psocoptera (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
psocoptera) wrote2015-02-26 09:38 pm
psocoptera) wrote2015-02-26 09:38 pm
Entry tags:
three kid things recs
Two books and a game.
A Fine Dessert: Four Centuries, Four Families, One Delicious Treat by Emily Jenkins and Sophie Blackall is a brilliant picture book that, like it says in the subtitle there, shows how four different families, from 1710, 1810, 1910, and 2010, make blackberry fool. Junie and I read through this several times (on different occasions) comparing different things between the time periods - the technology (twigs! a wire whisk! an electric mixer!) but also the clothes, the details of the house, sociological things like how in 1810 the people are slaves and what does that mean and in 2010 is the first time a dad and son are making it instead of a mom and daughter. We also made blackberry fool ourselves, a fine project with much smashing of blackberries and shrieking about the mixer noise. (It would really help to own a wire sieve, though, the colander holes were too big to strain out the blackberry seeds and trying to push it through the fine mesh of my woven plastic sieve took forever. Or maybe actual cheesecloth.) Highly recommended. (I also had a good conversation with Junie about what blackberry fool in 2110 might be like - we think maybe robots will make it. And we talked about how she'll turn 101 in 2110 and she might live to be that old and see that year, dang (and she was able to figure out that Quentin would be 98 which I think is the first time I've seen her do math across 100).)
Little Melba and Her Big Trombone, Katheryn Russell-Brown, ill. Frank Morrison. Junie was less enthralled with this but I felt like we got a fine multimedia lesson out of it reading it and then watching YouTube videos of Melba Liston playing.
Chutes and Ladders. No, wait, listen. I finally did what I've been claiming I was going to do for ages and made up a set of "powers cards" vaguely along the lines of options in RoboRally and now this game is much faster and actually fun. Everyone starts with a power, spins, has the option to use their power instead of the spin, and gets a new power if they do. Some sample powers: "go to the next odd number", "go up vertically one space", "if you're at the bottom of a chute go up it", "go to the next multiple of three/four/five" which might actually be familiarizing Junie with the word "multiple" although she still needs my help to find them. It has pretty much solved the "endless cycling at the top" problem and made me willing to actually play.
A Fine Dessert: Four Centuries, Four Families, One Delicious Treat by Emily Jenkins and Sophie Blackall is a brilliant picture book that, like it says in the subtitle there, shows how four different families, from 1710, 1810, 1910, and 2010, make blackberry fool. Junie and I read through this several times (on different occasions) comparing different things between the time periods - the technology (twigs! a wire whisk! an electric mixer!) but also the clothes, the details of the house, sociological things like how in 1810 the people are slaves and what does that mean and in 2010 is the first time a dad and son are making it instead of a mom and daughter. We also made blackberry fool ourselves, a fine project with much smashing of blackberries and shrieking about the mixer noise. (It would really help to own a wire sieve, though, the colander holes were too big to strain out the blackberry seeds and trying to push it through the fine mesh of my woven plastic sieve took forever. Or maybe actual cheesecloth.) Highly recommended. (I also had a good conversation with Junie about what blackberry fool in 2110 might be like - we think maybe robots will make it. And we talked about how she'll turn 101 in 2110 and she might live to be that old and see that year, dang (and she was able to figure out that Quentin would be 98 which I think is the first time I've seen her do math across 100).)
Little Melba and Her Big Trombone, Katheryn Russell-Brown, ill. Frank Morrison. Junie was less enthralled with this but I felt like we got a fine multimedia lesson out of it reading it and then watching YouTube videos of Melba Liston playing.
Chutes and Ladders. No, wait, listen. I finally did what I've been claiming I was going to do for ages and made up a set of "powers cards" vaguely along the lines of options in RoboRally and now this game is much faster and actually fun. Everyone starts with a power, spins, has the option to use their power instead of the spin, and gets a new power if they do. Some sample powers: "go to the next odd number", "go up vertically one space", "if you're at the bottom of a chute go up it", "go to the next multiple of three/four/five" which might actually be familiarizing Junie with the word "multiple" although she still needs my help to find them. It has pretty much solved the "endless cycling at the top" problem and made me willing to actually play.
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