Come Follow Along With Me!

My desk at the moment...click for a close up of the chaos

Hi Everyone!

So I've decided I'm going to try and start a (hopefully) weekly series of posts connected to the children's lit classes I'm taking this fall.  I know some of you have told me you really want to hear about my classes and experience them vicariously through me, I'm not sure if my posts will live up to those expectations but I think it will be a great way to engage with the works I'm studying and hear from all of you! And it would also be a fun way for me to keep track of what I'm reading, my thoughts on it etc.

So these are the series (I'm calling them that) that I'll be hoping to do weekly:


A Fairy Tale-a-Day Quest : So my professor has asked us to try and read a fairy tale a day and see how that influences us, our ways of thinking, seeing the variety of tales, and possibly it's influence on our dreams...So, in these posts, which ideally I would love to do one a day, but might end up doing it just Tuesdays and Thursdays on class meeting days, I will be posting the fairy tale I'm reading that day, which edition I'm reading, and various images/illustrations I find along with some thoughts on the tale.  I will also be making Pinterest boards for each fairy tale and I'll have as MANY images as I can find pinned up there (I've already made one for Thumbelina which you can check out here). 

Snow White's mother, illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman

Monday in the Universe of Adolescence: Each week in my Literature for Adolescents class, we discuss a book.  Thus I'm hoping as much as possible to post my thoughts on the book of the week here.  For example today we discussed Catcher in the Rye, so following this post I'll post my thoughts on it :)  So I guess these will act sort of like book reviews/critical analysis/general discussion type posts.

I haven't read this, but the film's coming out, and I read an
intriguing review of it today so I decided to pick this image :)

Tuesday/Thursday in the World of Children's Literature: These three sets of posts, so the one on YA fiction above, along with this one on children's literature, and fairy tales below will be structured similarly, in that they will be posts on the text we're discussing that day along with ideas that I personally had while reading along with what came up in the lecture and discussion. So again a mix of book review, critical analysis, and general discussion.

This image and the one below are from a really old children's lit textbook
and they have these great illustrations from Trina Schart Hyman

Tuesday/Thursday in the Land of Fairy Tales: This will follow the pattern set up above, but will pertain to the realm of fairy tales!  Some weeks I foresee this post possibly not coming up if I cover what I need to in my Fairy Tale-a-Day Quest post.  But I am hoping to be consistent or at least endeavor to keep up with these posts because I think they will be fun and also help me flesh out ideas that we are tackling in class.

Before I end, I want to say that I hope that all of you will enjoy these posts and more so that you will engage in the discussions that I'm having in class and bringing to the arena of Alice in Baker Street and that all of you will add to it and take it off in new directions :)  

Oh, also some of these posts will consist of my notes and such from class or from reading so they may not be completely fleshed out, but I hope that's ok and maybe it will even add to the feeling of being in a classroom haha