Lit Kid: set pieces

It’s been a low-lit week. Seems like the only thing Junior Reader and I have looked at together has been the weekly reading book from school.

Except. Except. This one is called Potatoes and Tomatoes. It’s not a satire on pronunciation on either sides of the Atlantic. It may not make it onto any best seller list.

But it has plenty of set pieces. And at this point, for school, Junior Reader is working on the noble art of reading aloud – and set pieces will do just fine for that.

Potatoes and Tomatoes is a bit like The Little Red Hen. You know: the one where the hen decides to grow a seed of corn, and none of the other animals help her.

She does the whole shebang: plant it, water it, tend it, harvest it, grind the seed and bake it into bread. Predictably, the other animals show up at this point, demanding to eat the bread.

Little Red Hen refuses at this point – because at every point when she was asking for their involvement, they didn’t give it.

(This response can be a temptation when it comes to teatime, but I do still cook tea, because, as you know, I like eating even more than I like cooking.)

In the potatoes and tomatoes story, husband and wife live entirely off potatoes – or so it seems. (As a little aside, do go and have a look at Daft Jack and the Bean Stack, where they have a similarly limited diet.)

All of a sudden, one day, the wife decides she wants tomatoes for a change. (I can see her point, much as the potato is revered in this household.)

To hurry the story along a little, it’s fair to say that she ends up doing all the work: clearing the ground, building the greenhouse, developing a sprinkler system, and so on. The husband does admittedly say that what she is doing looks good, at every stage.

“By this time the wife was very very very hungry. You see, she wouldn’t eat potatoes, and there were no tomatoes.  So she said to the farmer ‘How are the tomatoes doing?’

‘They’re not,’ answered the farmer…”

And so it goes on. At every venture, she gains another ‘very’ for her very hungry. The potatoes/tomatoes pattern jingles through again.

It is the perfect material for the reader aloud, who is learning to use emphasis for the latest ‘very’, so we notice it as a new addition.

The points at which it mirrors The Little Red Hen is where the wife takes the next steps each time:

” ‘Then I’ll build you a greenhouse,’ said the wife.

And she did…”

I’ll confess I have slightly mixed feelings about the book. By the end, the wife realises she can do all the steps that lead to her producing great tomatoes. And the husband gets to eat them too.

(There may be a minor treatise here on whether women feel they need to do all the steps of something before they feel confident about the whole enterprise.

But that is probably not uppermost in the minds of the kids reading the books. At least,
I hope not.)

Maybe I am more like Little Red Hen, wanting others to help me in order to share the benefits of the hard work.

But now that I am the recipient of Junior Reader’s homework reading, I have shifted sides.
I am doing almost no hard digging, and am eating all the tomatoes, as it were.

But then I had many happy hours of ‘growing potatoes and tomatoes’ myself, reading the set pieces over and over with Junior Reader, until gradually, growing duties have transferred.

Junior Reader has meanwhile moved on to solo reading of chapter books. Is this like an even more complicated type of veg to grow? Avocados? Straight cucumbers?

I am meanwhile doing my best to find further ‘tricky veg’, as it were: the grown-up level chapter books, where I can indulge myself in doing all the voices.

When I can squeeze in a bit more lit kid time, my current favourites are the trio of magpies in Atticus Claw’s second outing.

As long as my throat can hold out when reading Jimmy Magpie’s latest plottings.

The lure of the opening phrase

Monday again. No Lit Kid. Trust me when I say that my compulsion to talk about children’s books is not on the wane. It’s just been a very busy week and weekend.

Dan led a trip to a certain brick-building type film yesterday, leaving me the house to myself for a few hours. What normally happens is that I then run around, catching up on housework.

No great change there. But then I decided that I needed some rest – by which I might in fact mean writing. Writing as a way of unwinding. No particular plans about it.

There have been a few times when a phrase or an idea has set in, and I wander off after it, seeing where it goes.

(It’s not all highly literary. One time I wondered what rainglasses would be – as an alternative to sunglasses – and spent a happy half hour finding out.)

I did a bit more of this yesterday. Then a new idea came in, just the opening phrase, and I set off again.

I’m not sure quite why this way of writing is working for me just now. (I’m not putting any pressure on it working for anyone else – barring putting a screen full of words in front of Dan from time to time.)

It may be a little like the writing prompts that you work on because you are part of a class, or an online group, or you’ve paid good money, or the person leading the group is inspirational – or any of the above.

