Pairs of pears and polar bears

Twas a hellish last day of the semester with flagrant nose goobies and a pair of preverts in the potty.  Thunder and lightning prevented lightening our teacher moods with an outdoor recess.  We all needed an energetic Strauss polka moment, but twern't to be.

I'm set to teach about pairs and matching.  Have photos of pairs of socks, pairs of mittens, pairs of peppers, pairs of bears and even pineapples.  My students surprised me by being one step ahead. They gave me a pair of polar bear slippers, and let me tell you my tired teacher feet are happy! I might wear them the entire break, even at the public library and in Portland.

In the random coincidence category, I received a gift of pairs--Noah dispensing Post-It notes.  This is the best chuckle of the day, with pairs of giraffe, dolphin, and octopi.  I plan to keep this for a little dose of levity all next year.

Our pair of preschool potty preverts were playing a version of show and tell.  It's not likely to be a reliable predictor of future deviant behavior any more than a preschool art class incident of over-extended glue stick twisting.

 Just don't confuse glue stick with Chapstick and hope you don't have to explain to  Col. Bat Guano:


Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Colonel! Colonel, I must know what you think has been going on here! 
Colonel "Bat" Guano: You wanna know what I think? 
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Yes! 
Colonel "Bat" Guano: I think you're some kind of deviated prevert. I think General Ripper found out about your preversion, and that you were organizing some kind of mutiny of preverts. Now MOVE! 


© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

At play with the English language

My boss asked, "Do you mind if I play some Christmas music?"

"As long as it isn't that rump a tum tum one," I answered, "or the twelve days."  That one always gives me flashbacks to Seventies t.v.

Long days with children who can't differentiate between pine cones, pineapples, and porcupines.  I slip off to my mental playground.

1 pear
Pair of pears
Parrot
Pair of parrots
Partridge Family

1 apple
Pineapple
Pine cones
Coneheads
Corn on the cob

Pair of mittens
Pair of peppers
Pail of peppers

Puppy
Puppy puppet
Sock puppet
Pair of socks
Pair of dogs
Prairie dog






Peacock
Peanut butter
Peanut butter and jelly


Pizza chef
[Pepperoni with mushrooms, black olives, and green pepper]

9 potatoes
Potato Head in bed



Porcupine
Bongo polar bears 
Poinsettia



Had to go forth to purchase pine cones, peppers, and pears for a photo shoot.  DFW is not a conifer-friendly metroplex, so pine cones don't just hang around waiting to be photographed.

Good grief, about a decade ago I ripped this funny illustration of Mr. Potato Head off to snoozeville out of a magazine.  Found the clipping while looking for something completely different, but it still makes me laugh.  Nothing on the page or reverse indicates the source.


© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Lyle Finds His Mother

It's been over a year since the opportunity presented itself for a preschool book festival. The last time we celebrated the silliness of Daniel Pinkwater's polar bear named Larry. This time we are delighting in Bernard Waber's brownstone-dwelling crocodile, Lyle.


Lyle came to students' attention when he saved the drowning Clover Sue Hipple during our swimming art unit. Children, the true enquiring minds, wanted to know more about how Lyle came to live with the Primm family in The House On East 88th Street. I wanted to get reacquainted with Lyle's mother now that my own little crocodiles have grown up.

The oldest photo in this group is a mind-blowing quarter century old. I sewed a Halloween costume for a major Lyle fan in 1984. His younger brothers wore the costume in 1987 and 1989. Cousins carried on the crocodile tradition.


While all the boys loved being Lyle, only one transformed Lyle into a firefighting stuntrider.



© 2009 Nancy L. Ruder

We Heart Larry!

Back-to-back sessions at the Larry Book Festival led to another good discussion about jobs. After a reading of Ice Cream Larry (which I consider the least successful picture book in the the series), I told the kids we would read a bonus story. We want to get through all the books before I have to return them to the library, I explained.

