I am happy to share the card I did for Duel Masters.

It is based on the Durian Tree.

The set is released in Japan!

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“It is less painful to learn in youth
than to be ignorant in age”

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Happy Birthday, Lenny Lee!

I have completed two new video tutorials this week!

The first, How to Make a Magnetic Puppet Theater, is craft project designed for children (approx. age 8 and up) or adults to complete using basic household items.

The second is a needle felting instructional video for creating magnetic puppets to go with the aforementioned puppet theater. Coming soon: how to create more basic magnetic puppets from corks and spools.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZ5XYBoX4FI&feature=context-cha

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7H–fLfrruw&feature=plcp

I’ve been watching the presidential and vice presidential debates with interest.  Granted, I’m not an expert on many of the topics they discussed, but I do know quite a bit about science and climate change.  The focus seems to be on the cost of energy when, by far, the more important issue is what are we going to do about carbon dioxide levels that impact atmospheric temperature and the health of our oceans.  This has yet to be discussed.

Here is a link to a description of a couple of kid’s classes I’ll be running in early November.  There will be plenty of interacting and I have lots of fun activities planned.  I hope to see you there!

Speaking of classes, I took one myself.  It was fascinating stuff that I stumbled upon while doing research for one project I’m working on.  The professor and grad students used shrinky dinks (how fun!) to explain how they are doing their work.  We poured goop called PVMS (I think that stands for polyvinylmethylsiloxane) on our designs.  After shrinking, the design was raised slightly because the ink gets denser when it shrinks.   When the plastic hardened, they cut out plastic cubes.  (top photo: butterfly shrinky dink covered in hardened plastic with a square cut out of it) After drilling holes they injected dye into the tiny channels of these reverse images.  (bottom photo: reverse image glued to glass slide with dye injected into holes)   It was a really interesting way to understand the work they are doing.     

Just yesterday I was writing about The FitzOsbornes in Exhile‘s similarity to various series on Masterpiece and its use of Kathleen and Joseph Kennedy, Jr. as historical details. Well, I just saw last Sunday’s episode of Upstairs Downstairs and who should appear at 165 Eaton Place but Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., the missus, and one of the boys. I missed which one it was–he was skinny like Joe, Jr., but it could have been Jack. He didn’t have much of an impact on the story because it does look as if he was just there because, well, the Kennedys were in London in the 1930s.

The Poetry Friday Anthology was the dream child of Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong, who have compiled other great collections. In their introduction, they advocate reading poetry first and foremost for pleasure, but also point out ways that reading poetry fulfills the Common Core standards for kindergarten through grade 5. Each poem is accompanied by five discussion questions, which relate to language arts skills, personal experiences, or comparisons to other poems. I love how easy this makes it for teachers to add poetry the day, providing enough poems for five minutes on each Friday of the school year. These poems are written by dozens of well-known poets, and many are full of humor and enchanting twists, providing ways for students to bond over the language, the topics, and some original silliness. You can see samples on the Poetry Friday Blog.

I’m happy to have two poems included. Here’s one followed by a picture of an inspiration (which Peter took when we were walking a few days ago).

Good Dog! Bad Dog!

Good dog never wakes us up.

Yip! Bad dog jumps on the bed.

Good dog shakes for a biscuit.

Bad dog snitches jam and bread.

Good dog chews dog toys.

Bad dog chews the chair.

Good dog comes when called.

Bad dog doesn’t care.

Good dog snuggles by my feet.

Bad dog steals my heart.

No, that’s our good dog!

Some days we can’t tell them apart.

Copyright © 2012 Jeannine Atkins. All rights reserved.

For Poetry Friday links, please visit Irene Latham at Live Your Poem, where she’s featuring a collaborative zoo poem (I wrote a goat couplet) to celebrate her new novel. which has a zoo setting: Don’t Feed the Boy.

Tagged: @jeannineatkins ]]> http://nescbwi.wordpress.com/2012/10/19/jeannine-atkins-the-poetry-friday-anthology/feed/ 0 newenglandscbwi CC green cover exact parker http://nescbwi.wordpress.com/2012/10/19/michelle-cusolito-go-mushroom-hunting-with-your-kids/ http://nescbwi.wordpress.com/2012/10/19/michelle-cusolito-go-mushroom-hunting-with-your-kids/#comments Fri, 19 Oct 2012 13:07:26 +0000 New England SCBWI http://nescbwi.wordpress.com/?p=9803 ]]> From: Polliwog on Safari
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October 19, 2012 at 08:33AM

Photo taken in Bartlett, NH 6 Oct 2012

Many people associate autumn with aging and the approach of death. Indeed many poems have been written about being in the “autumn” of one’s life. Sure, annual plants die during the first frost. Deciduous trees lose their leaves and  look dead to some. But around here, mushroom/fungi seem to come to life out of nowhere during September and October.

