One of my favorite tasks when I taught at the Jewish day school was grading and writing report cards. It has to do with my judgmental nature, I think. Of course I delighted in making this report of our first official quarter homeschooling. Dates: August 2011 – December 2011 Achievements: Reading fluency Writing complete sentences Spelling creatively but understandably Basic addition fluency Counting coins Butterfly life cycle Plant bulb life cycle Basic anatomy and dissection [...]

Two years ago at the Wild Goose Creative New Years celebration, Allison from Igloo Letterpress taught me an imminently useful skill: how to fold a four page booklet from a single piece of paper. Since then, I have transformed paper into books for Lil to make into dinner menus, sticker stories, and hand drawn comics. At one point she even labeled the bindings with letters like at the library to organize her homemade books. Now [...]

This fall, Lillian happened upon the book Sun Bread by Elisa Kleven at one of our wonderful library branches.  The story tells of a town of animals depressed by the winter cold.  The baker, a long eared dog, creates a loaf of bright yellow rich and warm sun bread. The animals eat it to brighten their days and invite the Sun to share some too. With no direct mention of Winter Solstice, clearly this story [...]

Voting is as critical as planning the garden to us at Hounds Central – both activities set the stage for life in the coming years.  On Tuesday, we want you to vote, to express your voice in America’s democracy, no matter your political leanings. If you are in Columbus like us, your ballot is lengthy with candidates and we would not dare use this platform to advocate for electing any one particular person. But we [...]

Today’s edition of Book Hounds is a political-video-chicken one. Why political?  Well, I would have precious few books to read or recommend if not for the Columbus Metro Library.  Starting today, Columbus area voters can go to the polls and cast a ballot for Issue 4, the levy to Keep Columbus Metro Library Strong. This levy, the first levy brought to the public in ten years and first increase in twenty four years, will restore [...]

Publishers recently sent me a copy of Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World.  Written by Mark Frauenfelder, founder of Make magazine, this quick read is an overview of one family’s experience with making things by hand.  Organized by the various objects they attempt to create, each chapter is both a tutorial and reflection.  The themes are simple: waste not, want not; creativity and out-of-the-box thinking is fun; mistakes are how we [...]

Every night after cooking, gardening, parenting and teaching, I settle in to bed to read.  Columbus is the home of the number one library in the nation by many measures; most of the books on my nightstand come from their nonfiction section.  Below are my thoughts on three recent reads: Matthew Amster-Burton’s Hungry Monkey: A Food-Loving Father’s Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater is part journal, part editorial. He honestly and humorously details dining out, [...]