The Belly Button of the Moon and Other Summer Poems

Summer came Saturday -

these poems celebrate this special season.

The colorful illustrations splash and spill over
the pages.
Here's a lesson plan that makes use of this
and other seasonal poetry books by Alarcon

My boy's thoughts (prompted and unprompted)

The Belly Button of the Moon

The book is about Spanish and how to translate it for poems.

There is a cow named Mariposa. Mariposa means butterfly in

Spanish. A cow named “Butterfly” is strange. There are some

things of her that look like a butterfly. Is it funny that there was a waterwheel poem on a waterwheel?

Any person who likes to go to Spanish class would like this book.

Education Friday - Proximity and Variety

Happy Summer!

School's out and the kids are home.
Which means brief entries or none
at all.
Two thoughts for summer reading -
Proximity
With my both my boys, I've
had some luck with product placement.
I put a book (instructive or appealing,
or with luck, both) next to them or
in a place where they are going to 
be soon. In some cases, in the car,
I reach it back to them.
Here's the hard part - I say nothing.
They either read it or they don't.
The decision is theirs.
This sometimes works.
When I was a child, my Father insistence that
I read Kim kept me away from it from months.
When he shut up about it, I sought it out and
read it and decided I loved Rudyard Kipling 
books.
Variety
My oldest son (the one with autism)
has to read The Hound of the Baskervilles
this Summer. He has challenges with
his working memory and
comprehension. He can read
a book aloud and be unable to tell you
anything but the number of chapters 
and what page each started on. So 
I'm trying the multi-channel approach.
Before we started, we watched book
trailers for it on the computer.
We're listening to it, he's reading it,
and he's reading the graphic novel.
He's also working on it in Extended 
School Year. I'll let you know how 
he does with it.
A typically developing child would probably
be heartily sick of the book by now.
But he seems no more reluctant than
usual to read it.