This is not your mother's Charlotte's Web.

This is real and it's creeping me out and fascinating me at the same time. There is a rather giant--and probably radioactive--spider right outside my window. I'm finding it hard to concentrate on publicizing and promoting as I struggle with the urge to run for my life.

All the same, as this really big spider builds a web outside my window, I fantasize about messages like "Awesome Pig," "Nice Shoes," and "You Need a Haircut" when I come to work every day.


So as to keep my blogging in the world of children's literature, I need to share one of Charlesbridge's best books--Up, Up, and Away by Ginger Wadsworth and illustrated by Patricia J. Wynne.

Up, Up, and Away was published in 2009 and is the story of how one spider finds herself snug as a bug inside her egg sac until spring. Then, she and her hundreds of siblings hatch and very soon go off to find their way in the world. They grow up so fast. This spider is a garden spider, I don't know what kind of spider is dangling two feet from my face right now, but I hope the glass holds. In Up, Up, and Away, Ginger says garden spiders live for about a year. I'm sure I'll miss her when she's gone. I hope I get to see hundreds of babies born and fly away.

Up, Up, and Away is a CBC/NSTA Outstanding Science Trade Book and a CCBC Choices book.

Can't get enough of spiders? Watch this fun video:

As a children's author, my goal is to write books that will help kids learn and grow, and I've always been a big believer in using animals to help kids relate to important and sometimes difficult situations.

So when I was approached by the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) to write a book in celebration of the 60th birthday of Sparky the Fire Dog®, I could not have been more honored and excited. As the NFPA's official mascot and spokesdog, Sparky has long played an important role in communicating fire safety to kids and families.

Since Sparky's creation in 1951, the number of fire and fires injuries in the United States has declined, which is due in part to enhanced public education efforts. But despite this positive impact, fires in the home still take a great toll on life and property. Approximately 3,000 people die each year because of fires.

Working on the Sparky the Fire Dog® picture book was a particularly special experience for me because I've had first-hand experience with fire. When I was 5, my house caught on fire and while my parents escaped, they weren't able to get to my room to guide me to safety. I was lucky to be rescued by a firefighter.

This is no doubt a scary memory for me, but it's also a reminder of the importance of instilling fire safety messages in children. Sparky is crucial because children under the age of five face the highest risk of home fire death. While fire can be frightening to children, the kind and gentle image of this dalmatian emphasizes positive fire safety messages in a way that is appealing to children.

In Sparky the Fire Dog®, Sparky takes a group of young animals through the neighborhood, pointing out hazards, giving basic fire prevention and safety tips, and showing them how to be prepared in case of an emergency. From having a working smoke alarm to being careful with candles and knowing where your exits are, Sparky's advice may be the most important thing children--and their parents--ever learn.

I very much hope that adults will benefit from the book as much as children. We all remember learning fire safety lessons from firefighters or Sparky when we were in school, but many of us may not have carried all of the crucial fire safety practices we once learned in our day-to-day lives as adults.

This week officially kicked off the Dog Blog Tour. Sparky the Fire Dog^®, that is. In anticipation of the upcoming release of Sparky the Fire Dog, several bloggers signed on to post reviews of this new book by prolific children's book author Don Hoffman. Some blogs will be hosting giveaways to a few lucky readers, so be sure to check them out! Here's the line-up so far--stay tuned for more information!


Donna Bowman Bratton's blog, review posted 9/17; read it here!
Biblio Reads, review posted 9/20; read it here!
Anastasia Suen's blog, check out the Sparky post on October 12th!
Barefoot Mommies
Chasing Supermom
In the Pages
NC Teacher Stuff
Reading With My Eyes Shut

Sparky is the official mascot for the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) and the book's release date is October 1st--coinciding with National Fire Prevention Week (October 9-15) and Sparky's 60th birthday year. Check out Sparky's website, www.sparky.org, for cool games and activities. You can also download a Sparky Birthday Party Kit to celebrate Sparky's big day!

When I told my parents that I was getting a degree in anthropology I might as well have told them I planned to either remain a student for another ten years or be unemployable. About the only thing you can do with a bachelor's degree in anthropology is to get a master's and doctorate in anthropology. Thankfully for me it proved to be an excellent foundation for becoming a librarian. I always tell people that thanks to that anthropology degree, I know a little bit about everything and not much about anything!

So the anthropology degree got me to being a librarian but how did a career as a librarian get me to writing a book about hummingbirds? And how do hummingbirds connect to anthropology? A lot of serendipity is involved.

