Explode the Code Blends Phonics and Fun

My mother taught first grade for a million years. In her career, she saw trends in pedagogy come and go, including whole word reading, context support, invented spelling, etc. She was a firm believer in the phonics method, and even hoarded old textbooks, saved phonics-based readers from dumpsters, and rebelled against her school system in order to continue teaching first graders to read with phonics. She believed that all other methods were, to use her word, "bunk."

I know my mother would have loved Explode the Code. It is not flashy, and it is not slick == it is solid, reliable, old-school phonics and it will teach your child to read. In this it reminds me of the Bob Books -- also hand drawn, also based on progressive phonics, also reliable as dirt. Now, for those who love learning on the computer, there's even an online version of Explode the Code, which translates the excellent phonics foundation to a fun, flash-based learning environment. Using the web site independently or together with the workbooks, it's a win win. Go here to explore this new online phonics curriculum.

My daughter Sadie has been struggling with reading for years. She is now six, but since she was four she knew all her letters and the sounds they make. She had the tools, the knowledge, to read first grade material, and yet she would look at a word and say "I can't read." This was extremely frustrating for me as a teacher. I am a book person, my older child is a strong reader, how could this be happening? I'm still not sure exactly what's going on in Sadie's head when she says "I can't read." I think it might have to do with her persistent suspicion that if she learns to read we'll send her to college.

Explode the Code workbooks and online games have been miraculous for her. The repetition, the spiralling returns to familiar material, the very very slow steps forward accompanied by many iterations of the words the child can confidently do, have made it absolutely impossible for her to tell herself she can't read. She can. It's undeniable. The words she knows with Explode the Code she knows inside out, upside down, backwards, and sideways. When she looks at me, shocked, and says, "I can read that!" it's amazing! Explode the Code works for us, and if you have a brand new reader that needs the confidence that comes from practice, I bet it will work for you too!

The Ever Breath by Julianna Baggott

This post is a book review. Really. But it will take me a minute to get there.

I have two children, four years apart. My son, 10, likes books about science. He likes to pour over them, again and again, memorizing the delicious facts and savoring the tasty trivia. The only fictional stories he's been interested in at all involve butts, roughly drawn comics, underpants, middle school hardships, warrior cats, and fake superheroes. I don't think I need to mention titles -- you know which ones I mean. Still, any book with pictures of the moon's surface will handily defeat any book that has characters and a beginning, middle and end. He's just not that into fiction.

My daughter, 6, has a categorical aversion to chapter books. Not only does she not want to admit she can read, she also does not want to be treated like a person who can read. In her mind, as she has explained it to me, reading will lead to college, and she doesn't want to go there. While I completely blame myself and all of my "Oh, sweetie! Don't ever change! Be my baby forever!" nonsense, I still feel like we should be able to move past the picture book stage before she hits puberty. Jan Brett, I super-love you, but I am done reading Fritz and the Beautiful Horses to my six year old, while she firmly asserts she cannot handle any more challenging fare. Then there's the fact that Sadie likes science books too. Books about polar bears. Books about caves. Books about what your heart does -- not figuratively, or as a literary theme, but as an actual biological fact.

True fact that is lodged in my bitter, resentful throat: Both of my kids prefer nonfiction to fiction. They will sit and listen to books about geography, or history, or science. They will not sit and listen to storybooks. They will not get interested in dragons. They do not yearn to discover more about elves or wizarding schools or hard times on the cold prairie. They just want to know more about why fish are cold, or where Indonesia is.

I'm a book person, and more specifically a fiction person. I have fantasized, since I knew I was going to have kids, about reading to them from the favorite books of my childhood. I looked forward to sharing Narnia with them, Middle Earth, the Moomins, etc. it's hard for me to realize that I can't keep up with Benny's interest in astronomy and the lymphatic system, and if I have to read "McElligott's Pool" one more time I will put a fishhook in my eye and gouge out my frontal lobe. I mean seriously, learning to swallow the fact that my kids just aren't that into novels has been almost as bad as finding out makeup is made out of bacon fat, or whatever.

Pretty difficult. It hasn't been great. But. There have been moments.

I bought Julianna Baggott's newest book, The Ever Breath, because hope springs eternal in this human breast, and because I like her, and I thought, hey, we'll give it a shot. What could it hurt? We've stalled on so many read-aloud attempts, and retreated to the safety of Childcraft for Benny and Let's Read and Find Out for Sadie. Why not try one more?

People, this is the book review part of the blog post. And I really feel like this is all I need to say, to sell you on this book. It was like magic. After the first chapter, I had one child tucked up on each side of me, and the other child tucked up on the other side. When I tried to quit reading for the night, I heard the words that had never been said by my children before: "Just one more chapter!" I felt like I was dreaming. I'm not kidding -- it was weird! I don't even know why this happened -- I'm not sure what captivated them in The Ever Breath where other books have so utterly failed. Why is it so accessible to these kids of such disparate ages. Why was Sadie saying, "This is my favorite book!" and why was Benny saying, "This book is better than Harry Potter!" I don't know.

I can tell you it's inventive. It's exciting. It's something you haven't seen before. And I can tell you that the children in my house careened through it at breakneck speed, anxious to get more, find out more, read more. That means a lot to me -- maybe this won't be the only book we'll read cover to cover, all curled up together. But it was the first!

Presidents of the United States Workbook Recommendation

Introducing the Complete Book of Presidents and States. I bought this book at Sam's Club when I was collecting materials to inform my elections unit production, because of the cool set of cards in the beginning of the book -- pictures of the presidents on the front and facts/trivia on the back, along with different game ideas for learning the names and order. That seemed like a great selling point, and it is. However, I've found that we're using this book a lot, and it has benefits beyond the deck of cards in the front. For example, there is *another* set of cards in the middle! Who knew?

