Advent is celebrated by Christians in the four weeks leading up to Christmas Day. At our house, we have taken to setting out an Advent wreath with candles and lighting the candles in succession during the weeks before Christmas while we have dinner. We also have Advent calendars — one with chocolates, and the other stuffed with candy canes that our children eat day-by-day. This year, my daughter and I have the added pleasure of enjoying an on-line Advent calendar that celebrates each day with a magical scene from a wintry village.
One of my reading pleasures this Advent is librarian Sue Fisher’s blog, Mouse-traps and the Moon. For Advent, Sue is featuring a blog post each day on the best child-focused book sites she’s found on the Web. I know it’s getting close to mid-December with my post today, but you can always scroll back to Sue’s earlier posts to see what gems she’s found from Dec. 1. In fact, that’s just what my daughter and I did together this past Sunday afternoon when it simply was too cold to do anything outside. We watched videos on the Peter Rabbit site, heard Spike Milligan recite “On the Ning Nang Nong,” played games on the Jan Brett author site — these are some of the delightful interactive sites Sue links to in her posts. Do check out Mousetraps and the Moon. You can have a fun time with your child exploring these sites and learning about some great books for kids.
See Saw Saskatchewan is a children’s collection of poems about Canada by Robert Heidbreder, illustrated by Scot Ritchie (Kids Can Press, 2003.) I found out about this delightful book from librarian Sue Fisher’s blog, Mousetraps and the Moon. For National Poetry Month which was April, Sue featured various children’s poetry books on her blog.
See Saw Saskatchewan is a playful collection of poems that can be skipped to, ball-bounced to, or clapped to. The poems are about life in Canada in various locations featuring activities, or animals, or sights particular to the locale. There’s definitely a touch of Dennis Lee in these poems that’s detectable in such poems that play on Canadian place names like in ‘Niagara Falls’:
Kapuskasing sings
Cornwall calls
Thunder Bay storms,
And Niagara
FALLS!
In fact there are a lot of playful references to famous children’s rhymes which you can tell by the titles of some of the poems like ‘Pick a peck of P.E.I.’ or ‘Take Toronto by the Toe’. I had to laugh at the poem referring to my home city of Winnipeg: ‘Winnipeg Mosquitoes’. Yes, we do often have them and in enough abundance, to make them poetry-worthy! There’s a cute illustration of two besotted mosquitoes sucking blood out of a finger, which vaguely reminded me of a line from John Donne’s ‘The Flea’ — “wherein two bloods mingled be” — except in this case it’s the reverse with the blood of one Canadian ‘mingled’ into two lovelorn mosquitoes! Now if that isn’t an image of Canadian love, I don’t know what is.
Do you know of any good poetry books that celebrate your locale? Or play with the funny names of your towns and cities? In Canada, we have some great place names like Moose Jaw and Nipissing, Tumbler Ridge and Nanaimo. See Saw Saskatchewan does a nice job of making Canada a fun place to read about with its delightful poems set all over the land.
This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by jama at jama rattigan’s alphabet soup.