"Whoa," one kid said, "I hope my library has Larry books!"

"Whoa, me too!," the rest said.

I explained that a librarian's job is to help you find the books you want. You can go right up to the librarian and ask for help finding books about Larry the polar bear. Even better, you can ask for help finding books by Daniel Pinkwater, so you can check out the Wallpaper From Space book, too. We closed our eyes and imagined a glass of water turning pink so we could remember Pinkwater. A librarian gets money to buy blueberry muffins by helping children and grown-ups find the books they want to check out.

The children loved Sleepover Larry. Most kids have gone on a sleepover with grandma or friends by the time they are four or five. They were excited to find a bunny in the book along with Larry, his brother Roy, Bear Number One, and Bear Number Three.

The dress-up party in the hospitality suite of the book festival was a big success. Kids took turns wearing a beret, dark sunglasses, and my mom's London Fog raincoat, pretending to be our favorite bear. That's what Larry wears when he goes walking around Bayonne, New Jersey to meet Roy at the zoo or have blueberry pancakes and sundaes. Other kids wore groovy beads and snapped their fingers like the bongo beatnik bears at Cafe Mama Bear. The teachers snapped digital party pics for this adventure in pretend silliness.



I refuse to serve codfish ice cream bars at snacktime on the final day of the book festival. We'll have blueberry mini-muffins instead. We'll make a collage poster with the party pics and magazine clippings of real polar bears. Then we'll wind up the festival with Dancing Larry.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Day Three at the Larry Book Festival

The Larry movement is building momentum. If Barack Obama had a lick of sense, he would name Larry the polar bear as his running mate.

Larry is the Classroom Motivator. He's about Change and Making Things Happen. I tell a preschooler in a low voice, "Hey, I hope you can get this work done so we have enough time to read about Larry." The work gets done!

Today we read At the Hotel Larry. It is difficult disguising a nine and a half foot tall polar bear to take him to the Pancake Palace. You have to dress him in a very big coat, hat, and sunglasses, and pretend he is your uncle from Milwaukee. Preschoolers understand pancakes!

Tomorrow, I will take a very big coat to school, along with a beret, so the kids can put on a disguise. We will look for Milwaukee and New Jersey on the map. Now I just need to find some dark sunglasses.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Larry Festival Day Two

Backtracking to the beginning of the story, we shared Young Larry during afternoon line time. Larry, the polar bear creation of Daniel Pinkwater, was a middle-sized bear when his mother indicated he should fend for himself. Larry and his brother, Roy, were each nine and a half feet tall.

How tall is that? What does nine and a half feet look like? We found that it looks like two and three quarters preschoolers placed head to head and toe to toe on the rug and measured with a ruler. A full-grown male polar bear would be about three and a half preschoolers tall standing up on its hind legs.

Charged up from attending a weekend literacy workshop, I'm ready to let the students sit closer to the picture book when I read, and intent on reinforcing listening comprehension after stories. We spent a lot of time discussing jobs--Larry's job as a lifeguard, our parents' jobs, our own classroom jobs. Then we spent time considering swimming and muffins. Larry wanted a job so he could get money to buy muffins. What do parents buy with the money they earn at their jobs?

One student has learned to alphabetize simple words, giving my cataloging heart great joy. To demonstrate the power of his new skill, we spent time in the index of the great big book of animals. We looked up lemurs and polar bears. I'm very fond of both animals, as I spent so much time watching them with my little sons at Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo.

It is only Day Two of the Larry Book Festival, and already I'm feeling cool and refreshed. If I can teach just one child to use an index, it will help preserve civilization such as it is. Remember the ancient proverb:

Give a kid a fish and he can feed a polar bear.
Teach a kid to alphabetize and he can look up "polar bear" in the index.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

The Larry Book Festival

As it is not possible to spend this week floating on a chunk of ice about as far north as one can go from Texas, I have reached the only logical conclusion. It is time to host "The Larry Book Festival" in the preschool classroom.