A number of years ago I met Adrienne Yorinks. She was touring for the book, Stand for Children by Marian Wright Edelman and came to Austin. After a delightful shopping spree for fabric, we became friends. Over the years we talked about doing a book together but never really came up with a good idea. I did help Adrienne with Quilt of States, a book about how America pieced itself together as a nation but that was her book. We wanted to find a topic that would truly be ours. We both love animals and we talked about fish (after a visit to the National Aquarium in Baltimore) and primates, but neither really hit home for us.

Then one September weekend my husband and I took a short vacation to Rockport, Texas. This charming coastal community happens to be directly in the path of the spectacular fall migration of the ruby-throated hummingbird. As the birds get ready to leave North America and head to their wintering grounds in Mexico and Central America, a lot of them pass through the Gulf Coast area. Once they leave Texas and Louisiana, many hummers fly 500 miles non-stop across the gulf, although some take the inland route, finding food along the way. Because Rockport is directly in the migratory route, tens of thousands of hummingbirds can be seen in the area. When I walked out of the hotel that weekend I felt like I was experiencing a hummingbird flash mob! They were literally flying around me like flies. [Click here to see a video]

Inspired by their beauty, I recalled that many of the cultures I had studied about in my anthropology classes have stories about hummingbirds. I remembered seeing hummingbird images on Navajo pottery and the hummingbird katchina of the Hopi. I also remembered that one of the Nazca lines carved into the plains of Peru was of a hummingbird and that I had seen hummingbird petroglyphs incised into rocks in New Mexico and Arizona. Clearly these birds were inspiring to many people! So I started to do some research and thought about combining facts with cultural tales. As I soon discovered, hummingbirds are only found in the Americas (although there is some fossil evidence that they existed in Europe 30 million years ago). Loving a challenge, I sought out folk tales and stories from a variety of cultures. I wanted to be able to include stories from cultures from the same range as the hummingbirds--from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Being a librarian I did a lot of research and found that many of the same stories, or similar stories, appear in many cultures. So I read and listened to as many versions as I could and then retold them in my own way. I love the way the book turned out. Adrienne's beautiful fabric art so perfectly reflects the amazing features of the hummingbird but I especially love how she illustrated the folktales.

So the serendipity in this journey? If I hadn't studied anthropology I probably wouldn't have become a librarian and I would not have met Adrienne and we wouldn't have decided to work together on a book that developed out of a chance meeting and a spur-of-the-moment vacation. I'm delighted that it all worked out! And another bit of serendipity--this blog posting is going up just in time for National Hummingbird Day (the first Saturday in September).

Posted by Jeanette Larson, author of Hummingbirds: Facts and Folklore from the Americas. Jeanette will be appearing at the Princeton Children's Book Festival on September 10th, and Hummingbirds has been selected to represent Texas at the National Book Festival in Washington, DC on September 24th.

If not for my childhood friend Frances, it’s hard to say what would have become of me. Frances stuck by me even though I clearly was not a kindergarten, first or second grade star. My early report cards were a smattering of Cs with an occasional B, plus a red DAYDREAMS in the comment section. I didn’t make friends easily; too often, when I opened my mouth to speak, nothing came out. And I was not good at recess games, especially not dodge ball.

However, I did have my refuge—a corner of the school library that was all mine. While my classmates scattered among the shelves, I tucked myself away in that corner with Frances, a badger who was as spunky as I was meek.

Why was I so enamored with the star of the Frances books? Perhaps it was because, when insulted, Frances thought up sassy rhymes on the spot instead of falling silent. When Albert excluded Frances from his activities, Frances created a special day of her own, complete with Albert’s favorite foods and a marching sign: BEST FRIENDS OUTING—NO BOYS (Best Friends for Frances by Russell and Lillian Hoban). When my friends excluded me, I slunk into my house and told my mom.

Frances was not perfect. She made messes. She ran away from home. She ate her little sister’s birthday chocolate bar. But Frances had spunk. And I didn’t—not yet.

In the real world, we choose our friends for a variety of reasons (and not because they are perfect). Some are like we are, and some are like we wish to be. The same is true of our favorite book characters. All of these friends, those in the pages of our books and those in the real world, become part of us. My friendship with Frances and other book characters made the school day less lonely and helped me find my voice and make real-world friends. Eventually I gained some spunk of my own (though never as much as Frances).

As an author, I also have the opportunity to rewrite my personal history—and reach children like myself—through my characters. In Polka-dot Fixes Kindergarten, the main character Polka-dot is a bit apprehensive about her first day of school. But unlike me, Polka-dot is resourceful; she’s packed a fix-it kit just like Grandpa’s—complete with duct tape, the fixer of all trouble.

