Booking is still open for “Raising Feminist Boys” - you can find out more and book here. I’d love to have you in the group!
We’ve gotten our Spring books out and I noticed that, like many of our seasonal books, they are not very diverse. We love Elsa Beskow as much as anyone else, but I wanted to make our seasonal reading fit our family guidelines for books: that the majority of what we read features girls and non-white children as the main characters.
I am sad to say that I am struggling to find spring-themed storybooks that are Montessori-approved (not full of fantasy characters), and that feature non-white children and girls. I hope that some of you will chime in with suggestions! This is clearly a challenge for the next couple of weeks - I will write another blog post later in the spring on what I’ve been able to find, and I’m starting to look now for summer-themed diverse books.
What we have on the seasonal bookshelf at the moment:
(Growing Frogs, Errol’s Garden, It Starts With a Seed, and Nest).
Plus the standards of course: Shirley Hughes’s Spring (part of the nursery collection), The Story of the Root Children, Pelle’s New Suit, and the Little Book of Garden Birds. Birdie has a few seasonal books in his box: The My First Root Children board book (which we all adore!) and Lois Ehlert’s Planting a Rainbow.
I’ve ordered a book on the Spring equinox, plus a book about Purim and a book which talks about ways to explain God as we approach a season of a few different religious holidays celebrated by family, friends and neighbours.
We loosely follow Exploring Nature with Children’s curriculum so I’ll be looking for books to fit those themes wherever possible. We tend to take a relaxed, month-long view of the curriculum rather than follow it week by week since A is still in nursery, but we’ll be visiting our local pond at least every other week to check for signs of frogspawn, listening to the dawn chorus and the evening chorus in our back garden, and watching out for the nesting wrens and blue tits who visit our cedar tree each spring and summer. We’ll be making hot cross buns and hamantaschen, starting a very small number of seeds indoors, and getting outdoors as much as we can.
I have a couple of new seasonal music books and I’ve been using the extensive resources on Dany Rosevear’s Singing Games for Children to put together our springtime playlist and singing game collection.
Music books and a spare toy blood pressure cuff!
I can’t play all of the tunes on our spring playlist (keep an eye out for the link on instagram!) but I try to learn at least the chords to the ones which are singable. Frances England’s “Bicycle” is on repeat at the moment for obvious reasons! We are also loving the rhymes in the Wynstone Press Spring book, which has less religious content than the Winter book. One of our favourites is “The Little Plant” by K.L. Brown:
In the heart of a seed,
Buried deep, so deep,
A dear little plant
Lay fast asleep.
Wake! said the sunshine,
And creep to the light
Wake! said the voice
Of the raindrops bright.
The little plant heard
And rose up to see
What the wonderful outside
World might be.
Spring in my mind comes in two parts: early Spring, until about halfway through April, and late Spring. As we creep towards mid April I’ll be thinking about Birdie’s first birthday and what new traditions we can start to celebrate him. Somehow, incredibly, he is nearly a year old - and springtime, of course, is the perfect time for a little Bird.
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