October 24, 2008

I went to the polls, now I can review a presidential book

in homeschooling,learning ideas/activities,media,reviews

Amongst the things we went out to do on Thursday was to go to one of the area early voting places! Yep — that’s right! I already voted.

The line wasn’t too bad (we waited for about 30 minutes), we were in line with a bunch of nice people, and we were at the retirement home that my grandma lives in, so we were able to stop in for a visit. Oh, and then couple that with the fact that the kids got to learn about the election process and they were given stickers that said “I Voted!” and it was a great experience.

So, now that I can ignore political ads, I can move on to other important things, like writing a review about the new book Madam President by Lane Smith.

The folks over at Disney-Hyperion were nice enough to send me a copy to check out and share with my kids. I was pretty thrilled, because I love Lane Smith’s books. (I pretty much made it a rule that everyone at the school that I used to teach at must be familiar with The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales.)

The kids and I were anxious to sit down and read Madam President almost right after it arrived. Everyone (including me) seemed to enjoy that the main character was a girl. It’s simple things like that to help show that girls can dream about being president one day too.

This is the story of young girl who dreams about being president one day. Well…except that she is pretty much trying to live out the dream right now. She goes about her daily routine, but with an infusion of presidential duties along the way. She has to deal with photo ops, kissing babies, attending state funerals (for another little girl’s pet frog “Froggy”), negotiating a treaty between a dog and a cat, and amongst many other presidential duties.

We all enjoyed this book. It was fun and light, while providing opportunites to explain various presidential duties to the kids while we read through it. There are a lot of silly aspects to the book (like when I had to make a point of nodding my head yes or no to the page of cabinet members so that my kids would know that there really is a Secretary of State and a Secretary of the Treasury, but not really a Secretary of Fantasy or a Secretary of Pizza), so this might not have a place in a serious study on the president.

But, if you want a light hearted look on the presidency, this would be a great addition to your stack of books. (as would another great book by Lane Smith’s that was already on my book shelf, John, Paul, George & Ben.)

Thanks again to Disney-Hyperion for sharing this book with us. Of course, I may stop thanking you if my kids really think they have veto powers around here!

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