This was such a lovely story, I just had to share it. When a high school literature teacher found the students bored with traditional projects, and saw a room full of abandoned sewing machines, what did she do? Put the two together to make literature quilts, of course!

Ninth-grade teacher Gwen Thibadeau’s English classes are creating quilts to represent the themes and traits of the novels they read this year. So far they’ve made quilts for Fahrenheit 451, To Kill a Mockingbird, and two quilts depicting ‘heroic traits.’ Next up: Romeo and Juliet.

Just think about what this does: it makes students more involved in reading, it requires that they understand literature on a much deeper level than simply writing a research paper would, they learn to work together in teams, it builds creativity, and teaches the oft-forgotten skill of sewing. As if that weren’t enough, they even auction off the quilts for charities!

The project provides an innovative way for Thibadeau to teach students how to identify themes, character traits and symbols while taking writing across the curriculum by juxtaposing it with other subjects such as math, art and design.”The students have really taken to this project, they beg to do it. They love visually representing what they are reading,” says Thibadeau.Students say the experience has helped them better understand the books they are studying while at the same time teaching them life skills that they can use beyond high school.

You can read the entire sweet story here.

I reeeeeeally want one of those quilts.

Post from: Literally Blogging

I found the perfect solution. It was a moment of pure serendipity. Picture someone stumbling into a doorway and falling flat on their face in the entry hall. That is, in a cyber-kind-of way what happened to me. The Web site is called JiggerBug. It is to audio books, what Netflix is to films.

There are three plans. One allows you to have one audio book at a time. A second plan allows for two at a time, plus a downloadable audio book every 14 days, and another plan allows for five audio books at a time, plus two free instant downloads every 14 days. These are very reasonably priced plans – you can keep the CDs or tapes as long as you need to and it is all postage paid. And there is a two week trial – what more could you need?

Just like Netflix, they have a queue. So I have selected about a dozen books and they will come to me one after the other, as I return them. I chose the two at a time plan; my plan is to be reading one while the other is in transit.

They have classics, plays, genre fiction, popular fiction, nonfiction… you name it and they have it. And if they don’t, they’ll try to get it for you via a convenient request form.

I am thrilled. I love to knit, which is why I am usually hanging out at Hankering For Yarn, my primary blog. And there are times I want to read but I can’t do both! Movies I can at least listen to, but I have a HUGE stack of books to read. Now I can knit and read simultaneously. I have been doing the happy dance ever since I found JiggerBug.

JiggerBug

Post from: Literally Blogging

I have been writing professionally for about a decade now. In my “previous life,” I was a nurse but fortunately, I also studied journalism and have had an interest in literature, both American and European, since… well, forever. When I left nursing, I decided to just chase my own dream and stepped out on the proverbial limb and began writing for a living. There are days I can’t believe how fortunate I am and there are days I fight for every word. I have written freelance for several publications, a textbook publisher and have one book on the market about autism. I now am blogging about the things that I love the most and wish to share.

I define myself as a woman, a widow who was once a wife (and still is in some sort of spiritual sense), a mother, a daughter, and a friend. I enjoy reading, knitting, my cats, sewing, violin (I’m just a beginner though) and a myriad of other things that I never have enough time to do. I enjoy good music, ice cream, hot summer days, and snowy winter nights, and my favorite time of the year is autumn when the days are crisp and the memories are crisper.

I am looking forward to sharing with you our love for literature; I love the exchange and hearing from readers, and I hope you will comment and/or email me. I am sure this blog will evolve over time; a blog is merely a reflection of the individual writing it and people change, so it stands to reason that our blogs will change with us. I hope to inspire you, tell you about books you may not know about, share a wee bit of literary gossip, and touch your life in some way that makes for enjoyable reading.

Adelle Tilton Biography

Post from: Literally Blogging

Is there any young lady out there who never read “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret?”

It’s THE tome of girlish puberty, provided by the puberty-obsessed Judy Blume, and graced every girl’s bookshelf in the 1980s. The 1980s were a rich decade for these puberty books, pages filled with anxieties and excitements of first kisses, growing hair in weird places, and of course, getting your first period.

Those books made it sound so exciting. A life-changing experience. It would make you all grown up and experienced and boys would be suddenly infatuated with you, but they wouldn’t know why.

What happened to the genre? Today’s books just aren’t the same… ‘puberty’ is equated more with first sexual experiences than with the body changing, and that’s sad, a huge step skipped.

Today, the focus is on ignoring menstruation, on making it no big deal. As the Tampax (I think) commercials sing at us: It’s just an ordinary day…

Okay, so it’s not like a big deal in that it makes you different or unable to do anything you want to do, but what about the sacred rite of passing from girlhood? Why isn’t that celebrated anymore? When did ‘a girl’s first sexual experience’ replace the imminence of ‘a girl’s first period?’ Are first kisses still the heart-thumpers they used to be, or have we moved on to handjobs as out first romantic introduction?