Polka-dot faces a variety of challenges, including a stripe-loving girl named Liz who criticizes everything from Polka-dot’s painting to her fashion choices. (Try to guess the name of the girl from my old neighborhood who was mean to me…) But, unlike me, Polka-dot speaks up. And she uses the duct tape to deliver an unexpected kindness and forge a friendship with Liz, who is experiencing kindergarten troubles of her own. Polka-dot has given voice to my shy kindergarten self and, with her trusty fix-it kit, created a happier, albeit fictitious, ending to my childhood relationship with the real-life Liz.

Author Manjula Padmanabhan blogs about her inspiration to write her new children's book, I Am Different, on the Global Fund for Children blog, On the Road.

Here is an excerpt:

It didn’t really matter if the differences were “good” or “bad,” as I soon realized. Sometimes we can choose whether or not to belong to the majority. Sometimes the issues are trivial. For instance, I could choose to dress as other Indian children dressed or I could go around in miniskirts and knee-high boots. Needless to say, my mother preferred me to conform, while I preferred NOT to! But at other times, such as in my convent boarding school, there was no question of “choosing to be different.” At the level of uniforms, we had to conform or we’d be sent away.

Read the rest of the story at On the Road.

Find out more about I Am Different at www.charlesbridge.com.

Little Pig Joins the Band

Archimedes Notebook: Nonfiction Monday: Up, Up & Away!: "Up, Up and Away Written by Ginger Wadsworth, illustrates by Patricia J. Wynne 32 pages, for ages 4 - 9 Charlesbridge, 2009 I have lots of s..."

Balkin Buddies: How children’s book illustrator Robin Brickman cam...: "Robin Brickman is the illustrator of such books as BEAKS! (Charlesbridge), WINGS (Charlesbridge) STARFISH (HarperCollins), A LOG'S LIFE (..."

Where do you get your ideas from? People ask me that question a lot, and sometimes I hear a tiny wisp of frustration in their voices, as if maybe they think that there is some sort of secret, magic warehouse crammed with ideas, and if only I would reveal its location, then – voila – they could become the next J.K. Rowling.

I love how Madeleine L’Engle dispelled such folly when a little girl posed this same question to her. She bent down and gazed into the little girl’s face, answering, “I get my ideas from the very same place that you do.” In other words, there is no magic key to unlocking the mystery of creativity. Perhaps E.B. White sums it up best, “All I want to say in books, all I ever wanted to say is, I love the world.” Inspiration, I believe, comes from all that we love in this world - and that can be an infinite fountain. But I find it helpful for children if I narrow it down to what I call:

My Five P’s of Inspiration
1. Poetry (and I use the term loosely to include any words that stir my soul, be they in poem, story, song, or even a snippet of a conversation)
2. Pictures (could be an actual painting, photograph, or just a visual image that has taken root in my heart)
3. Places
4. People
5. Passions

A few thoughts then on each of these as they relate to my picture book, Raj the Bookstore Tiger.

Poetry

As a little girl, growing up in Scotland, I had to learn volumes of poems by heart. Like all Scottish schoolchildren, I could recite my poems as well as I could chant my tables. We never viewed such learning as a tedious task, probably because we were the product of a culture that honored the beauty of the spoken and written word. When I first came to America, I was amazed at how much emphasis everyone placed on food – the supermarkets had a whole aisle devoted to cereal! The advertisements touted a different diet every month it seemed, and always someone you met was counting calories or carbs. But yet, I never saw the same emphasis on what we feed our hearts and souls –and that puzzled me, for what better way to feed our souls than with truth and beauty –the very “stuff” of POEMS (and great stories)?

As I grew older, I came to realize just how comforting it was to have that little snippet of a story or poem tucked away in my heart to lean on in troubled times or dark days, such as “All will be well, all will be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” (Julian of Norwich) And when my plans are turned head over heel, what better words to recall than those of our very own Scottish bard, Rabbie Burns, “the best laid plans o’ mice and men gang aft aglae.” In Angela’s Ashes, F

Humans are naturally rhythmic beings.
Our heart beats.
Our arms and legs swing.
We breathe and blink and our cells divide to the music in our protoplasm.
So it is only natural that we should be rhyming babies.
Long after we have forgotten best friends from 8th grade, the way to weave a mat in Girl Scouts, our first phone number or the trick for remembering the five Great Lakes (HOMES, for those of you who don't live here),
we remember that we will not eat them in a train, we will not eat them in the rain,
we recall that an old house in Paris that was covered in vines lived twelve little girls in two straight lines,
where under a spreading chestnut tree, the village smithy stands,
and celery stewed is more quietly chewed,
while in a beautiful pea green boat,
quoth the raven, nevermore.