It feels a little different too. It is more like the points at which a character is told to wait in a particular place: maybe in a book, or in a film, in a TV programme. You know the kind.

Of course we know what happens next. A reason comes why they fail to comply.

Maybe they want to be in on the action. Maybe they are too nosey for their own good.
(We also know that not all of these stories work out well for the one waiting.)

Imagine that they are waiting beside a wood. It’s dark in there. You can’t really see where you are going – you certainly can’t see a clear path through it.

The person waiting: they hear something. It’s not their name – it’s not that simple – but what they hear resonates. The words are inside them and outside them, all at the same time.

The words promise: something. It’s not yet clear what. They promise, at least, that words will follow words; perhaps, that the person waiting may follow the words too, and find out where the thread may lead.

Various ideas come to mind when I write this. Some suggest a path that relates to a certain stage in life – one that is anything but a stroll in the woods.

Some suggest a fork in the road. An opportunity to make a choice. The writer of the famous poem is able to look back and see that he took the right road, but at the time we see the alternative road, we don’t know for sure.

It might be the breadcrumbs in the woods approach of Hansel and Gretl. If they are lucky, they will have the earlier escape: the white stones that Hansel has gathered, that shine in the moonlight and guide them back home.

It might be the hope of rediscovering an old path – yet one that the poet tells us was never there in the first place.

I don’t really know where the next phrase will lead. (And I’m not yet abandoning my underwater investigator either. She’ll just have to tread water for a little, that’s all.)

I can only say, for now, that if you are considering entering the woods, an opening phrase may be enough of a guide to begin the journey.

If all else fails, you can write yourself back onto the path again.

I think.

Friday phrases: Today I saw a little worm

Fairly recently, Junior Reader and I were working through the week’s reading book sent home from school.

Now we’ve moved on a bit, it tends to be a collection of things in the book: sometimes non-fiction, sometimes longer stories.

Sometimes, a poem or two.

So I was very happy to see one I knew, and love – and that Junior Reader appreciated just fine.

I hope you do too. Cherchez les temps libres!

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Today I saw a little worm

“Today I saw a little worm

Wriggling on his belly

Perhaps he’d like to come inside

And see what’s on the telly.”

Spike Milligan

Lit Kid: pirates ahoy!

If there’s one post I ought to be able to write in my sleep, it would be about pirates, and books to do with pirates.

(After three days’ hard spring cleaning, I might just fall asleep while writing, so let’s keep it to an easy topic.)

I like it when a child has a particular, ongoing interest. It makes present buying easier, for a start. And you can have big ongoing conversations about what they are keen on, and what they’ve found out about next.

Junior Reader does pirates. BIG interest: four years and counting kind of interest. So you can guess that has an impact on what we look for in libraries, second-hand bookshops and so on.

I suspect that I could write a few posts purely about pirate books, with the number we’ve read, but I’ll try to keep it to some of the favourites for now.

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Picture books

I wouldn’t like to pick one favourite, but high up the list would have to be Captain Flinn and the Pirate Dinosaurs. Boy likes pirates AND dinosaurs: good start. Text by the adept Giles Andrae, nice cartoony pics by Russell Ayto.

(Good example of a mash-up too – something I want to write about some time – ie sticking two separate but favoured themes together in one story.)

Flinn has friends to join him on his adventure – boys and girls. His version of Narnia is the back of the school art cupboard, which allows them access to a swashbuckling ship, and the dreaded pirate dinosaurs.

Lead baddie is (of course) a T Rex, who is particularly keen on the prospect of eating Flinn and his friends – with ‘much too much tomato ketchup’.

I shall say no more for now, but if you develop a liking for Flinn, there are more adventures to be had. There’s even a stage production too now.

Tinker and Tanker (Richard Scarry)

I can’t tell you how many times we read the Tinker and Tanker pirate story in this collection. But it was A Lot.

I think I can confirm that there is a nice cross-over with the notion of a Trojan Horse, without giving too much away.

Tinker and Tanker are a rabbit and a hippo, respectively, who have lots of adventures in settings like the Wild West, with pirates, building a space ship etc.

We are generally a Richard Scarry appreciating household. This wasn’t one Dan or I had come across before, but it has a particular place in Junior Reader’s affections.

Captain Pugwash books (John Ryan)

Pirates have a particular opportunity to try out the hero / villain / anti-hero options.

