I picked up our copy of Mouse Trouble last week, and I was gone! What memories of reading and rereading it! What a story! What a good moral, so simply presented! And the emotional buttons those illustrations push for me – memories of bedtime reading, of talking about the mice and the wonderful old cat they befriend! Even the masking tape one of the kids put on to hold it together is worn out.

So the invitation: Tell us about your most-loved children’s books! Your favorites might be picture books, first readers, chapter books, great reference books – anywhere from the first cloth book to ready-for-adulthood reading. They could be books you remember having read to you, ones you read to yourself when you were a kid, ones you read to your kids, or new ones you can’t wait to read to some deserving child. I’ve started the list off with one of my favorites.

Kids are especially invited to tell everyone about their favorites!

Maybe you’ll see some titles here you want to order. Of course Amazon is only a click away. But if you value independent book stores, call Kathleen at the Erie Book Store (800-480-5671), or your local independent dealer, if you’re still lucky enough to have one.

Down below are some resources to remind you of a few of the officially great children’s books. But your best resource is your memory of the books that mattered to you, and maybe a quick check of the most tattered covers on the shelf. Drop by and tell us about your favorites: Our Favorite Kids’ Books.

Here are two sites to jog your memory:

The Newbery Medal has been awarded annually since 1922 to the author of the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children.

The Caldecott Medal, has been awarded annually since 1938 to the artist of the most distinguished American picture book for children.

If you have other links you think give great lists, please tell us about them!

How to Evaluate a Web Page is a helpful tool for students, courtesy of the Colorado State University Libraries. If students will ask these questions every time they consider using a Web source for research, they’ll develop a vital skill. If you can help them understand why these questions are helpful, you’ll have struck a blow for critical thinking!

I talked before about the importance of information-evaluation skills for our kids:
See Meta Explosion: “Brazil” and the Universal Library, which links back to an earlier, more basic article.

“Advanced Placement.” Listen carefully: Does that say anything about college admissions? The goal of the AP system was originally to allow capable students to be placed in advanced college courses on the basis of exceptional work in high school.

In an op-ed piece for the New York Times this morning, Rodney LaBrecque, the head of Wilbraham & Monson Academy, a first-rank college preparatory school, accuses the AP program of having

…metamorphosed into something far from its founders’ intentions. Today its de facto purpose is to provide privileged high school students with a credential for college admission. It has become another form of standardized, high-stakes testing…

Good point – one of several in the article. And I like his soluton: to not allow AP classes to be reported until a student is accepted by a school, so they can serve only their original purpose. But I’m on a mission a bit to the side, as regular readers know: One of the most distressing results of the current national fear frenzy is that all of childhood is being turned into a competition. We are driven not by a desire for excellence so much as by the fear that our child will be one of the Have-Nots. It will backfire – it will make less capable learners, whatever their paper qualifications. Advanced Placement classes would do a better job for learners if they were removed from the admissions process.

I just read a short piece that left my jaw hanging. Fortunately or not, my fingers are still functional. In last Sunday’s USA Weekend, Ann Pleshette Murphy cites a survey where many kids report stress because they have “too much to do,” and then mentions research which finds that boredom “produces brainwaves associated with creativity.” Oh! Boredom is good for my kids’ brainpower! How can I give them the brain benefits of boredom? Here are some selections from her answer:

…enforcing boredom…. Make downtime a scheduled family activity…. When your child says, “There’s nothing to do,” don’t rush to fill the void. Provide art supplies… give older ones a journal or tape recorder to chronicle their thoughts.

Italics are mine. For my careful readers, I have to add: I didn’t forget the ellipsis: There’s nothing between “don’t rush to fill the void.” and “Provide.”

By coincidence, I’ve been reading Bill Bryson’s latest, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir, about his childhood in the fifties:

Because days were so long and so little occurred, you were prepared to invest long periods in just sitting and watching things on the off chance that something diverting might occur…. Other long periods of the day were devoted to just seeing what would happen – what would happen if you….

It isn’t just that USA Weekend gets it so wrong. It’s as though they can’t conceive the setting conditions for true boredom: that a child could have nothing to do, that a parent would not leap to the rescue, that children could be left completely to their own devices. (At my most cynical, I think staring into space, without so much as a tape recorder to chronicle the busy content of the idle moment, was seen to be a distressing consumer behavior, to be extirpated.)

In Grow With the Flow, I use the old phrase “to invite the soul” to talk about the private, apparently empty times in which our minds wander where they will. I suspect kids do this best when they have “nothing to do.”

I wouldn’t want this post to be about The Good Olde Days. You know from GWTF that I’m an activist for action with our kids; the idea that we influence their development is central to the book. But you also know that I bemoan the potential loss of balance in this – the fear-based sense that we must make certain no minute of our child’s formative years goes unmanaged.

Things have changed a bit since 1956. I don’t know what boredom looks like in the midst of bombarding stimulation. (Maybe just the same as always?) I don’t even know that occasional boredom is fruitful, although my intuition says it is. But I do know you don’t help your kids to fruitful boredom by finding something for them to do.

I’ve set up a Coffee Table, What Should Parents Do? in case anyone would like to talk about the appropriate extent of parent involvement in their child’s day-to-day development. Should we sometimes back off? Or is that just a cheap way to avoid responsibility? Has the world changed so much that benign neglect isn’t benign? Or can our level of involvement interfere with basic developmental needs?

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