After that first section, there is a page for every President, with a summary of their lives and the major events that happened during their presidencies.

1. Used as reading comprehension practice, it delivers short non-fiction pieces and varied, interesting little recall exercises like crosswords, fill-ins, and other puzzles. Not a lot of "why" questions but it is good practice for remembering facts and also locating facts within blocks of text.

2. I don't expect Benny to really absorb and remember which President bought Arizona or who was a Whig or whatever. But the information does give him a context in which to think of the current President and the candidates. Some were disliked, some were liked. Some only were President for a few weeks or months. It's definitely educational for *me* in the same way -- looking at the whole string of Presidents in a row takes a little significance away from any single one. It also gives you a sense that the country has really changed. I mean, obviously, right? But still, looking at the people and faces and the crises they faced, you really get that the country itself, the entity of the USA has morphed and changed in significant ways. Of course you can provide the "why" questions that the book does not.

3. Another cool thing about the book is that at the end of each one-page lesson there is an extension question for which the student has to do a bit of research. I've decided that Wikipedia is safe enough, or at least that the only danger comes from overly political pages on community organizing and not from X-rated pop-ups. So, Benny's been learning to search for things like what they used to call the White House, or whose father was a Congressman from what state. More exercise in scanning text for information, and also it's very satisfying to find the answer with research.

4. But wait, there's more. After the Presidents section there's a states section! Every state commands two or three pages of info and then cute little tests on that info. Of course you'll learn about the state bird (what an immortal waste of time state birds are, yo) and the capitol, but you'll also learn other things that are actually interesting and will lead you to discussions.

So, ding dong we hurry along. Benny knows the President song and the Electoral College song, so this week we're going to add another song:

James T. Polk by They Might Be Giants.



You can hear it in this movie from YouTube, accompanied by a video that someone made for a history class, which I find quite good. I have to write down the guitar chords, but here are the lyrics:

In 1844, the Democrats were split
The three nominees for the presidential candidate
Were Martin Van Buren, a former president and an abolitionist
James Buchanan, a moderate
Louis Cass, a general and expansionist
From Nashville came a dark horse riding up
He was James K. Polk, Napoleon of the Stump

Austere, severe, he held few people dear
His oratory filled his foes with fear
The factions soon agreed
He's just the man we need
To bring about victory
Fulfill our manifest destiny
And annex the land the Mexicans command
And when the votes were cast the winner was
Mister James K. Polk, Napoleon of the Stump

In four short years he met his every goal
He seized the whole southwest from Mexico
Made sure the tarriffs fell
And made the English sell the Oregon territory
He built an independent treasury
Having done all this he sought no second term
But precious few have mourned the passing of
Mister James K. Polk, our eleventh president
Young Hickory, Napoleon of the Stump

I bought this book for $5.88 and it is listed on this web site for $14.95, so keep that in mind.

Book Review: The Mistmantle Chronicles: Urchin of the Riding Stars by M.I. McAllister

It's hard to remember that my child doesn't recognize cliches or care about what's trite or used or done to death. He doesn't predict what's predictable, he hasn't read the thing that makes me say something is derivative, and whatever I can see coming will probably surprise the heck out of him. He's seven.

Urchin of the Riding Stars is not innovative, except for the fact that the characters are squirrels, otters, moles, and momewraths. Or... hedgehogs, rather. Or ferrets. So what? Another small animal takes the stage. We've seen it done with rabbits, with rats, but have squirrels ever been swordfighting heros before? I don't think.

Sadly, the originality ends with the choice of species. To start the tale, a baby squirrel with unnaturally pale fur (a strange birthmark? a sixth toe? ) is dropped on the shore and picked up by a captain of the realm. Given to a dumb but motherly foster mother, he is raised in humble circumstances, then brought to the castle where he is trained as a page, and as you can see from the cover shot, soon gets his own sword and cloak and has to be brave and save the world. I wonder if book 2 or 3 in this series will reveal that he has noble blood? And I also wonder if the sun will come up in the east tomorrow.

There is something dark in the dungeon. There is a wise old priest. There is a befuddled king misled and betrayed by a power-hungry lieutenant. I've seen it before. I am getting a little eye-rolling fatigue over here. But, has the child seen it before? No. For the child, it may all be exciting and new.

I bought this book because Benny, age 7, is deeply interested in swordfighting and good and evil and princes and dungeons. I thought this would be a sweeter, easier way for him to read about adventures of this nature without the intensity of humanity. It's just squirrels, right? It wouldn't freak him out or give him nightmares or inspire him to decapitate his sister, right? Well, I was right and wrong.

The surprise of the book, and also the redemption of the book, is that it actually didn't back off the intensity just because there's a squirrel on the cover. The bad guys actually kill people, they don't just endlessly and ridiculously threaten. The abuse of power is damaging, and the danger is real. The little animals are overworked and hungry, and there's a practice called "culling" where the infants who are born with any deformity or weakness are killed by the government, actually by the corrupt lieutenant. Yes, the hero is sweet, overly sweet, cloyingly and insufferably sweet to this adult reader, but the immediacy of the violence affected me, made me care about him in spite of myself.

So, we'll see how it goes with the child. As soon as we finish Bunnicula, we're going to try this one. I'll let you know how it goes!

Now, I must ask (speaking of Bunnicula): If microwaves kill all the nutrition on vegetables, how life-threatening are those new Glad bags that you can use to steam vegetables in the microwave? Isn't that like... a hideous betrayal of children everywhere, suffering through steamed broccoli with absolutely no nutritional value?