Shout it out loud.
Make it up as you make breakfast,
reel it off as you peel potatoes,
jive while you drive the kids to school,
sing while you bring in the groceries,
dance like Gene Kelly eating peanut butter and jelly,
(You don't just make rhymes with your mouth, you know).

It is what we are meant to be.
Joyful, playful, sorrowful, full of ful.

Poetry! It's the human thing to do.



Posted by C.M. Millen, author of the 2011 Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award winner, The Ink Garden of Brother Theophane.

For years I have loved the music of Leonard Bernstein. Music he composed such as the opera Candide, the ballet Fancy Free, and the shows On the Town, West Side Story, thrill me. And when I hear a recording of Lenny conducting music by another composer like Mahler or Beethoven, I am deeply moved. I feel Lenny’s passion and it enhances my pleasure of the music.

This pleasure was something I wanted to bring to readers in Music Was It: Young Leonard Bernstein. I was astonished to learn that as a boy growing up in Boston, Lenny had to struggle to make a career in music despite his exceptional talent. His father, a Russian immigrant who had successfully established a beauty supply business, opposed the idea. Sam Bernstein, Lenny’s father, believed that it would be impossible for an American Jewish kid to break into the world of classical music, which in the 1930s and 1940s was dominated by Europeans. And he was right. Sam wanted Lenny to take over his beauty supply business. Or, at second best, become a rabbi.

Although Lenny loved his father and was greatly influenced by Judaism, he pursued his dream of a life in music. From the moment when he was ten-years-old and the family received a cast-off piano from Aunt Clara, Lenny knew that “music was 'it'.” “There was no question in my mind,” he recalled, “that my life was to be about music.”

With the encouragement of his mother, younger sister Shirley, supportive teachers and influential mentors, Lenny achieved his goal. The book ends with his triumphant conducting debut at Carnegie Hall when he was just twenty-five. A reporter asked Sam why he had ever objected to Lenny’s desire to be a musician, and Sam relied, “How could I know my son was going to grow up to be Leonard Bernstein?”

Researching and writing this book was a joy. During the process I had the marvelous opportunity to meet and interview two of Lenny’s children, Jamie and Alexander Bernstein. I also talked to Lenny’s brother Burton and his lifelong friend and one of his first piano students, Sid Ramin.

But reading about Lenny is incomplete without listening to his music. I tried to compile a discography for the book but had trouble because Lenny is one of the most recorded conductors in history. With the help of my wonderful edit

Calvary Baptist Church and the John Greenleaf Whittier Birthplace collaborate on Anne Broyles' Priscilla and the Hollyhocks, a special musical presentation by fiddler Marie Rawlings and the Youth of Calvary Baptist Church, directed by Joseph Devoe. Admission is free to the performance at 1 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 19, at the Calvary Baptist Church, 13 Ashland St., Haverhill. Snow date is Monday, Feb. 21. The performance celebrates local poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier and Haverhill's place as a stop on the Underground Railroad, which helped escaped slaves reach Canada, and freedom.

On the morning of Tuesday, January 12th, 2010, I turned on my favorite radio program and sat down to work on one of the illustrations for my forthcoming book: While You Are Sleeping: A Lift-the-Flap Book of Time Around the World. I was painting a nighttime scene of three children sleeping in Haiti. With a collage of photographs up on my computer screen for reference, I carefully assembled a fictitious image based on visual facts.

Like all the scenes in the book, this one features a clock, showing the time of day and an appropriate sky to match. But I want my book to teach about more than just time zones. I want it to convey something about what life is like in other parts of the world – how it is different, and how it is the same. The three Haitian children in this illustration share a tattered mattress on a floor of packed earth. They sleep in their clothes under bare walls and windows without glass. But despite a standard of living which the average reader of my book will never experience, these children have each other, and they sleep peacefully.

Suddenly, a news report interrupted the morning radio program: Haiti had just been hit by a devastating earthquake. I stopped painting, and considered what would happen in an earthquake to a house such as this, built of mud and concrete. That picture would not be so pretty. Clearly, my depiction of Haiti was scarcely grim enough. Yet I'm glad it's included in the book, among many other scenes showing children engaged in daily activities which may not be familiar to the majority of my readers.

Though none are as tragic as Haiti, every illustration in While You are Sleeping shows something real. A young girl in England rises early to milk a goat before school. A boy in Thailand climbs a lychee tree and picks the ripe fruit for his afternoon snack. A pre-teen in India carries her baby brother to an outdoor public well, where she pumps water by hand and bathes him in an enamel basin. A Nigerian girl carries a bowl of fruit on her head past neighbors grinding millet in a large wooden mortar. While these places have not gained the world attention the earthquake brought to Haiti, they show children the reality of how other people live even in today's modern world.

The seed idea for While