Bob Shepherd, veteran author and curriculum designer, wants to buy a book for his grandson’s birthday. He wants a book that will help him prepare for Common Core testing.
He writes:
“I have been considering what to buy my grandson for his sixth birthday. He wants some Pokeman cards, but I was thinking, instead, of getting him a book.
“What do you think? Being and Nothingness, by Sartre, or Being and Time, by Heidegger?
“It’s important, of course, that he master both by Grade 4 so that he will be ready for Derrida’s Of Grammatology.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Gotta catch ’em all trumps Gotta test ’em all.
Choose Pikachu and the Pokemon cards, Bob.
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Agree…Pokeman cards will please him. My grandson is the same age and has the same yearning for these expensive toys.$16 for a deck of cards is ridiculous. Bob…. This selection of books gave me my first big guffaw today.
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Sad.
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It’s too late. He should have started reading the top 100 classics everyone should read at least once in their lifetime when his grandson turned age 2. But what list would he read from? There are so many recommended must read lists.
Here’s just one of those lists and it starts with “To Kill a Mockingbird”. Wow, “Harry Potter” and “The Lord of the Ring” is on this list too.
http://distractify.com/mark-pygas/top-books/?v=1
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Quite ! he won’t get a chance to read them at school.
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Actually Lloyd, this is a great list you linked here. Some of the wonderful books are appropriate to elementary grade levels…but 5 years old, not so much…make it Pokemon.
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“He wants a book that will help him prepare for Common Core testing.”
Test Refusal for Dummies
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TAGO!
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Great ideas for books, but I recommend waiting to expose him to the Nazi Heidegger, and for Sartre, ‘Critique of Dialectical Reason’ (2 vols.) instead of ‘Being and Nothingness.
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My grandson is 2- maybe these would be more appropriate for him so he doesn’t get left behind.
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Of course, he doesn’t have to read the WHOLE book – just excerpts from anywhere!
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I recommend close reading of Lord of the R……I can’t even type this with a straight face. How about suffering the indignity of being a child for a while. Go with Pokemon and write your own discourse on having a childhood and being crippled by not being exposed to too much fertilizer of the mind.
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On a serious note, The Inn of William Blake has great pictures and poems the inspire the imagination. My sons have loved it and still have their hardcover illustrated copies.
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“The Little House” by Virginia Lee Burton, is my favorite. I have read it to many classes over 40 years, including a sixth grade, in which I was doing a unit on classic children’s literature. It is a Caldecott winner.
Not only are the illustrations, absolutely wonderful as it presents the wheel the seasons for this one little place, it has a classic theme for six year olds (HIB ‘HOME IS BEST’) and it presents a theme that is important and reassuring for young children… that change is inevitable, but that one’s home will always be there.
The lyrical text, which is embedded in the illustrations, is pure poetry. There are no monsters, no evil creatures to conquer, but the crisis for this wonderful ‘character’ is real, and it is one that we face today a things change before our eyes. it is fun to watch that change unfold… even my more sophisticated six graders poured over the illustrations when I put the book out for them to examine.
I love this book!
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It is never too soon to have him start learning how to scam huh I mean pass the SAT test. There are several excellent books on SAT test prep – most of them published by Pearson.
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hahaha. Pearson loves your suggestion. May
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Many universities do not require SAT anymore. Even the famed University of California says SAT may help to get into impacted majors, otherwise they do not require it.
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Not a book in the traditional sense but you really can’t get started on Kafka too early these days:
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/kafkas-joke-book
Kafka’s Joke Book, McSweeney’s Internet Tendencies
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wholeheartedly agree on Kafka’s Joke Book. May
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Pick a nifty book–but Grandpa, Don’t Dare Give Any Context before reading!! Enjoy
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I LOVE the sarcasm.
But is it not tragic that he has to write something like this.
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Not just one book, please. He has to learn to compare and contrast characters and different types of text. The sooner, the better, too. Sigh.
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You guys!
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Well, he could compare The Little House to the abode of The Old Woman who lives in a Shoe, or perhaps to The House That Jack Built.
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Perfect for kids of all ages, though I dare the writers of the common core to read/understand it: Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter.
It certainly requires DEEP reading.
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How old is he & whereabouts do you live? I suggest “Anarchy for Children” (I think that’s the title. Anyway, I know they have it at Magic Tree Bookstore in Oak Park, ILL-Annoy, because that’s where I bought it!
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Couldn’t find anything called “Anarchy for Children”, but did find “The ABC’s of Anarchy”, which I promptly ordered. Thanks for the suggestion. Who knew?
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Moby Dick
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“A Whale of a Tale”
The Coleman tells a tale
Both fanciful and grim:
The Common Core’s a whale
That swallows Huck and Jim
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Whoops, I did not do me “close reading.” Six is perfect for the “Anarchy” book!
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Bob, write a book or poem, dedicate it too him. Have it bound as a keepsake.. Goodness knows you have the talent. Do that for multiple years.
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How good to hear from you again, Bob Shepherd! I have been missing your cogent and detailed critiques of CCSS-ELA.
