Best Summer Ever: Day 21

July 21
Put Your Rainy Day Plan in Place

Our expectations of summer tend to be sky-high. We want every day to be the stuff of which tourism promo videos are made -- not something on YouTube tagged "family vacation fail."

If Mother Nature rains on our parade - literally or figuratively - it's hard not to take it personally.

But into each Canadian season a little precipitation must fall. That includes summer, too.

So having some rainy day activities in mind (in case an outdoor fun day gets rained out at the last minute) is simply a summer sanity preserver.

Here are a few ideas that could very well save the day.

• Hit the library, virtually or in person.
• Plan an indoor picnic with another family.
• Visit an art gallery or museum (i.e. The Science of Spying at the Ontario Science Centre).
• Find out what else is happening in your neighborhood.
• Make your own fun. Tackle a DIY project in your backyard, basement, or at your kitchen table.

Photo Credit: Ann Douglas, 2009.

Best Summer Ever: Day 5

July 5
Add politics to the family dinner menu

Encourage your kids to become passionate and informed citizens by discussing issues that really matter to you.

Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party of Canada, discovered while researching her book Losing Confidence: Power, Politics, and the Crisis in Canadian Democracy, that young people raised in families where politics is discussed at the family dinner table are far more likely to vote than those who haven't benefited from such lively discussions with family members.

You can also extend the conversation by watching documentary films together, ensuring that your kids have access to plenty of books and magazines (either via your in-home collection or via regular trips to the library), and by participating in community events.

The opportunities to grow and develop as a family committed to a better world are endless, once you start seeking them out.

"I surveyed a lot of youth in writing my book to seek answers for the lower level of youth voting,. The results are completely unscientific, but many of the young people with whom I spoke, who are engaged, say their interest in politics started in the home over energetic family debates."
- Elizabeth May, Q & A: Canadian Democracy in Crisis? Toronto Star, April 21, 2009

Related:

DocumentaryFilms.net: A website that features detailed reviews of documentary films.

National Film Board: You can search National Film Board (NFB) films by title. There are 660 films available for viewing online. (You'll definitely recognize some of these films from your school days. Prepare yourself for a blast-from-the-past experience.)

ReelLearning.ca: The Toronto International Film Festival's film literacy and learning site for children and youth. "We believe film is a tool that can give a voice to students, bridge cultures and transform the way students see the world," the site declares. "Written literacy was the focus of twentieth-century education; media literacy will be the focus in the twenty-first!"

Magazines Canada: Get the scoop on hundreds of Canadian magazines you may want to start reading, if you're not already.

Note: Just as an aside, if you're a fan of small/literary magazines, you may want to find out about a new Heritage Canada funding policy that may be putting some low-circulation, but culturally significant Canadian publications in peril. Quill and Quire wrote about the new arts policy - and a Facebook group was formed in response - recently.

Photo Credit: Ann Douglas, 2009.

Best Summer Ever: Day 1

July 1
Happy Birthday, Canada!

Play Gordon Lightfoot's Canadian Railroad Trilogy, eat red-and-white foods (strawberries with ice cream or a cake inspired by this design), and find other fun ways to celebrate Canada's birthday.

Related:

Best Summer Ever Series (63 Days, 63 Tips): Make This Summer Really Count for Yourself and Your Family: Over the next 63 days, I will be featuring a tip a day for parents who are hoping to make this summer really count for themselves and their families.

O, Canada! 7 Sensational Ways to Bring History to Life for Your Kids: Tips on making history come alive for your kids in fun and fabulous ways.

Creative Inspiration for Moms and Little Ones

Veronika Roux-Vlachova believes that all mothers are creative by nature, but that some moms can benefit from a little behind-the-scenes support for their artistic desires.

 “Motherhood definitely inspires art but often prevents us from experiencing due to time pressure and lack of planning. Once the first step towards art is made, mothers are inspired to see and to create more, creating a wonderful loop between motherhood and art, as one really feeds off the other."

An accountant turned business-development executive and entrepreneur, Roux-Vlachova has found a novel way to combine her passions for art and motherhood - and share those passions with other mothers who are eager to introduce art to their children’s lives, through her business, Art Strollers.

“After the birth of my first son, Carl-Edmund, I wanted to introduce art-related outings for our family, so we started going to the museum and the galleries a little more,” Roux-Vlachova explains. “Art surrounds us and introduces elements of history, culture and creativity. In addition to the creation process, there is an entire analytical thinking process when reacting to a work or when researching on an art movement. They are simply great activities for both parents and children."

