Home Is Where The Heart Is

When you start writing about a children's book with your own super cliche title and on your old computer that has no spell check there is a lot of pressure. People aren't so forgiving in blog worlds about your two finger typing. As my daughter said this AM, "Go get a class, 70% of the world learns this." (Oh for the old days when I was the smart one). Add to that an author you revere and it's daunting to get anything written. But bravely I'm shouldering on because I try to bring literature, usually kids primary literature, to this format to emphasize how without it much of what you can do in a classroom is narrowed. Of course also to talk to motivating and contextualizing what you do, so you can get children all kinds of places. It'll vastly help the writing, to be in a theme and context.

Plus I'm home today, hit with a rapid serious cold moving into my chest with a fury...oh no. Thank goodness I can curl up in my bed, at home, avoid a little my 80 plus Mom who is a bit like a terrier on steroids, and type. Which of course brings me around to this great childrens's book just read to my class.

Home, it certainly is where we go to renew and find security.

It is also the current assigned "theme" in 1st grade instruction rolling out of a rather annoying reading basal. (Home Sweet Home-theme 5 Houghton Mifflin)
I do like this theme, I just have a lot of mandating going along with it. They give a story Moving Day by Robert Kalan and Yossi Abolafia
that feels a bit of a knock off about a hermit crab looking for a new shell (it teaches opposites mainly). Not to be too hard on it, it just isn't as expert as the one they did not use.

A HOUSE FOR HERMIT CRAB
by Eric. Carle
This story however is a bit different. Carle seems to revel, and rightfully so, in taking an important idea for a child, for us, and doing some story telling with a "catch."

I like so very much what Eric Carle does here.

I bought for my class hermit crabs, three of them, Ike, Tina named so because, well, hermit crabs have personalities and this is who they are. She's a physical twin to Tina Turner.

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Their cage is the Thunderdome for the wire mesh to climb. Love's coincidentally been on my mind, can you tell? And the other Hermit is Herman. He's shy. But studly. They fight over the back left cage corner. Herman always wins. He changed shells his first night at my house before he got to school. Did you know you need a bigger cage than I got, 4 inches at least of substrate and that they moult, meaning dig down out of the borrowed shell for like a month buried in sand and literally shed their body shell and then eat it returning then to the borrowed sea shells? No one knows that going into crab care. Now you do.
I have to buy these things after pay day.
(The life of a teacher is having no money ever believe me, and not getting much but school related things when you do.)
Anyway to return to this book, hermit crabs have quite a few children's books made about them, but what I like about this book is the way Eric Carle muses really about our human homes.

This Hermit goes out in his new shell acquiring an anemone, starfish, this and that in a patterned way and a most polite way as he fixes up his home. Wandering around making it his own.
Have you ever rented successively?
I've had to at the high prices of homes here and with the demands of poor health, bills and life, keeps you down. You can never keep a home in the shape you move in, and they ding you for it going out. Right now I can't paint or finish, but I have put in my spices, I have planted flowers for the butterflies and hummingbirds. I've nicked this and hung that making it reflect who I am. Homes take on our color schemes, our values. They hold shelves of books or surf boards. The floors may be pristine or look like the bottom of the barn floor. It depends. I went in a house recently with a front room full of bikes and sports equipment very central to the activity of the people who lived there and thus very beautiful to me. Loving my friend, I loved the home.

And so this hermit crab decorates in a YEAR with the months named. January, February, March, you get the idea. The 1st graders I teach squealed with delight over this and RECOGNIZED their birth month as I read what was added to the home in that month. This is core for me/them instructionally. I realized the children did not KNOW at ALL their birthdays in October when in lessons with my husband they could not tell him their birthdays. I got embarrassed and actually told to do something by someone who could get a little polish, but it was rather odd.
Also they couldn't read months. More red face. Now they can. They are 6, but they are in great poverty, and the birthday date holding onto is different apparently. Not to say that I don't see celebration, what I didn't see was knowing the date and a concept of calendar and dating. This is something I want to share out about. Understand this is NOT consistent with kids down the road in affluence. It mattered to him and it matters to me.

A birthday is a thing unique to a child, it is theirs. It is something parents usually bind to the story of the child coming to them. Only one child knew that birth story. But we found out. Parents shrugged and had a very, very hard time at first relating this to them, to me. It was as if no one ever asked or cared. It is something that usually holds the child in relationship to home and who they are. I found that so , frankly, odd. As if you have a child and just move on. I know i'll never forget my children's moments of arrival. As long as the synapses fire.

So we taught it kind of to them, or we tried. With songs, writing, repetition. No small task. So when this book I just read contained the months, they knew which was " theirs " and more interestingly could understand that we share the months and days with others, tons of people might be born on their day too. Fascinating to me studying children and studying the impositional nature of school and always watching what I do with care.
Because clearly this was imposing my values.

So the book has each month passing with this hermit crab asking something in the tide pool to join his home per month, for a very good reason, politely, so that it improves his home life SOMEHOW (my favorite the lantern fish for light).
Then , of course, he outgrows it.

What is interesting there is my kids have to move. A lot.
In poverty, in cities, hoods, you often move. Into a garage, into a room, into a car, into a housing complex, maybe into a house, maybe with a lot of other people to afford it My son's best friend just lost his room to a new baby and now sleeps on a couch. You get by.
Sometimes in one night you move in eviction. Or right now we see lots of families being foreclosed. You see this way more where I am.
All the children in my room by age 6, all recall having to move. Knew it strongly as an idea. I moved as a child too, 5 times by nine and then as my father divorced my mom I lost the place I called home ( way hurt through this) and landed in the adult world where we have moved 14 times. A lot. For the kids this elicits things to say and writing opportunities. Of course.

We stopped and did that writing. Where have you lived? What do you miss, what do you like now. Kids, just like me, have strong feelings associated with ALL of that.
Carle is giving us a vehicle to make a connection.

Then the story moves the hermit into a new home and to ease the burden of the move, ease the mixed FEELINGS of this, he has the next occupant arrive with a joy of finding this new old shell. That's consistent with hermits. They like to move in when another moves out, by definition the shells are temporary. This was helpful as I was working on THAT IDEA for the children. The external homes are temporary but the feeling of home goes with us, the family does to. The hermit story addresses that as well. If you now we read The Little House you have done a real service to your room. You connected to the idea of history.

So home. We make it when we live inside of structures. It is a place we need to find security.It changes. I would argue with many others it's a human right, certainly necessary for a child to do well. Bound into this book on a hermit crab Eric Carle , picture-writer, has given a way to think about a year as a cycle. He has given a way to practice month names, learn vocabulary of tide pool animals. He has explored the life of a hermit crab and their habits. He has spoken to children about their own connections to months, to homes, to permanence and change. He has evoked this animal life to allow him to paint a picture in the mind of a child that change is natural, that moving is fraught with a mixture of feelings, regrets, anticipation, that life is a journey. In fact he has also alluded to the need to move on and to seek your bliss.

Pretty good thing I got the hermit crabs, they really take us a lot of places. "What's love got to do with it?" Tina bellows out. The answer is everything. It is at the heart of the home.