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Thanksgiving, while not strictly an American holiday, has a  history that runs deep.  In October 1782, the Continental Congress declared November 28, 1782, a day of Thanksgiving for the young country.President Abraham Lincoln in 1864 proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving during the Civil War as he shared the news of General U.S. Grant’s success in battles.  Thanksgiving was to be celebrated the last Thursday in November. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, through much maneuvering, formally declared the fourth Thursday of November as Thanksgiving to begin in 1942. Curiously, the change in Thursdays had to do with boosting the economy for the Christmas shopping season, as it was considered at that time inappropriate to advertise for Christmas before Thanksgiving! My goodness how times have changed!

The Education and Social Science Library (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), created a Thanksgiving reading list for children. Available on line also is their catalog of Native American Children’s and Young Adult Literature.

A very happy Thanksgiving to you and your families from SSPP Reads.

Reposted  from SSPP  Reads 11/10/2010. Graphic from Mike Licht, Creative Commons License.

The Veterans Day National Ceremony is held each year on November 11th at Arlington National Cemetery . The ceremony commences precisely at 11:00 a.m. with a wreath laying at the Tomb of the Unknowns and continues inside the Memorial Amphitheater with a parade of colors by veterans’ organizations and remarks from dignitaries. The ceremony is intended to honor and thank all who served in the United States Armed Forces. (US Dept. of Veterans Affairs)

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the Veterans Day National Committee have provided a Teacher Resource Guide for this year’s Veterans Day, 11-11-11. There are more than 24 million Veterans who have reintegrated back into our communities.

Following are a few key facts about Veterans’ Day; you can find more at VA Kids. or keyword search at the San Francisco Public Library.

• WWI officially ended in the summer of 1919 with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles
• Bullets stopped flying  seven months earlier  on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month–11-11-1918–when an armistice between Germany and the Allied Forces went into effect.
• In 1938, the US Congress declared Armistice Day a federal legal holiday.
• In 1968 Congress enacted legislation to change Veteran’s Day to the fourth Monday of October but under pressure from veterans groups, the holiday returned to the historically significant date of November 11.

Make your own medal to give your veteran, thanking him or her for their service to their country.

Parts of this post originally appeared here on 11-07-2010. Graphic from Department of Veterans Affairs.

Admission Day, September 9, was a state holiday when I was a girl.  Today we look at our history with a more critical eye to get a better understanding of the human condition.  California became the 31st state to join the Union on September 9, 1850, not long after gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in 1848 in Coloma.  By 1869 the first westbound train arrived in San Francisco thanks in no small part to the Chinese and Irish Immigrants yet in 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act which banned all Chinese immigration.

California History is the fourth grade curriculum throughout California.  Here at Sts. Peter & Paul’s we use the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt History/Social Science textbook and follow the California State Standards and the Archdiocesan Curriculum Guidelines.  Students in fourth grade explore history, indigenous people of California, the Spanish and Russian influence in our history, the California Missions, the Gold Rush,  immigration to the Golden State, and of course geography.

You might want to check out some of these links to learn more about the great state of California and you too can exclaim Eureka! I have found it!

• California Kids Page, Just for Kids State of California
• Kids Zone, California Museum
• Houghton Mifflin GeoNet Game
• Learn California
• California Historical Society, History Online
• Library of Congress, California History Collection
• National Geographic Kids
• The Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco

Graphic from Flickr Creative Commons by kevincole.

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Fireworks are exciting, I’m the first to oohh and aahh, but in these economic times, lots of towns and cities are cutting down on the celebrations, the money isn’t there.  So we fire up the barbeque with family and friends,  perhaps attend a wedding or family reunion.  Maybe we’re lucky enough to have some down time for ourselves. What a great opportunity to show by example to our children the joy of reading.  I’m into the first of two books that have been patiently waiting for me on my bookshelf.  Here are a few gems I culled from Jon Scieszka’s  Guys Read a web-based literacy program for boys (but it’s not just for boys!) on a recent hunt for birthday gifts for nieces and nephews.