This event won't be patterned after the Texas Book Festival I was fortunate to attend two years ago in Austin. For one thing, Barack Obama and Maureen Dowd won't be speaking. There won't be any authors signing books, or vender tents selling Lemon Snow and Brats-On-A-Stick.

"The Larry Book Festival" won't be McMurtry, either. Driving back from Lubbock in the fall of 2004, I went out of my way to visit Booked Up, Larry McMurtry's collection of stores selling used and antiquarian books around the town square of Archer City. To be honest, all Booked Up did for me was activate my dusty moldy book allergy with a vengence.

The namesake of "The Larry Book Festival" is the charming, smart, clueless, preadolescent polar bear creation of Daniel and Jill Pinkwater. Larry the polar bear is the lifeguard at the Hotel Larry, owned by Martin, Semolina, and Mildred Frobisher. Larry is the brother of Roy, one of the polar bears at the Bayonne, New Jersey zoo. Ever since Larry and Roy's polar bear mother hit each of them on the head and told them to "Get lost. Go and fend for yourselves," I have had a fond, chilled place in my heart for this fending bear.

I discovered Larry, Roy, and their mother polar bear at the library where I worked when my three sons were charming, smart, clueless preadolescents, more or less. It was a good reminder that a parent's job is to prepare teens to get lost and go fend for themselves for the most part. Nature is harsh. It makes sure parents and children keep that end goal in mind. Seems to me a lot of human parents these days need a hit on the head to remind them of the end goal, which is self-sufficient adult offspring.

So this week I'll be sharing a Larry picture book with my students each day, while I give my brain a little iceberg floating time. We started with Bongo Larry today, and practiced cool beatnik finger-snapping. Tomorrow we'll learn about blueberry muffins. Maybe on Friday we can have them for a special literary Larry snack!



© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Plexiglas party for three

Although trivia means unimportant, trifling things or details, especially obscure and useless knowledge, it's origin has been a signpost in my life since my Greco-Roman class back at old East High. Trivia derives from Latin for the meeting of three roads, from tri- "three" + via "road." The idea is that things at the crossroads are insignificant, ordinary, and/or vulgar.

When three ideas or events converge, it often means inspiration is waiting for me to take notice:

• I picked up a large quantity of clear and light blue plastic boxes at the most recent W.A.S.T.E. recyclables giveaway for art teachers organized by Raytheon and Alcatel-Lucent. I need to use them for an art project pronto, as they are taking up a corner of my room.


• La Scala commissioned an opera based on Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth", and the NPR reported, "the drama won't be over till the polar bear sings." Italian composer Giorgio Battistelli says, "It will be about the tragedy of our present situation ... It is a great challenge, of course, to write an opera on such an unusual subject. It is certainly not the story of Romeo and Juliet."


• Al Peppard wrote in a society piece for the Dallas Morning News about a party, " To complete the transparency theme, a Plexiglas bridge spanned the [Olympic size] pool where belly dancers ... performed for the crowd."

Pondering the set design possibilities for a global warming opera reminded me of the dreadful clear acrylic stairs used in the Dallas Opera's 2003 production of Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades . Très Target!

So could the polar bears sing and swim in an Olympic size pool with Al Gore on the Plexiglas bridge? Has there ever been an opera production with synchronized swimming? Could my students build a bridge sculpture out of all the plastic boxes? Maybe we should stick with crystal palaces. And no, we won't be making clothespin belly dancers! I will be repeating some of the transparency drawing and painting project from 2006. We may have to read some of Daniel Pinkwater's books about Larry the polar bear who likes blueberry muffins. Think cool for summer school!

If you can't wait for the La Scala premiere, there's a fun parody of "An Inconvenient" opera at http://www.ecorazzi.com/2008/06/07/video-preview-of-an-inconvenient-truth-the-opera/.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder