3 posts tagged “library”

Since May is just about here, I thought I'd send one out in April.  Here things are going fairly well.  No news on any library jobs.  Homeschooling continues to progress.  We're up to Pocahontas and Jamestown and I learned for the first time that Mary Queen of Scots and Bloody Mary are two completely different people, though related.  Bloody Mary was Elizabeth I's older half-sister.  Mary Queen of Scots was a cousin, the daughter of the King of Scotland whom Elizabeth I had killed when there was possible evidence she was after England's throne.  MQOS was the mother of James I, who succeed Elizabeth to the throne.

The weather up here made history last week  --   we got the latest snow in recorded history in the Seattle area at SEATAC on April 18th and 19th.  The benefits are that it extended the tulip season, we got to play in the snow and my procrastination in setting out our veggie garden this year was rewarded.   I planted it this weekend instead and now have to find a way to battle the slugs and save the strawberries and lettuce.  There was a cool blog that mentioned that slugs get a shock when they touch copper, so rings of pennies around plants will keep them at bay.  We certainly have enough old pennies to do the job.  If the rain holds off, I'll have the kids do it this afternoon.

One more garden-y type of thing.  Ever since I watched an ER episode about 14 years ago where Carol Hathaway helps a lady save her worms from freezing I have been really interested in worm composting.  We haven't really had a good set-up for it and I honestly haven't gotten around to it.  It has a bit of the feeling of having a pet and being responsible for another living creature, so while I thought it would be cool and loved the idea of turning waste into good soil quickly, I hadn't done it.  Fast forward to this house, where there really isn't a garbage disposal  - there is one, but its location doesn't work out, and there is a big yard with a little "compost bin."   I've been taking our food scraps and peelings and having the kids dump them in there.  Imagine my delight when I turned the pile today and found my own private colony of happy little worms, composting away!  They are doing a fabulous job, and I don't have to do a thing but keep adding food scraps.  The bin has open sides, so the finished compost spills out the bottom.  I did have to remove an opportunistic raspberry bush or two that had decided the compost pile was their home, but otherwise things are going well.

For the last several years I have been using a cool "free" program to do our federal taxes called taxact  --   fortunately we've lived in states that didn't require state income taxes to be filed, so the free federal forms worked out nicely and I tended to download it in January and had filed by February and got a refund in March.  With our move and rental of our old house and owning two houses the paperwork was a little more complicated this year so just completed everything now.  Hopefully I have postage and can mail it out today.  In Austin the local IRS office was local  --  here the mailing address is out of state. 

Homeschool this week is studying the 1500's and Reformation and Tulip Mania  --   a pretty interesting economic bubble situation where people were paying the equivalent of $40,000 for one tulip bulb, and two weeks later it was only worth $1.  I also watched the Disney film "So Dear to My Heart" with the kids this week.  It was even a bit historically relevant  --   had an animated Christopher Columbus, which we studied 3 weeks ago, and a Robert the Bruce, which we studied 6 weeks ago.  And an animated lamb, which was cute.   I'd never seen a picture of Burl Ives before.  I pictured him older.

In other news there is a very vague possibility that there might be a job opening in September that might work out for me.  Uncommital enough?   I had lunch with a friend that moved from Austin up here and works at a private school.  She introduced me around and I  met the principal and took a tour with the children, and I was introduced as the "librarian" from her old school and there was much interest on the part of the principal and asked me about my degree.  There is going to be an opening for a librarian at that school.  And if I wanted to send the kids there, it would be a 30% discount.  However, I relly don't think I want to send them there. For one thing, the math program is the same, but instead of working one year ahead, they are on grade level, so it would be a repeat for the two older kids.  The kids don't study ancient history at all, just social studies.  Possibly I could send the older two to Benjamin's school. 

In any case, while I could post a strong case of being experienced, my last paid employment wast 9 years ago and I don't have a teacher's certificate and I have no idea of the salary or the job requirements  -- and getting a teaching certificate in Washington State looks like a major pain.  If working full time barely covers private school tuition I'm really not sure it would be worth it, as I know they'll learn more homeschooling, and I'd definitely see them more if they aren't in school for 6 hours every day.

Very well,   with a little nudging, here I go for my second post.  This morning I was given a lesson in giving spelling tests.  My son's school uses Spell to Read Write and Think, which is a neat system.  My daughter uses Spell to Read and Write.  They sound similar, don't they -- well they are.  My son's came first and then a student of it, namely Wanda Sanseri took that method and improved upon it.  So I've been learning the second system for the last three years and like it better -- it seems like a step backward to be using the older one.  However you can't really tell a kindergarterner that his kindergarten teacher is wrong, and in all, they are both teaching the same thing.  I just can't wait to get him full time and "fix" it so we'll both be on the same system.  Both systems rely heavily on phonograms (which are mostly all the same) and markings -- which are vaguely similar.  The one that immediately comes to mind is how they mark silent "e"s --  the first and the second both double underline the "e" -- all well and good.  The first proceeds to mark your common or garden variety "e"  -- i.e. changing can to cane with a single underline under the "a", an underline under the "n", because it is in the middle of a silent letter and the vowel it changes, and then, finally a "1" next to the e's underlines.  The poor word now looks like it is the most complicated thing to spell on earth -- and if the child forget's even one of these markings the word is marked 50% off on a spelling test.  Sanseri's method goes from the double underlined "e" and then has the child draw a "rainbow"  over the word between the vowel and the silent e -- and then, since it is the most common reason, causing a vowel to change its sound,  the child is done.  Which one would you prefer??

Oh, since I haven't managed to mention it earlier I am a "librarian"  --  I haven't worked professionally in a library since my first year out of library school, 10 years ago, but I'm keeping my hand in.  I spent the last year and a half as the librarian of my daughter's school.  It was a brand new school and she was part of the first kindergarten class, so I got to do it all --  help with aquisitions, manage the formation of "wishlists" for various grade levels, cover books, research library software, catalog, print out spine labels,  check out books to students,  do library tours, etc.  It was a wonderful collection of books for being  only 1 1/2 old -- and I spent much too much time on it, for no pay.  Since we've moved I had to turn over my "baby" to a team of ladies.  It's still going, though I think the cataloging is going to suffer a little.

I made the decision not to get quite so  utterly involved here.  Their school is more than ten years old and the "library" is not really there.  They bought some software several years back and one of the teachers got it loaded, but I don't expect it to be a working library for years yet.  I am enjoying being a library consumer, though.  We joined the local one and I have been checking out books right and left  -- mostly not for me, and the kids and I tend to do a lot of audiobooks, so we can listen together while driving to and from school and activities.  We're listening to "Escape" by Sid Fleischman -- a biography of  Harry Houdini.  Some of our favorites have been "Larklight" --by Philip Reeve because it is an English book I think the audiobook  is a must --  I would read it, and did read the sequel, but the audiobook is superior as my brain can't provide the correct accent.

Personally, I finally checked out and read the final Harry Potter book --  and I was quite pleased to find it was an extremely satisfying read. Yes, very late, I know,  I haven't had access to a library since last May, and wasn't ready to purchase.  While reading, I  did find, however, that my recollection of the details in the half-blood prince were hazy at best, as I only read it once several years back. I almost thought I'd missed one along the way.  I'm currently reading "Inkspell," which is taking much more thoughtfulness of a reader to finish.  It is rather like going from chocolate chip cookies to celery with peanut butter, both of which I love, but one of which takes more effort.

Off to do the drive-to-pick-up-my-child-at-one-of-her-activities thing.  More later!