My favorite book, in 1957, at age 6 ( &7, & 8…) was The Box-Car Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner, orig. pub. 1924. How unusual yet strangely appropriate >sarc<: its author was a first-grade teacher!
Your grandson's object of desire, the Pokemon card (also the craved item for my 3 sons in the '90's), was for me an education in parenting. I thought them gimmicky, & unhealthily attached to a line of commercial stuff that stretched scarily into computer games.
In early computer-game days we immunized our kids against Nintendo with a home-computer system set up by my techie husband & stocked w/Math-Blaster, Reading Rabbit, & such. Nonetheless we pushovers could be found any Saturday in distant towns, kids in tow, hunting down then-elusive Pokemon cards & figures [not to mention far-away flea markets featuring those first little metallic Power Rangers].
What I learned about Pokemon cards: my sons, just like both parents, were connaisseur-collectors, always a step ahead of competition. (Brought home to me when middle son at age 8 begged a ride for himself & friend to a hotel in the next town– both with chore-money stashed in pockets– for a Beanie-Baby convention!)
What I learned about books: nightly bed-time reading went my way until they began to develop their own tastes (before age 6). I tried my early faves to no avail. Had to wait for them to become engrossed in what caught their fancy. This happened, for each, through 1st-grade classrooms that were libraries-cum-fleamarkets with bins of a wide variety of books graduated from easy to hard.
What I learned about computer-games: when we finally allowed them access to non-academic [non-violent] video games– & the internet– they immediately found ways to download advance foreign copies of the latest cool games. Soon they were learning snatches of French & Japanese so as to compete with those playing them!
CCSS cannot keep out the world.
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Robert,
Read to him “Charlotte’s Web”. You can condense the text as you read to bring it a bit down more to his level, and the tale teaches so much about humanism and the complexities therein. He will take delight in the characters and not even know he is learning something wonderful and profound.
You can also show him the animation musical to frontload the process. You can read small chunks of it over a long time to prolong your quality time with him. You can have him draw pictures form the story and buy him a Chalrotte’s Web coloting book. You can extend the book buy getting him a spider, pig, rat, and boy and girl puppet to have him and you reenact the story.
Also, flood your grandson with Dr. Seuss and have him imitate the lines after you repeat them for him. Make up little songs using your own melodies and Seuss’s verbiage.
The sky is the limit . . . . . Enjoy the book with him, but more importantly, enjoy your grandson.
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To Bob Shepherd:
Your choice is the best gift providing that you read with your grand child who must understand the relationship between these two books ideas in compare and contrast to POKEMON’s ideas in adventure.
I used to read stories of all Zen Masters to my only child in order to motivate him to preserve his own INNER PEACE, by doing his best under any circumstances whether they are pleasant or hash.
Pokemon, Power Ranger, and Dinosaurs are the greatest marketing scheme on cards and figures. WHY? Dream, adventure, friendship, puppy love, and hope for the best outcome are the craving or yearning to have in all human beings young and old, wise and foolish.
I love and admire your analysis about time management in learning.
If you enjoy the ideas in your choice of these two books, then you believe in enlightenment. This means that the detachment of all REALISTICALLY emotional and material desires or needs to survive must be completely done in this dichotomous life.
Your grand son is a very lucky child to have you as his grandpa. Best wishes and Good Luck on training him to be the BEST WARRIOR for inner peace. May King
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My boys adored the original Winnie the Pooh stories by A.A. Milne. No one thought that they would be able to sit still for an entire chapter of the stories (they were three and five), but they loved them, and we would sometimes read two or three stories in a sitting. They had parts memorized, so I would stop and let them add those parts in themselves. It’s been a long time ago–they’re 17 and almost 15 now.
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That is so true because all children love Winnie the Pooh. Back2basic
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Berenstain Bears, “Too Much Nihilism”
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What’s with all the fiction suggestions? Don’t you know the Core is all about informational text? I highly recommend the Federal Tax Code.
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Good idea. In addition, I want to recommend the Agent Orange information found at the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs
http://www.publichealth.va.gov/exposures/agentorange/
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Great to hear from you Bob. We missed you. I recommend The Giving Tree, or anything by Shel Silverstein. It could probably count for 50% fiction and 50% nonfiction at the same time. And of course any Dr. Seuss. Jack Prelutsky is fun also. Nonfiction, I would go for Grossology or Guiness. You could give Opting Out For Dummies to his parents.
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I would also recommend a great book by Dr. Ravitch, titled The American Reader. You can start him on page 80, The Case For Public Schools, by Horace Mann.
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This was posted by Professor Emeritus Stephen Krashen:
This is not hard scientific data, but deserves our attention. Neil Gaiman talks about the influence of Science Fiction:
“I was in China in 2007, at the first party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one point I took a top official aside and asked him Why? SF had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed?
It’s simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.”
From: Neil Gaiman, Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-libraries-reading-daydreaming
See also for more discussion of Neil Gaiman’s quote: http://damiengwalter.com/2011/09/05/science-fiction-is-the-most-valuable-art-ever-discuss/
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