“Then, while pregnant with my second son, Martin-Oliver, the idea to do gallery tours for mothers came one day while browsing some art works. A date was scheduled and the idea was to see if people were interested; over 40 mothers signed up for the first tour.”

Roux-Vlachova’s most recent program - Simply Babies! - provides mothers with the opportunity to obtain professional photographs of themselves creating art with their babies.

The setting is an art gallery. Ten mothers with children all engage in various artistic activities. Babies and toddlers draw, paint, sleep, run or crawl while photographer Andrew Taylor snaps away. The result: creative in the moment images of both mother and child....Workshops are scheduled monthly and limited to 10 participants.

Roux-Vlachova connected with Taylor through her work in the stock photography world and was very impressed by his knowledge and professionalism. “We came up with the idea of having mother and child engage in an art activity. It takes away from the pressure of posing for the camera and offers some fabulous moments to capture."

Art Strollers offers a variety of other child-friendly arts and cultural outings for mothers with young children. According to Roux-Vlachova, the majority of her clients come from a field outside the arts, but they are passionate about art and want to make art a regular part of their family’s lives. The benefits of doing so can be considerable.

“Looking at art with your children offers the possibilities for fabulous dialogues which can be as simple as shapes and colours or go more in depth in history. Toddlers often recognize objects in their day to day life in paintings and it offers a wonderful window of explanation as to how these objects were used in the past.”

To share art with your child is to carry on a creative dialogue about things that might otherwise defy expression. It's a conversation that can continue throughout your lifetime. What an amazing opportunity for both you and your child..

Do you make a point of creating art with your children and otherwise incorporating art and culture into their lives? If so, what are your favorite ways of doing so?

Sundance Film Festival - Ten Free Movie Shorts from iTunes

I came across the link to this offer while I was over on Twitter. I just downloaded the ten free movie shorts myself, so the offer is for real -- and it works from Canada, too. (Note: it's only valid until 1/25/09.)

I haven't had a chance to watch the movie shorts myself yet (I wanted to act quickly, like the offer says) so I can't speak to their content or their quality. But we're talking Sundance Film Festival Movie Shorts. For free.

Bulletin Board

I thought I'd introduce a new feature to the blog so that I can post some of those items I come across that don't quite warrant an entire blog post in-and-of themselves, but that are too intriguing to keep to myself. I'm calling this new feature Bulletin Board for obvious reasons. These are the types of items you might tear out and stick on your bulletin board if you came across them in real life.

Prevention of Youth Crime Can Start During Pregnancy
Researchers Julie Brousseau and Mireille Jetté of Prevention are attempting to deal with some of the root causes of youth crime by identifying risk factors that tend to carry over from generation to generation and taking steps to try to break the cycle of inter-generational problems, starting when a mother first becomes pregnant.

Oh, Do You Know the Muffin Gran?
Here's proof positive that you can pass down your entrepreneurial vision to your kids and your grandkids. The granddaughter of one of the co-authors of the 1980's cookbook megahit Muffin Mania mega has released a revised second edition of her grandmother's cookbook.

Autism Re-Defined
Two parents from Nova Scotia have written a tell-it-like-it-is account of how their lives play out day-to-day as they cope with the joys and challenges of their sons' autism. "Autism means ... having to absorb glaring and judgmental stares if there is a meltdown at the grocery store, or the mall, or the bus, or the sidewalk. And rather than people offering a helping hand, you hear... 'Why don’t you control your kid.' 'Why’s that boy screaming mommy?' 'What a bad parent.' It means making sure they are wearing a red T-shirt with the words Autism Summer Camp on the back and the front when we do go out, to try and avoid the condemnation." - From Life on Mars by Charlene and David Croft (an excerpt from their forthcoming book Little Rain Men).

Affluenza
Just in time for holiday shopping season -- a link to this PBS documentary about the root causes of overspending and what they mean for our society and the future of the planet. The fabulous retro footage of car ads, dream kitchens, and bored/unhappy shoppers make Affluenza a must watch before you hit the malls. (More.)  If the film leaves you looking for solutions, you may want to check out the viewers' guide which was created to accompany the sequel, Escape from Affluenza.

Thinking Outside the Ice Cream Box

Last Sunday, a Peterborough animation production company invited the entire town to a free outdoor showing of PeterboroughTime (a satirical cartoon about the town and its people).

People brought their dogs and their kids (including quite a few babes in arms); planted themselves in lawn chairs or on blankets; and got ready to enjoy the show.