It’s so sad to think of all those slumber parties today, without little girls crouched together in a circle to peer at the book Jenny brought, braces glinting in the moonlight, twirling their pigtails and giggling over Margaret’s misadventures.

Well, amazon.com does have this at least. Maybe it will bring back the puberty book…back to the beginning.

Post from: Literally Blogging

Tom and Huck, those classic icons of boyhood, still color my perception today of what childhood should be like: sunrises and fishing trips, wholesome packed lunches and adventures with schoolyard chums.

Sometimes I longed to be Becky, receiving a first kiss of such awkward sweetness. But mostly, I wanted to be Tom, and Huck. I wanted to whitewash fences and flee down the Mississippi on a makeshift raft. I wanted dangerous caves and hidden treasure and running barefoot. In short, I wanted to be an adventure novel boy.

During my tenth summer, I refused to wear anything except my red-and-white Little League baseball uniform, long hair tucked under a red cap, black cleats kicking up dust as I roamed the broken countryside, looking for buried treasure.

Whenever anyone mistook me for a boy, my heart would give a wild leap of triumph. Being a boy meant spirit and independence. Being a boy meant fun.

The ‘girl’ stories I loved then and still cherish, did not offer these adventures. Their triumphs were found not in outsmarting villains, but in pleasing society.

Even the spirited ones never ventured far from home, mixing delightful bouts of tomboy-hood with sewing patchwork squares. Even the wildest, the Jo Marches and Caddie Woodlawns, ended up corseted and hairpinned, usually on the arm of some handsome suitor.

Years later, I gained a new appreciation for both my girlness and those girl characters I spent so many happy hours with. Theirs weren’t adventures of body perhaps, but they did share adventures of mind and spirit.

The tomboys, especially, those who fought against society’s limits, even if only for a few years, were heroes in their own way.

One of my favorite paintings is a portrait of Alice Liddell, the little girl who inspired Lewis Carroll. Carroll made his storybook Alice much more subdued and feminine, with her long wavy hair and starched dress and pinafore. But in the portrait, the real Alice’s spirit blazes through, with her challenging stare and ripped clothes, a wild, unbroken, spirited tomboy.

I hope she never outgrew that.

Post from: Literally Blogging

The episode was about redheads, how society fears them and discriminates against them.

For centuries, redheads were persecuted, accused of evil doings, sometimes even killed. Things began to turn around the mid-1800’s, when literature abounded with girls of fiery locks. There were male redheads too, but it is the females who are so well remembered.

The most famous of these is, of course, Anne Shirley. Anne of Green Gables, is far more than a book: it is a lifestyle, a major tourist trap, an outright obsession for many. Even venerable Mark Twain, creator of the delightful Huck and Tom, called Anne Shirley “the sweetest creation of child life yet written.”

The good stars met in your horoscope,
Made you of spirit and fire and dew.

Those lines above, written by Robert Browning, grace the first page of one of my favorite books, Anne of Green Gables.

Anne, a young orphan with very red hair, lives in a world of imagination, and of passion for her beliefs. Much is made of Anne’s hair, by Anne herself and those around her. It is her hair that makes people notice her, and often distrust her. It is her hair that first captures the attention of the handsome Gilbert Blythe, who Anne at first hates, but who she is destined to fall in love with and marry.

Anne hates her hair, and fervently wishes for it “to darken to a handsome auburn.” It eventually does, much to the delight of Anne, and the chagrin of the reader. The more Anne’s hair darkens, the more her personality fades. As she leaves her fiery hair behind her, she also leaves behind a good chunk of ambition and spunk.

She gives up writing after marriage, dismissing her talent and imagination as a ‘silly’ hobby. By the last book in the series, she is a simpering mother of a houseful of children, playing shadow to her doctor husband, with no trace left of the little girl who stood up to the cruelty of elders and invented the Haunted Wood.

This fading of the hair and person is a symbol you find not only in literature, but in culture. As a girl grows, she is expected to become more and more repressed, more of a maiden than a heroine. She is, quite simply, not supposed to make herself ‘noticed.’

Of course, Anne Shirley is not the only character in this predicament. Literature is riddled with the broken spirits of girls passing into young ladyhood. After the age of twelve, it’s difficult for girls to find a spiritual hero in a book, or anywhere else.

Could these books, the very ones I and others love so dearly, also be a detriment to us? What exactly are they saying, and what exactly are we hearing?

What do you think?

Spirit and fire and dew.

Post from: Literally Blogging