The Good Mother: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Literacy Advice to Mothers in the 20th Century

This is a doctoral thesis passed along to me by a friend. She quoted it in a meeting we were in saying "sometimes the things we choose to teach say more about us than they do about those we are trying to teach" or something along those lines. It stuck with me. This paper is a compelling discussion about how parents and especially women get trapped by the idea, fed to us through culture, and rooted in patriarchy, of the unreachable goal of the"good mother". Read on to get the gist. http://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/?year=2014&country=27

Book mobiles, WOW bus and Reading Rockets

When I was a child Vancouver had a Book Bus. It was wonderful. I came in the evening once a week or so and allowed me and my brothers to be proactive about literacy. The librarian paid attention to our interests and would bring us books that suited them.

I have been doing a little research about the existence of such busses and am relieved to see that in some places they still exist!

Places like Peace River North A.K.A. District 60, which also has a great website listing all the different projects they are offering. and District 59 has one too, as does district 69. Coquitlam has a beautiful one. All this makes me wonder if Haida Gwaii would have a WOW bus of it's own. Why not?

Not only that, now I am seeing pictures of really fashionable busses! Cool ones like the award winning sweedish beauty pictured above. At the very top is an image of a revamped airstream called "projet mobilivre" from montreal, which specializes in zines, I have actually been on it once when it visited Vancouver. I was thinking cutesy 0-5 kid friendly, but hey, cool buses could work too. Depends on the budget/librarian I suppose. The point is to get books into the hands of kids, and to get kids into books. Though creating an appealing environment seems like a no-brainer. This space can also offer puppet shows, reading circles, and perhaps just a safe place for kids in rural areas to come and hang out with books? Could be good.

Book Bus

I also want to start a book bus. They have one in coquitlam...More on this later. Here's one that started in Tampa Bay Florida, Bess the Book Bus.

Outdoor Literacy

The other day when we were playing outside Je and Ca were jumping on the new cobblestones and singing the alphabet. I thought of something I had read in "Teaching Green" about numeracy and how it can be a cool idea to number the trees in your schoolyard and use them for games and I proposed to the children that we could write the letters of the alphabet on the stones thinking this may help the children gain a more firm grasp of some of the letters, like that LMNOP is not one letter for example. They liked this idea and so we drew it out in chalk. There were only 24 cobblestones in the line so I pried two from the frozen ground in another part of the yard. I noticed other children like Ka and Fr were now joining in walking and hopping along and naming the letters so I decided this might be a good permanent thing to have outside to help encourage literacy in the children. After checking with Ms. Pamela I found some bright yellow outdoor acrylic in the shed and set to work with Na Ay and Au helping me to keep children from stepping on the stones until they were dry and helping me think of what letter was next and as I painted we thought of different words that started with that letter and sang our phonics song (se the JJJ Justin post:). As I was painting Ms. Gina came by and said "Looks like you are having a sesame street moment!" I thought this was quite flattering as despite my reservations about having kids watch TV, especially before age 2, I feel Sesame street and their amazing puppets have done amazing things to encourage literacy and numeracy in preschool aged children over the past 30 years. The first tiny snowflakes of the season began to fall as I painted XYZ I hope the paint will dry in time so they can last into 2010!

-Ms. Alicia