THERE IS A DINOSAUR FOR YOU!
THERE’S A DINOSAUR FOR EVERY KID AND A KID FOR EVERY DINOSAUR.
This guide will help you find the right one for you.
With a warning that “some dinosaurs need a little more housebreaking than others,” Laura Rennart’s and Marc Brown’s new tongue-in-cheek guide to caring for pet dinosaurs, Buying, Training, and Caring for Your Dinosaur, (Knopf, 2009) is off and running.
Need a watch-dino? Try Tricerotops or Tyranosaurus Rex! (“Post a BEWARE OF DINOSAUR warning; the mail carrier will appreciate this!”) Your T. Rex is an unparalleled watch-dino, but a sturdy leash and obedience lessons are a must for this one.
Now Old three-horn-face is also great as a ring-toss target for birthday parties, and a Diplodiclus also has party possibilities. With one of those you have your own roller coaster!
Training? Well, that takes a little forethought. Before undertaking the sit command, be sure to check underneath your dino.
Roll Over? Don’t even go there!
Hygiene? When your dino needs a bath, the carwash is best! Be forewarned, however, that an Ankylosaurus is difficult to groom. Exercise? Hit the water! Dinos make excellent floatation devices, and some have awesome waterslide possibilities.
Buying, Training, and Caring for Your Dinosaur has some, er, fantastic advice for the would-be pet owner, but there’s one bit of counsel I’d like to question:
Potential Health Problem: Extinction (but not for millions of years)
Uh, guys! Read your First Book of Paleontology lately?
I found this in an Arts & Activities magazine, and it works great for any student that has already made a pinch pot. I’m saving it for 1st graders on up.
1. Give each student a lump of clay about the size of a small apple. Tell them that softening the clay is an important first step, and this is best done by squeezing it and spreading water on it for at least five minutes. After the clay is warm, they are to roll it into a smooth ball.
2. To make a pinch pot, they are to stick their thumb in the middle of the ball, and then pinch the sides until a bowl forms with walls that are about the thickness of a pancake.
3. On one side of the bowl, a small fold can be made and pinched together to gather extra clay to make the turkey head. On the opposite side, clay can be pinched a bit to make a curve of the tail. When the shape is complete, feathers can scratched in the sides to add some texture.
4. Fire the clay, paint with glaze, and fire again. A very cute addition to your Thanksgiving table!
It was dark.
It was stormy.
It was night.
Melvin had a flat tire.
Cement mixer Melvin is in a situation. With a deflated front tire, he hopefully rolls into a shadowy, spooky junkyard in hopes of snagging a spare. And there he sees one, a strangely orangish, strangely glowing tire. It’s a weird one, all right, but if the tire fits, wear it, Melvin thinks.
But before Melvin can roll back the way he came, he is stopped right in his treads.
“WHO TOOK MY GOLDEN TIRE?” a spooky voice called.
Melvin was worried.
Melvin was scared.
The timorous cement mixer hurriedly makes for home and, still spooked, parks himself in what he hopes is an undisclosed location, in hopes of an incognito idle.
“WHO TOOK MY GOLDEN TIRE?”
The spooky voice had found him!
Melvin pulls in his fenders and closes his eyes, but the spooky voice grows closer, until to his horror he sees a dark draped shape, with headlights glowing from behind its covering sheet.
“YOU TOOK IT!”
Don’t you want the OTHER one?”
For those youngsters who are both ready to read or, as the author puts it in his introduction, “ready to roll,” Jon Scieszka and his trio of vehicular design artists have a brand-new offering for the season, The Spooky Tire (Ready-to-Read Level 1) (Aladdin, 2009.) Using the, er, bare bones of the familiar folktale “The Golden Arm” and its variants, this talented pit crew has fashioned some timely truck fun for their emergent reader fans. Other books in this easy-to-read series are Uh-Oh, Max (Ready-to-Read. Level 1) and Pete’s Party (Ready-to-Read. Level 1).
In a swingin’ Texas spoof of the old movie theme, two talented youngsters, Tex Mex Rex and Sugar Lee Snughead, leave the ranch behind to take on the trials of the big city:
“I’ve tuned my guitar. I know I’ll be a big star,” Tex tells his parents.
“Here I come, Broadway! Farewell, El Paso!” the sweet-singin’ Sugar tells her momma.
But the big city has its trials for the the Texas twosome. Alone, they struggle to survive in the Big Apple.
Tex begged all the networks to give him a spot.
But a gig washin’ dishes was all that he got.
She sang and danced and flashed her big smile.
But Sugar’s big part in a show was the aisle.
After sloggin’ through weeks of washin’ dishes and usherin’ patrons to their seats at the local movie house, Tex and Sugar are ready to pack up their guitar picks and head back to Texas–until one night after work they both do a bit of solo singin’:
The warm summer breeze blew their songs throughout the sky.
Such sweet soulful longing caused neighbors to cry.
