Poems Poems Poems!

The Academy of American Poets has a wonderful website, Poets.org, that I often go to if I'm looking for a group of poems about a specific theme. It's super-easy to navigate:


So there you go - lots of poems about shoes, aliens, shark week. Also, as you can see, there's a "For Teens" page of poems. Under "Life and Leisure," there's a "childhood" page of poems, and under "Family and People," there are poem pages for "parenting," "daughters," and "sons."

Even BETTER, at least for our investigative purposes, is the Poetry Foundation's website, which has a similar categories function, which they call the "Poetry Tool."


(I made the blue circles)
As you can see, there is a whole section roped off for "Children's."

There are tons of great nooks and crannies on both of these organization's websites - for example, I stumbled upon "Ten Poems to Get You Through Science Class," which I would have loooved to use as a resource while I was growing up. If our lockers were any bigger, I probably would have also appreciated "Ten Poems to Read When You Get Stuffed in a Locker."

Anyway, have fun with these websites!

Diving into archives...

I might have written about Project Gutenberg in an earlier post, but it's one of my favorite things, so it's worth re-mentioning. It'll be a really great resource for everyone's final projects, especially if you'll be writing about book culture or if you'll be doing some sort of historical project. Here are some example titles:

Types Of Children's Literature: A Collection Of The World's Best Literature For Children (For use in colleges, normal schools and library schools) Collected and edited by Walter Barnes, A.M. (1920)

Children’s Stories in American Literature, 1660-1860 By Henrietta Christian Wright. New York, Charles Scribner's Sons (1909).

Children's Books and Their Illustrators Author: Gleeson White (1897)

The Children's Story Of The War. Vol IV. The Story of the Year 1915 By Sir Edward Parrott, M.A., Ll.D. (1916)

Children's Hour With Red Riding Hood And Other Stories Edited by Watty Piper (1922)

Other sites that include thousands of free titles in HTML and .pdf formats include openlibrary.org, fullbooks.com, and literature.org.

UPDATE 3/25/11: ok, so apparently there is a whole "children's bookshelf" on Gutenberg.

Another tumblr scour!

I thought I'd search tumblr for more children's lit/children's book items..... click any of the following if you're interested in...

● Matilda or e-books ● old timey gender construction ● the very hungry caterpillar ● "post-colonial steampunk children's literature" ● Dr. Seuss and/or political writing ● Dune ● the wisdom of Tolkien or Milne ● writing and publishing ● general silliness/Shel Silverstein ●

Enjoy!

Cinderella & Culture

Cinderella is more than just a fairy tale. According to Wikipedia,

"The word "cinderella" has, by analogy, come to mean one whose attributes are unrecognised, or one who unexpectedly achieves recognition or success after a period of obscurity and neglect. The still-popular story of "Cinderella" continues to influence popular culture internationally, lending plot elements, allusions, and tropes to a wide variety of media."

And, according to our friend Wikipedia, these cinderella tropes and themes have also had an influence within the field of psychology:

"The Cinderella complex was first described by Colette Dowling,^[1] who wrote a book on women's fear of independence, as an unconscious desire to be taken care of by others, based primarily on a fear of being independent. The complex is said to become more apparent as a person grows older.

Colette Dowling attempts to define women as being motivated by an unconscious desire to be taken care of as a fear of independence termed "Cinderella complex". An important aspect of the work can be defined as identifying an aspect of a larger phenomenon as to why women choose to stay in dysfunctional relationships."

And:

"The Cinderella effect is a term used by psychologists to describe the high incidence of stepchildren being physically abused, emotionally abused, sexually abused, neglected or murdered, or otherwise mistreated at the hands of their stepparents at significantly higher rates than their genetic counterparts. It takes its name from the fairy tale character Cinderella, who in the story was cruelly mistreated by her stepmother and stepsisters.The effect has been called "one of the poster-children of evolutionary psychology".^[1]

"better book titles"

"better book titles" is pretty great, and children's literature is included, including books we've talked about in class. boom.

Coloring books!

Back to age appropriateness and adaptation: Genderific Coloring Books

Race, Geography, Representation

This here is a fabulous TED talk -- Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story.
I found it in my bookmark bar - where did it come from? We may never know. But I think the first three minutes really relate to our class!