Have you noticed how many are around? Last year, I took a walk and focused on locating and photographing the variety of mushrooms I saw. Yesterday, I left my camera at home but saw just as many when I was out in our woods.

So here’s a nature adventure for you and your kids this weekend- go out mushroom hunting! Maybe hand your kids a point and shoot camera and see how many they can photograph. (Use the “macro” setting to get good shots. The symbol looks like a flower on most cameras). Later, you can try to identify them using a field guide, if you choose.

CAUTION: Just remember that many mushrooms are poisonous. Only trained experts should pick and eat mushrooms. In fact, I generally encourage my kids not to touch mushrooms because I can’t identify the poisonous ones. If we do touch them, we immediately wash our hands thoroughly.

How many different kinds of mushrooms do you think you can find? Have your kids make a prediction before you go out. Then, I hope you’ll report back to us!


If you don’t live in the northeast or an area with lots of mushrooms right now, what organism can you search out this weekend? I’d love to hear what you find.

Related Posts:
Mushroom Hunting

Stress Therapy: Get Back To Nature

Typewriter correction fluid, known commercially as Liquid Paper, was invented by a divorced mother in 1951 who was trying to earn extra income. In 1979 she sold the product for over $47 million dollars. Her son, Michael Nesmith, was a member of The Monkees.

I’ve written a lot of alphabet books over the course of my career. (The book pictured above is one example of my alphabet oeuvre, which seemed timely.) Writing alphabet books is kind of an essential skill to acquire if you write for preschoolers, and especially so if you want to work, as I did, at Sesame Street. I was there for nine years.

One thing I learned from bitter experience: alphabet books are hard to write. Because you don’t want to get it wrong. You think, hah, I got this: D is for Dog. And the people down in Research shake their heads and tell you, no, the kid will say “Barkley.” How about D is for Daffodil, then? (Nope. The kid will say flower.) M is for Monster? (They massage their temples with barely-restrained patience and tell you no, the kid won’t say “M is for Monster.” The kid will say ”M is for Elmo.”) You think, hmmm. Here’s a foolproof one: C is for Coat. And Research says “Uh-uh. Jacket.” And you can’t say K is for knife for several obvious reasons, or C is for Chocolate for several other obvious reasons— or G is for Gnu or N is for Nylghau. (I’m becoming facetious, which also tends to happen when you’re writing an alphabet book and you arrive at the letter Q and realize you basically have queen or quilt as your pictureable objects. But you get my point I hope.)

And then there’s the Dreaded X. What do you picture on the X page? If you are writing a Sesame Street book, you put Cookie Monster on the page, standing behind an X-ray machine, showing his tummy with a lot of half-eaten cookies in it.

I turned to historical ABC books as a sort of snapshot of the kinds of pictureable objects that would have been familiar to kids in times past. You have to hope that the author/illustrators were trying their best to picture things familiar to kids of their era, but after you look at some of these, it does make you wonder. Have a look.

Here’s a picture alphabet from the UK national archives collection, 1885.

G is for Geranium. Hear that, Sesame Street Research? O is for Opera Glasses. And for X? X is for X-mas, silly.

We turn now to Dame Wonder’s Picture Alphabet, of anonymous authorship and unknown year of publication, but it’s certainly nineteenth century. I won’t take the time to show every letter–you can click on the link to see the whole thing–but a few entries are worth noting, like I is for Italian:J for Jane? Do you see that, Research?

Here’s U for Uncle (puhleeze). And how do they handle X in this one?X is for the number ten, or “No X” as the artist renders that numeral.

Here’s an entry from an 1850 Alphabet book.

Why, sure. M is for Monkey, drinking a glass of champagne, and N is for Nylghau.

How does this author handle the letter X? He totally wusses out.And finally, we have Little Pets Linen ABC, from the year 1886.

I’d love to show you the whole thing, but here’s G through L.

Note that G is for Gnu, Gun, and Groom. And please also note that the juggler is juggling KNIVES. My former colleagues down in Research have probably fainted dead away by this point, if they’re reading this.

And M through R.

Note that N is once again for Nylghau, and also (cringe) Negro.

And here is S through Z, which is a low quality scan but I had to show you how they dealt with X:

I know it’s hard for you to see it, but X is for Xerxes.

Here’s the cover of this book, by the way. From what I can tell, “Little Pets” was a series brand. And those kids on the cover, trying to tear apart the book? At least one is a boy. (For more about that, click here.)

Halloween ABC by Sarah Albee, illustrated by Julia Woolf, Random House, 2009