to see this picture of the covers of Barbara Leonie Picard's Odyssey and Iliad books (all illustrated by her frequent collaborator Joan Kiddell-Monroe) so for all the Picard fans out there, I thought I'd post a few images from another one of her wonderful long-lost books, Stories of King Arthur and His Knights (1955), published by Oxford University Press in the UK and Walck in the United States.

Text from the front flap is as follows:


Stories of
KING ARTHUR AND HIS KNIGHTS
By Barbara Leonie Picard
Illustrated by Roy Morgan


"...here with simplicity and directness and the joy of a good story for its own sake are told, from Malory and other sources, the 'lovely tales': the sword in the stone, Merlin and Morgan Le Fay, the loves of Guenever, the two Elaines, the two Isolts, Linette and Enid and many others. It is a cause for rejoicing that there are also a fine retelling of Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight, that perfect short story, and an unusually moving account of the quest for the Holy Grail. The spring green cover is just right to encase these enthralling, ever-youthful adventures and Roy Morgan's woodcut decorations have strength and a truly medieval flavor.


This finely made book should be in homes as well as in all libraries. The short chapters are well-adapted for reading aloud. The prose is modern and straightforward, extremely easy to follow yet always with a turn of phrase to give the feeling of the days of old..."


—New York Herald Tribune


HENRY Z. WALCK, Inc.

How's This for a Four-Year Cycle?

Morris Bishop's "storybook" cycle, illustrated by Alison Mason Kingsbury, published by Cornell University Press: A Classical Storybook (1970), A Medieval Storybook (1970), A Renaissance Storybook (1971), A Romantic Storybook (1971)

Aren't these just screaming to be used in a four-year history study cycle? This series is all but forgotten now, but I found one of them (maybe the Medieval one?) in a used bookshop and immediately went hunting for the other three on the Interwebs. More on these in the future, but I wanted to at least get a picture of these four treasures posted for any once and future readers of these books.