Amy loves to draw, but like many little artists, she isn’t very good at following instructions. Wonky circles and scribbles become pandas with personality and pirate princess crocodiles. Sometimes, if the instructions are too boring, she imagines herself as something else and forgets to draw at all! No matter what anyone else says about them, Amy’s drawings make her happy.
This book perfectly captures and celebrates the free spirit of childhood. Through Amy’s imagination children see the beauty and possibility of imperfection. They will connect with the pencils that roar and crayons that scribble nothing in particular just because they can. Best of all, they will spend hours giggling over an absolutely delightful story.
My husband and I love to go fourwheeler riding. Anyone who does any kind of off-road riding knows that trails develop because they have been driven over. Someone found a way through the woods or whatever terrain and others followed the tracks because the first person proved that path was passable. Enough vehicles pass that way and the dirt packs too hard for plants to grow, leaving an obvious dirt road. Dirt turns into mud, tires plow through it and dig channels, more tires follow the same channels because obviously the first guy didn’t sink there, and the ruts get deeper and deeper.
At first it seems so much safer and easier to follow the same path that everyone did before you, but eventually something else happens. The ruts get deeper while the ground between them stays the original height. The tires going through the ruts carry vehicles, and eventually while the tires could go through the ruts the vehicle frame can’t make it over that middle hump. It’s stuck. The tires keep spinning but the vehicle doesn’t move.
The only way a stuck vehicle is going anywhere is being pulled out by another vehicle. Sometimes the process of being pulled out breaks important parts on the bottom so the vehicle doesn’t run anymore. Suddenly using those established ruts became very expensive and caused a whole lot of trouble for more than one person. The problem is usually fixable, but going the easy established way isn’t easy anymore.
Sometimes life can be like that. It’s so much easier to just follow established paths without really paying attention. It’s what everyone else is doing, so why change anything? We don’t even notice we’re in the ruts until we’ve sunk ourselves so deep we can’t go forward or backward. When we finally manage to get out of the roubles we caused, often we are so broken we still can’t go anywhere and the need to heal consumes the time we could have used to reach our goals.
Hattie loves to make pictures. While her brother and sister play cards with the maids and torment the nannies, Hattie draws. While the family mixes with society at the seashore, Hattie walks the beaches alone and paints. While her sister gets married and her brother becomes a businessman, Hattie paints.
Hattie can’t play beautiful music on the piano like Mama. She can’t sew beautiful needlework like her sister. Even her hair won’t curl properly. But she can draw barges that Papa says are seaworthy, and she can paint the wild waves.
Hattie is every child with a dream. As readers walk Hattie’s journey with her and her family, they will unconsciously learn lessons of self-awareness, hard work, and never giving up. Although set in the early twentieth century, the appeal of this story is timeless and it’s message always relevant.
What image comes to mind when you imagine a person who likes origami (the art of paper folding, in case someone doesn’t know)? I can tell you I did not envision my nine year old son’s face. I was wrong. I’m not even sure how he was exposed to the idea, but for about two weeks now he has been rapidly draining our supply of construction paper.
His usual approach to tasks is wildly haphazard. Impulsive is an understatement for his personality. This new interest in origami has shown me a side of him I have been desperately trying and failing to find. He used the search engine on the old phone our kids use as a tablet to find instructions for folding ideas he dreamed up, read them carefully, and followed each step with painstaking care and accuracy. On his own he realized that construction paper isn’t square like origami paper and carefully measured and cut to create his own squares. Our house is filling with paper dinosaurs and weapons.
As parents and teachers, often we have a tendency to pre-judge our children. Daydreamy, wild, stubborn, unfocused, the list of paper boxes we create continues. We wrap our own ideas and expectations around our children like bubble wrap in preparation to ship them off into the world we recognize, ensuring they can’t move or bounce around as if their value might go down for a few scuffs and bruises.
The truth is our children are not commodities to be packed into paper boxes and shipped in whatever direction we choose. They are beautiful, unique, and surprising souls, folding their own lives into the image they choose. Sometimes they will fold incorrectly and leave marks on the surface of their lives. Sometimes they will cut or fasten in the wrong place, leaving nicks and scrapes. Sometimes their delicate constructions will be dropped and stepped on and have to be reinflated and smoothed. Sometimes they will fashion themselves into many different forms before discovering the exact set of folds required for the structure they are meant to have. The finished product will have been wrinkled, folded, torn, stapled, taped, glued, and crushed, but without all of that, it could not be the unique masterpiece of a human soul.
The Word Worker 