The tunes were forlorn and feelin’s so true
That rats and roaches and pigeons cried, too.
“Dear Dogies!” purred Sugar. “I hear my soul mate.”
“Hot Froggies!” yowled Tex, ” This has to be fate.”
The Texas tunesmiths finally meet and form a twosome, and it’s a duet made in heaven. Tex and Sugar together take the town by storm, and it’s no time before they make the marquees on old Broadway:
The music was magic for Sugar and Tex.
It’s hard to figure out what happened next….
Each cat searched for stardom and found a best friend.
They’re still making music and will to… THE END!
Carefully crafted illustrations with many Texas-style motifs add plenty of visual emphasis to Barbara Johansen Newman’s Tex & Sugar: A Big City Kitty Ditty that will have the listeners singin’ “Deep in the Heart of Texas.”
It comes from Ellen at Clayworks Studio. It’s basically making two pinch pots and blending them together. My kids grade 3-5 loved making these and the success rate was very high!
1. Give each student a piece of clay about the size of a small apple. Instruct them to remove a small piece for the stem and set aside. The rest of the clay is to be split into 2 sections.
2. After warming and softening the clay with their hands, each of the 2 sections needs to be turned into a ball and then into a smooth pinch pot. The goal is to have 2 bowls that roughly match each other in size.
3. Discuss how any time clay pieces are to be blended together, they need to be scored (scratched) and “puttied” together with slip (clay mud). Roughen up the edges of each bowl with a fork, wet with slip, and gently push the two bowls together. Use clay tool to blend together and hide seam.
4. A small stem is to be formed from the last piece of clay. It also gets scored and slipped on what is determined to be the top of the ball. Encourage extra blending on stem base as they are prone to fall off otherwise.
5. The students then hold the pumpkin in their hands and use a round tube, such as a jumbo-size pencil to push in ridges. If they rock the pencil from the stem to the bottom, rotate, and press again, they will form what look like the ridges of the pumpkin. Names may then be scored onto the bottom.
6. The next day, I had students draw lightly on the clay what they wanted their faces to look like. I kept it simple with only allowing circles, triangles or squares (no teeth!). It takes a sharp knife to cut out the faces, so I did it for them with an xacto knife.
7. When the clay is no longer cool to the touch, do a bisque firing with all the pumpkins. Have the students paint the pumpkins with glaze, and fire again.
You could make this a lesson about anatomy and what the different kinds of bones in your body look like – or you could just make some creepy looking name signs for Halloween!
1. I drew examples of some typical bones on the board. They generally look like sticks, but have large bumps on the end. I gave students long pieces of paper and had them write their name lightly in pencil, using just stick letters.
2. The students can then turn those letters into little sections of bone as they see fit. Curved letters can be made from several short straight ones, or something that looks like a rib bone, which has just a rounded point on one side.
3. Trace all the pencil lines in marker and add shading by using cross-hatching to one side.
Newton Starker knew he would most likely die from a lightning strike.
It would all happen in the blink of an eye. Zap!
One fried fourteen-year-old Newton, the last male heir of the Starker line.
In a parallel universe to that of Harry Potter and Hogwarts, Newton Starker knows that he, too, is stalked by a miscreant and malevolent force, a sudden bolt of lightning, perhaps from the blue of an innocent spring sky, the same force that has killed his mother. Without the physical mark on his forehead, Newton nevertheless wears the psychological scar of his family’s fatal curse.
Unwilling to remain secluded for life in the concrete geodesic dome his father had built in a vain attempt to safeguard his mother, Newton throws all his energies into learning the art of self-preservation at an eccentric boarding school, the Jerry Potts Academy of Higher Learning and Survival, a quirky twist on the boarding school where students wear kilts and are advised to keep their Scots dagger, the sgian dobh, sharp at all times. Potts Academy, dedicated to the skills of survivalism in the wild or in the economic jungle of modern life, seems Newton’s only hope of finding salvation from his fate, through the “fierce intelligence” which the school inculcates in its students.
Because his family’s deadly history is well-known, Newton has had few friends: most kids have been well advised to keep their distance outdoors to avoid becoming collateral damage in the course of the execution of Starker curse. At Potts, though, Newton is quickly befriended by Jacob Clarke, part Scots, part black, part Mi’kmaq Indian, a prolific writer who is apparently unperturbed by proximity to a human lightning rod.
Like Harry Potter, however, Newton quickly acquires an enemy, a rival in the person of Violet Quon for the top marks which will put him into the Hall of Heroes. Violet is not above a bit of academic sabotage, and Newton is certain that she is the person responsible for his kilt dropping in the midst of his impassioned recitation of Bobbie Burns’ “Red, Red Rose.” Newton, a devotee of culinary art, manages to outscore Violet in their first kitchen combat–the “Mystery Meat” survival cook off, which he wins with his own recipe utilizing roadkilled ground squirrel in a French truffle-spiced quiche.