• The Strange Case of Origami Yoda, Tom Angleberger:  Very nerdy sixth grader Dwight is.  Comes to school one day with an origami Yoda puppet on finger he does.  Read book you should.  Enjoy and learn much you will (from Guys Read).
• Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire, Gordon Korman, JoAnn Adinolfi:  Zoe’s desire to be interesting leads her to tell tall tales that make her the opposite of popular. When something exciting really does happen to her — like an eagle nestling in her backyard — no one wants to believe her! Will she ever find a friend in third grade? (from Scholastic Book Wizard)
• Racecar Alphabet, Brian Floca: Exactly what you think it is.  And that’s good.  Something for the beginning race fan.  Fantastic illustrations  (from Guys Read).
• Monkey Truck, Michael H. Slack: Monkey Truck is a monkey.  Monkey Truck is a truck.  Monkey Truck is both a monkey and a truck.  “When there’s trouble in the jungle, Monkey Truck knows what to do.”  Great, fun, read aloud.  Lively illustrations.  And Monkey Truck also burns banana gas (from Guys Read).
• Mercy Watson: Princess in Disguise, Kate DiCamillo: How can you go wrong with a pig in a pink tutu and tiara? (from SFGate)
• Saving Mister Nibbles (Elliot’s Park Series #1), Patrick Carman: Mister Nibbles has been captured and taken to the yellow house across the street from Elliot’s Park! Squirrels aren’t meant to live indoors (not even stuffed ones like Mister Nibbles), so Elliot and his friends come up with a plan to rescue their new friend. Can Elliot, Crash, Chip, and Twitch save Mister Nibbles before it’s too late? (from Patrick Carman website)

The longest day of the year, the first day of summer, has arrived.  Ah, sit back and relax, starting tomorrow the days begin to get shorter and school is here before we know it.  Of course, the longest day is not more than 24 hours, but it gives us in the Northern Hemisphere the sun for the longest period of time.  It appears to us Earthlings at its most northern point. At the North Pole, nearly the entire day is bathed in sunlight. Some years ago my youngest brother pitched summer baseball with the North Pole Nicks in North Pole, Alaska.  The big game was on the Summer Solstice and played at midnight without lights! You can guess what the shortest day of the year brings the folks up north–darkness.

See NASA’s Solstice Animation –what the Earth would look like on the Summer Solstice if you were standing on the Sun!

The spin axis of our planet is tilted 23.5 degrees with respect to Earth’s orbit around the Sun. The northern summer solstice is an instant in time when the north pole of the Earth points more directly toward the Sun than at any other time of the year. It marks the beginning of summer in the northern hemisphere and winter in the southern hemisphere.

A few children’s titles come up with a keyword search, summer solstice,  at the San Francisco Public Library:  The Summer Solstice by Ellen Jackson, The Longest Day by Wendy Pfeffer, Mermaid Dance by Marjorie Rose Hakala, and Mermaids on Parade by Melanie Hope Greenberg.

Visit StarDate Online from the University of Texas at Austin MacDonald Observatory to get the latest Summer Solstice news for 2011. Enjoy your summer! SSPP Reads will post around the Fourth of July.

Graphic from Flickr Creative Commons License by  nyaa birdies perch 

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Some interesting animal stories of late that beg a trip to the public library:

• Silent Knight, a blinded California Sea Lion,  was brought to his new home at San Francisco Zoo on May 6, with buddy Henry, also blind.  Silent Knight was shot in the head with buckshot and found at Swede’s Beach in Sausalito during the Christmas Season.  Silent Knight is seven feet long and weighs 350 pounds.  Henry and Silent Knight seem happy in their new environment (mercurynews.com). Check out Sea Lions by Caroline Arnold.
• San Francisco Zoo will be getting a Siberian Tiger from the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha, Nebraska in June.  Martha, this 9½ year old female, will be the first Siberian at the Zoo since the fatal attack in December 2007.  Zoo Director Tanya Peterson says the Doorly Zoo “has made a decision to start paring down their (big cat) collection.”  Martha will live in the tiger exhibit with walls 22 feet high (sfgate). Check out Big Cats by Dorothy Hinshaw Patent.
• Underground for 13 years, cicadas have emerged in the states of Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia.  They are big, loud, and in your face but other than that, cicadas are harmless according to Belmont University entomologist Steve Murphree, also a member of the Tennessee Entomological Society (The Tennessean).  Check out Cicadas! Strange and Wonderful by Laurence Pringle.

Graphic from Flickr Creative Commons License sduck409

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It is such a wonderful feeling to find childhood favorites, books that you thought you’d lost forever. They’re such treasure, like gold; they bring back a wash of good feeling. That just happened to me.

There was a book that I loved as a child (which my mother threw out) that I hadn’t been able to find. I couldn’t remember much about it, except that I loved the illustrations, they were hazy watercolors, and that there was a marble I used to gaze at from a boy’s pocket or a box or someplace, along with some other of his treasures.

I found another picture book from the same time period where the illustrations looked like what I remembered, and then I looked inside for the illustrator’s name. Then I started searching other titles by that author on Amazon.com, but most of the titles, because they were so old, didn’t have covers scanned in.

Next I searched on ebay in the children’s book section for that particular illustrator–and I found a cover that looked very familiar to me, and gave me a good feeling; I was pretty sure it was the right one. (The Hiding Place by Pauline Palmer Meek, illustrated by Tom O’Sullivan.) But I wanted to be sure before I purchased it.

So I wrote to the seller, asking what the book was about, and she wrote back the opening of the book: “Henry had a secret hiding place. In it he kept two marbles, a shiny rock, an old ball-point pen, and a stick of gum.”

I felt such a happy rush reading those lines, those words. Not only because it’s the right book, not only because those words bring back the happy, good feelings I had reading that book, but also because the words again touch me in just the right way. I’ve always loved the idea of having secret hiding places, and of having special little treasures, and I can see those things as treasures.

I can’t wait until the book arrives and I can open it again.

My route to finding the book may have been a bit round-about, but I discovered it. It helped that I remembered the illustrator’s style and found another book by him. It also helped that I could look at some covers online. So eBay, though you wouldn’t normally think of it as a way to find books, can help.

Then there’s the LiveJournal Find a Book community, which I’ve always found immensely helpful. (You just have to create a login to post.) And Librarian Mom wrote a great post on finding childhood favorites, with a link to a long article by the Internet Public Library: Half-Remembered Children’s Books: Search Strategies. My favorite new-to-me resources from that article are Loganberry Books’ Stump the Bookseller where you submit what you remember about a book for $2.00 (which can be used to purchase books from the store), and the bookseller tries to find it for you; and a MSN group Ex-Libris, the Lost Boards, which is a discussion board where you can post what you remember about a book, and others will try to help you find it, if it sounds familiar to them. These are wonderful resources, and fantastic ways to find that book you loved so much as a child.

I love waking up on Saturday mornings. Saturday has always been the day of greatest possibility. You never know what can happen on a Saturday. It is usually the one day of the week that has fewer "must dos" or scheduled activities. We have the luxury of imagining our day unfolding in many different ways. One of the things I have always loved to do on Saturdays is go to the library. You can imagine with all of the wonderful libraries in the world that you should be prepared for wonderful things to happen. But a real live lion?

Library Lion by Michelle Knudsen and illustrated by Kevin Hawkes is a warm and engaging story about libraries, books, rules and friendship. And most of all, when it is okay to break the rules to help someone. One of the librarians, Mr. McBee, is quite upset when a lion walks into the library one day. When he reports it to Miss Merriweather, the head librarian, her only concern is whether or not the lion is following the library's rules. The main rule in a library, of course, is keeping quiet or speaking in a low voice so as to not disturb other people in the library. When Mr. McBee reports that the lion is not breaking any rules, Miss Merriweather says to leave him alone

As it turns out, the lion's favorite time in the library is story hour when the story lady reads aloud to the children in their comfy story corner. However, he is not at all happy when she is done for the day as he wants to hear another story and so he roars very loudly. When Miss Merriweather comes to scold him, the children ask if he can return the following day for more stories if he doesn't roar. Miss Merriweather responds, "Yes. A nice, quiet lion would certainly be allowed to come back for story hour tomorrow."

Each day the lion returns early for story hour and makes himself useful by licking envelopes or dusting the encyclopedias with his tail or putting children on his back so they can reach books on the high shelves. But one day while he is helping in Miss Merriweather's office, she falls from a ladder and hurts herself. She tells the lion to get Mr. McBee to help. Mr. McBee has not grown any fonder of the lion and ignores him. The lion is trying to follow the rules and not make noise but Mr. McBee does not understand that the lion needs his help, so finally in frustration, he roars "the loudest roar he had ever roared in his life."

Mr. McBee runs to Miss Merriweather's office to report that the lion has broken the rules when he finds Miss Merriweather on the floor with a broken arm needing help. He realizes that the lion broke the rules to help a friend. But the lion doesn't come back to the library the next day, or the day after that. Everyone was sad, especially Miss Merriweather. So, Mr. McBee searches the town to find the lion to tell him about the NEW library rule - that there is no roaring in the library unless you have a good reason like trying to help a friend who's been hurt. The lion returns to the library the next day and is welcomed by all his friends.

In addition to being a good story with a happy ending and illustrated with evocative, soft pastels, the story celebrates friendship and the importance of community.