But they can of course also choose coward, which is Pugwash’s default (seconded only by ascribing the success of an adventure to himself, rather than the resourceful cabin boy Tom).

Whatever you think you know about the 70s TV series, stop for a minute, and try out the books. They are great. (The link above will show you a whole range of them.)

I say this as someone who could pretty much recite Pugwash and the Sea Monster, verbatim, from my own childhood (and my brother can do similar with Pugwash and the Smugglers).

Many of the shorter ones are versions of the stories covered in the TV series, but look a bit further, and you’ll find longer stories which are done in a more conventional cartoon-style.

Junior Reader is particularly fond of The Quest of the Golden Handshake, with the wonderfully named Chief Hotta Watta Bottle. (This reliably results in fits of laugher from Junior Reader, time after time.)

Jolly Roger and the Pirates of King Abdul (Colin McNaughton)

This is an interesting one – a kind of cross-over between a picture book and a novella. It’s also available in picture book format, and as a short read chapter book.

This is great for rollicking language, with a brilliant backstory about why Roger is really not that jolly – but does become so in time.

It’s another opportunity to see the more bungling versions of pirates, doing their best to be fearsome, but soon at the mercy of someone bossier than them.

Jolly Roger made it into the category of ‘read again immediately’, which is always a good sign. But you might want to have some cough sweets beside you, if you are reading aloud and trying to give different voices to the pirates.

There’s just time to squeeze in one more to take it up to five.

Leading the chase for the best title of today’s post is Margaret Mahy’s The Great Piratical Rumbustification.

(Who could see that on a bookshop shelf and pass by? Clearly not me. I love Mahy; Junior Reader loves pirates. Done deal.)

As well as introducing children to useful words like ‘rumbustification’, this plays to the carousing side of pirates. Imagine that pirates share a common calling to a really big knees-up, every so often, and the scene is set.

Imagine also that the location chosen for the knees-up is a house with fairly strait-laced characters, and you can imagine the impact of one on t’other.

Like other Mahy books I enjoy, there is often a positive rubbing off of traits when two seemingly opposing groups mix, and wonderful vocabulary at work too.

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I’ll leave it at that for now. There are of course also pirate chapter books (largely responsible for launching Junior Reader’s chapter book habit), pirate reference books, pirate activity books, and so on.

I’m sure a bottle of rum, or a glass of grog, would be just the thing to end the post on, before I seek out my hammock. But perhaps I’ll stick the kettle on instead.

Glossing over

It’s Monday, and it’s normally Lit Kid. It’ll come, folks, it will. Just not tonight.

It’s easy to be high on children’s books, but tonight, it’s fumes from white spirits. I have been learning the slow and delicate art of gloss painting.

I doubt anyone is going to take me on as a painter, but that’s not the point. It means we’ve finished off the room we were painting recently: walls, and now woodwork.

Deep in the recesses of my brain, I had some recollection of one of those DIY diagrams which tell you in which order to paint panels on doors. I don’t know if I got it right, but I did paint it panel by panel, and managed not to miss any.

Tonight, I even painted my old bedside table, knocked at the corners and looking pretty grubby. I was able to see that, once upon a time, it used to be a pale blue. No idea at what stage it turned white, but now it is genuinely white again.

There are gloss painting aficianados. I’m starting to realise why, a little. It’s slow work, methodical. I gather that in the past, when gloss was a lot more drippy, it was even more of a skill.

The plus side, I guess, is the sheen on what you paint. You may not have the most amazing coverage of what you’re painting (and I don’t), but all of a sudden, there’s a shine to the whole thing. It’s very gratifying, particularly on larger surfaces like doors.

The greater achievement, I feel, is the removal of two key items from my DIY list: the airing cupboard door, and the bedside table.

They’ve been on there for several years, so it seems, migrating from one year’s notebook to another with no feeling of urgency.

Gloss painting isn’t urgent either. That’s quite nice. A friend showed me how to wrap the brush in a plastic bag, so you don’t have to wash it out if you are back to paint soon after. Also good.

I open the white spirits, finally at an end and ready to clean up. Quickly, I am transported back to my six-year-old self, looking on at my dad painting miniature figures. Humbrol paints (tiny pots), white spirit to clean the delicate brushes.

It doesn’t do to linger over paint thinners, it’s true, but I like the happy memories associated with that certain smell. Admiring someone else’s efforts, and now, my own.