Saturday, April 14, 2012

{Spotlight} Mo Willems

Back in the fall of 2009 I took a wonderful class called Survey of Children's Literature. It was my favourite class of my whole college career. During that class I was introduced to children's author Mo Willems and his classic book "Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!" That book turned into a whole pigeon series that concentrate on punctuation, inflection, repetition, and interactive stories where the children can be just as involved in the story reading as the person reading to them. I think it's great!

But what I like even more is this video Willems made. I found it when someone posted a link on Facebook to a new series he's been writing, the Elephant and Piggie books. I absolutely love how Willems explains his writing process, and the reason he tells kids they should learn to read.
Mo Willems is definitely a fun guy who writes fun kids books.

The Story of Stuff

Jonathan and I have been reading a blog called Mr. Money Mustache and learning so much interesting stuff as we go through the posts! I'm only about ten posts from being all caught up and last night I was reading the comments to one post called Why I am SO Not Buying the iPad 3. I enjoyed the read because I myself find no reason to own an iPad of any generation at this point in my life. (Actually I was almost convinced to get rid of my laptop and just use a Raspberry Pi for my computer needs after reading one comment, until Jonathan told me that it probably wouldn't be powerful enough to run Ubuntu, the version of Linux I use, or any other reasonably user-friendly version of Linux at this point. I'm sad about it, though, because it looked like a great alternative. I only ever use OpenOffice - for word processing and spreadsheets - and the Internet on my computer anyway, since my Adobe CS3 doesn't work on Linux. If I need to use InDesign or Photoshop, I use it on Jonathan's computer.) So in the comments of that iPad 3 article I found the following video. Jonathan and I watched it this morning, along with four others (the stories of water bottles, electronics, cosmetics, and broke) by the creator Annie Leonard. It made me mad. And sad. But mostly mad. So I thought I would share it on my blog and see what others think of it.


If it made you mad or sad, too, let me know in the comments. I don't know what we each individually can do about it all, but I personally plan to buy less stuff in the future, make sure what I buy is good quality and will last me for a LONG time, and find lots of ways to boost my happiness that don't center around buying stuff.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Caine's Arcade

On Monday my mum posted this article on her Facebook page saying, "i love original people. this is excellent." It's about a French man who traipsed across frozen lakes in France to make amazing patterns in the snow with his raquettes (snowshoes). You should definitely take a look (if you haven't seen the link already) because it's really impressive.

I, too, love original people. That's why, when I read this post from the Free-Range Kids blog yesterday, I knew I'd have to write my own blog post about this ingenuitive 9-year-old. I love it when people are creative and I love it even more when kids are.

If you've got 10 minutes free sometime, watch the video below or check out Caine's website. And then find your own fun, unique way to be creative and totally cool. If you come up with something, tell me about it because I'd love to know!