Summer's past...

So here we sit firmly in the onset of summer and it seems summer is passing Wisconsin by this year. Our weather is cool, foggy and predictably drizzly these days. The sun peeps it's head out once in a while only to be pushed back by clouds and mist.

School is out now and the neighborhood is busy with playing children most of the time. I remember those last days of school and waiting for summer to begin. Nothing seems longer than summer vacation. Three full months of swimming, playing, getting into trouble...the thought of it was all too much at the time. But, as with every summer, by the time we passed the Fourth of July those long, hot days started to get monotonous and boring. More often than not I would find myself lying in the shade of a tree reading one of the many books I'd taken out at the local library. The library was a favored summer destination for me. The Children's Library, as it was known though they had a full adult book section as well, was a mere 9 blocks from my house. I'd get on my bike and go early and browse the stacks. I think the limit was 10 books back then and you got to keep them for two weeks. I'd take the full limit, throw them in the basket on my bike and head home for hours of reading. I'd finish all ten in the two weeks time and be right back there for more. I may have read every book on the shelves.

The library was cool, dark and quiet. I think it was a church at one time and it's interior still had that religious look. It smelled of books. You know that smell, the paper and ink smell that only books can have? I read with a kindle now and though I like it very much I do miss the smell of a good book.

In the fall, the library would have a book sale. They'd put out all the older books for sale, dirt cheap. But I'd wait. Because on the last day of the sale they'd give you a brown paper grocery bag and for just $2 you could fill that to the brim with books. I'd bring home a sack full. Some great ones I'd read before and other, new to me, that I couldn't wait to get into.

My mother was a reader. She instilled in me a life long love of the written word. My sisters are all readers too. And their kids read too. We pass books around like treasured gifts - sharing those we dearly loved or getting rid of those we didn't like at all. I'm not in the loop much anymore since I have a kindle but I still read. I have at least four books going at once on the kindle. I pick it up whenever I can. Put it down when life gets busy and get right back to it when life slows down.

If the weather ever start acting like it's summer again, I may just go outside and sit under the tree and read for a while.

Remembering what I liked about what I used to know...

When I was "growing up" I never really got the hang of deciding what it was I was supposed to do for a living. I never seemed to have a definite career track. More or less, I "fell" into jobs and followed whatever it was I was interested in doing at the time. For example, the route I took to become the supervisor of the case management unit in a human service agency was very interesting and not at all what I thought I would be doing. And today I realized, as I reading a book that just arrived from Amazon, I seem to have created a career using a combination of things I've learned from all of my jobs along the way and have come full circle.

After graduating from the university, I took some early childhood education courses and found that I quite liked the idea of teaching pre-kindergarten. I love kids and 3-4 years old is the best age! One of the books we used as "additional" reading was a book called The Aesthetics of Play: A Didactic Study of Play and Culture in Preschools. I remember being very impressed by this book. The book illustrates how children play and how play and the culture they are in can be a very beneficial educational tool. Children can learn any number of subjects through play. Later, when I was teaching, I found myself using these principles again and again. For example, if we were learning about dinosaurs I would create entire themes for each lesson I wanted them to learn. We became paleontologists and had a "dig" in the sandbox. Wearing Pith helmets and carefully brushing the sand from the "dinos" we'd find we would label and catalogue them just like the real deal. All the music we would use would be about dinosaurs or I would play some classical music that was BIG, and LOUD and IMPRESSIVE so we could become the dinosaurs moving about the room. These were all ideas that came to me from reading The Aesthetics of Play. Turns out that I became so good at this that my then boss asked me to teach my colleagues how to do this as well. So, as you can see, this book was pretty influential in my life.

But here's the most interesting point about the book itself. The book was written by a woman named Gunilla Lindqvist. When I first read the book I had no idea who she was nor would I know. She was living and working in Europe and over here other less progressive psychological works and child development professionals were in vogue. It wasn't until much, much later that I would find out who she was - long after I wasn't teaching anymore. This book, this title, would come up in a conversation I had about two years ago now - a conversation with Alex. Alexander Lindqvist. My Alex... who, it turns out, is Gunilla Lindqvist's son.

Pretty cool, huh?