And what a show it was. The movie was projected on one of the exterior walls of the ice cream factory, which, conveniently, happens to be covered in white vinyl siding. There were freebies galore: free movie promos (stickers and buttons), free popcorn (donated by a local mom and pop video store), and tubs and tubs of free ice cream (donated by the same ice cream factory).

The downtown setting was perfect for a cartoon about the place. Because the ice cream factory is located across the street from the area where the crowd was seated, a steady stream of cars, trucks, cyclists, and pedestrians – and one ambulance – passed between the audience and the screen while the film was playing. From the audience's perspective, it appeared that these passersby were passing through the movie – something that only added to the realism (and the surrealism) of the flick.

The best part of the evening, for me, was witnessing such a creative use of a downtown space.

No one had their shorts in a knot about which square foot of sidewalk or asphalt was public and which was private (and whether the area was suitably zoned for use as an impromptu bring-your-own-chair-or-blanket outdoor movie event); and no one was freaking out about whether it was okay to show a movie on the exterior of a private industrial building in the downtown core on a Sunday night.

The event was allowed to unfold in a wonderfully grassroots way. It was fun, uncomplicated, and free – the result of someone's simple-but-brilliant idea ("That's not an ice cream factory: that's a box-shaped movie screen!")

We need more of this kind of creative thinking: the kind that happens when someone comes up with a great idea and is allowed to run with it, rather than being tripped up with red tape or the fear of trying anything new.

It was PeterboroughTime indeed.

Ghost Stories

Despite the perfect July weather -- weather that should, more logically, be inspiring a blog post about the magic of the all-too-short Canadian summer -- I'm thinking about school.

It's not my life-long obsession with school supplies that's triggered this post, by the way. It's the ghosts of school years past, present, and future.

Let's start with the ghost of school years future, because that's the easy one. (Okay, it's easy if I focus on the immediate future and zero in on my family only.)

I have two kids starting college this fall. I'm busy helping them to fill out the endless stream of college-related paperwork that keeps showing up on the kitchen counter. They're happy, excited, and anxious. I'm mostly happy, excited, and anxious. I can't wait until we can channel the anxiety in a more productive manner -- by shopping for school supplies.

Then there's the ghost of school years present.

I just finished enrolling my ten-year-old son in a fabulous alternative school in our neighbourhood: one that specializes in helping students who have autism spectrum disorders and other conditions that affect learning to get past the issues that block learning so that they can thrive. (That's a horrible sentence, but I felt like I needed to spit it out in one breath. Please forgive me.) Anyway, my son has met a bunch of his future classmates (thanks to a birthday party invite from one of the families) and he's eager to give school another chance. I am, too.

I just wish the services that we're purchasing for him (and not easily, I might add) were available to every child who needs them. Ability to pay should not affect access to services. Isn't that a long-held Canadian value? If it is, could someone please explain to me when, as a society we decided that a user-pay system was dreadfully un-Canadian in health care but perfectly acceptable when it comes to education?

Just to be clear: This user is paying for access to appropriate educational services for her child, out of necessity, not choice.

Finally, there's the ghost of school years past.

We just learned some valuable information about our college-bound son this past week -- information that will hopefully allow him to make the most of his college experience. A psycho-educational assessment revealed that he is both gifted and that he has a functional learning disability in certain areas. The assessment included a summary of comments made on his report cards from kindergarten through Grade 12. As you move from paragraph to paragraph, you can see his enthusiasm for school fizzle out and behavioral problems emerge.

I remember a conversation I had with a school official, back when my son was in Grade 8, right after another one of my sons (who was then in Grade 6) had just been diagnosed with a learning disability. I asked the school official if my oldest son should also be assessed. The school official told me that there were only so many assessments allocated to each school each year; and because my son wouldn't be one of their students next year, they didn't want to use one of their assessments on him. Besides, he wasn't a priority case. His problems were behavioral -- not the result of a learning disability or anything like that.

I'm still mulling over that conversation many years later, thinking about opportunities lost and the kids who ultimately pay the price for lean-and-mean educational budgets. Quotas and kids don't make a good mix. When a kid needs access to services, that kid needs access immediately. It's a concept that the power-brokers in our society seem to grasp brilliantly when they're allocating budget dollars to the zero to age six developmental bracket, but it's a concept that gets erased from the blackboard the moment kids move out of that favored funding bracket and head into the early school years.

Again, I'm left wondering why.

* * *

Postscript:

I watched the most inspiring documentary ever (well, the most inspiring documentary I've watched recently) last weekend. It's about two teachers who decide to re-introduce a theatre program to a sports-focused inner-city school, with amazing results. If you want to feel good about learning and life, I can't recommend OT: Our Town highly enough.