Acquiring the truffles for the dish brings Newton his second friend. Because of his fractured French, the shipment of truffles comes with a truffle-seeking piglet, Josephine, who seems to have powers far beyond the usual porker.
But Newton still needs expert advice in his search for survival, and for this he goes to the nearby nursing home where his 102-year-old great-grandmother, the only Starker known to have survived to old age, resides. Newton approaches the sour old woman gingerly, hoping to learn her secret, but what he hears seems impossible to carry out:
“I want to know how you’ve lived so long,” said Newton.
“Spite, Great-grandson. Lovely, gorgeous, unyielding spite. I hate everyone–everyone I have ever met….”
“You hate everyone?”
“Even you…. I’ll even outlive you, Newton.” She pointed a crooked finger at him. “Would you like to bet on it?”
“No. Not at all.”
Newton feels he must try his great-grandmother’s solitary way to survival, but in the freshman class’ first Outdoor Expedition, 48 hours of survival in the wilds, Newton discovers that he just doesn’t have it in him to leave Violet hurt and alone in the woods, even to score marks on his way to the Hall of Heroes. And then, in probably the only unselfish act of her long self-preserving existence, Great-Grandmother Enid takes a bolt that is obviously intended for Newton, and his coming-of-age comes in a literal burst of light.
Arthur Slade’s Jolted: Newton Starker’s Rules for Survivalis funny and poignant, a different sort of rite of passage story in an offbeat setting which somehow feels just right for Newton Starker. This story will resonate with early teen readers, kids who sometimes feel that adolescence itself carries its own kind of curse.
MY LOCKER IS OBSCENE (to the tune of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee”)
My locker is obscene.
Worst place you’ve ever seen.
It’s such a mess.
Place where old math tests lie,
Old lunch, old apple pie.
The janitor will surely die
When I leave in June!
Bruce Lasky, the famous school tunester, has a collection which is just right for letting off steam during elementary nature camps or field trips. Even the teachers will be laughing on the inside at these clever lyrics set to melodies everyone knows.
THE BATTLE HYMN OF THE REPULSIVE (to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”)
Mine eyes have seen the kitchen, which is why I bring my lunch.
We have smelled the things they’re cooking and they’re toxic, we’ve a hunch.
And the salads are so soggy that you’ll never hear a crunch.
I bring my lunch to school.
Of course, there are due consequences for some behavior, as one would-be meatball three-point shooter soon learns:
I’VE BEEN SITTIN’ IN DETENTION (to the tune of “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad”)
I’ve been sitting in detention,
Since the end of school.
I’ve been sitting in detention
Just because I broke a rule.
Throwing meatballs in the lunchroom
Wasn’t wise, I fear.
I was aiming for the trash can,
Not my teacher’s rear.
Lasky and his collaborating artist, Stephen Carpenter, hit just the right touch of self-spoofery for the middle grade school kid in their I’ve Been Burping in the Classroom, sure to bring forth giggles and a “Can we sing it now?” from the kids who hear these hilariously silly songs. For other books in this same genre, take a look at Alan Katz’ Take Me Out of the Bathtub and Other Silly Dilly Songs and its several sequels, and Kelly Dipucchio’s silly and spooky songbook, just right for Halloween parties, Campfire Songs For Monsters (Sipping Spiders Through A Straw).
My sister has reminded me on many occasions that I’m missing the prime window of opportunity to get my middle child started on violin using the Suzuki method. I’ve reminded her that I shouldn’t need to do that, seeing as how his aunt can teach him and his sibs all they need to know. 
I took piano lessons when I was younger, maybe from the ages of 8-12? I gave it up for basketball practices, though I was also in the band by then. I hadn’t touched the piano in years, and have recently started playing around with it a bit. That got my sister and I talking about having taken lessons when we were younger, and wishing we had stuck with it longer. She was about 4 when we started lessons.
My oldest is now 6 and I’m wondering if it’s time to get her started on piano or something. I know it depends on the child as to whether or not they’re ready, but I’m just looking for your thoughts and opinions out there. Do your kids play any instruments? What age did they start?
So, he’s 4 years old now and learning to stretch his vocabulary along with his personality!
Every day he learns to say a new bad word! It seems to coincide with his fearless attitude towards all things his mother asks him to do. Is this normal? Gnashing of teeth and ready to fight at the drop of a hat!
Where did the sweet, innocent go? The one who wanted to crawl into Grandma’s lap and fall asleep while being rocked? The “I love yous” have turned into “don’t look at me!” The little dreamer has become everyone’s nightmare!
Little boys are rather foreign to me and his older brother was much more empathetic and sensitive to those around him and their feelings. This one is living in the center of his own universe and could care less about anything unless it’s interrupting his pleasures!
Is it just a phase? Or has my mother cursed me twice!? She always told me I would have a child just like myself, and I did, but I didn’t expect to be blessed with a second one! Thanks, Mom!
August 4th, 2009 in
Parenting | tags:
Kid |
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