NEA’s Read Across America is an annual reading motivation and awareness program that calls for every child in every community to celebrate reading on March 2, the birthday of beloved children’s author Dr. Seuss.

I spent a few minutes this morning celebrating with my youngest daughter, Ayn, and her classmates at her preschool by reading my favourite Dr. Suess book, Fox in Socks.

I always enjoy reading that to kids. The look on their faces when I read the line about the book being dangerous is always priceless. The school also hooked me up with a great hat like the Cat from Cat in the Hat. I’ve decided to wear it all day today and remind people that reading to children is one of the best activities we can engage in as adults if we want to create lifelong successful readers.

You can read more about the NEA’s program, Read Across America here: http://www.nea.org/readacross

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Several years ago, while working as the Gentle Leader Product Manager at Premier Pet Products, I had the good fortune of visiting San Francisco to tour the then new and state of the art San Francisco SPCA. At the time, there was no other facility like it in the world and to top things off, Jean Donaldson, author of The Culture Clash and Dogs are from Neptune, was there putting together her widely respected Academy for Dog Trainers.

After touring the facility, I hit a few stores, looking for dog-related gifts to take home. I ended up in a little shop called The Loft where I found some note cards by an artist named R. Nichols.

His work was simple, playful, and clean. I loved his work so much that I bought every box of cards they had.

Almost 10 years later, I found myself down to the last card and ran a few searches online to find more. It seems Mr. Nichols has been busy. He’s expanded his line while keeping the same playful feeling in his work.

I ordered a few boxes of cards and shared my story of how I’d originally found out about his work.

My package of cards arrived a few days later and upon opening the box, I was surprised to find a nice note inside, along with a copy of French Women For All Seasons, A Calendar of Secrets, Recipes, & Pleasure, based on the bestselling books by Mireille Guiliano and illustrated by R. Nichols.

The spiral bound calendar is of high-quality paper, beautifully illustrated, and full of wonderful advice, insight, and recipes.

And if you want it, it’s yours.

Simply let me know you’re interested in the comments below and I’ll make arrangements to get it to you either in person or by mail.

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I finished reading Agile Software Development with SCRUM yesterday. The book provides an excellent introduction to the scrum methodology, highlighting its ease of use for newcomers and clearly defining the methodology’s benefits for anyone wanting to introduce scrum to an organization.

Several well written case studies are published throughout the book to which any software or web application developer can relate.

At work, we’re thankfully moving away from our old development methods (a non-codified, often painful, waterfall approach) to scrum. Three teams were recently set up and we’re already seeing positive results—in terms of productivity, creativity in problem solving, and morale.

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Jeff De Cagna posted a fantastic song about innovation on his Principled Innovation blog a couple of days ago.

The song, by Stanford student Gus Bitdinger, speaks for itself and is worth a listen but I’m posting this because Jeff references one of my favourite books, Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace, by Gordon MacKenzie.

I first heard about Gordon’s work when my former wife, Karen, was working for John Pastore at Capital One - back when COF was an innovative powerhouse and Rich Ronston wasn’t so much of a wanker.

If you haven’t read Gordon’s little masterpiece, I suggest you check it out. If you have read it and it’s collecting dust on your shelf, please find someone who would enjoy the book and pass it on.

The world needs more innovative thinkers.

(Thanks to Fouroboros for pointing me to the Principled Innovation blog)

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Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier.

Anitra picked up a copy of Howard Rheingold’s The Virtual Community as a Chrsitmas present for me.

Although the book is more of a historical document at this point, it still offers great perspectives on building online communities.

While I was only a member of the WELL for a short time (and not a very active one at that), reading the book is bringing back a lot of great memories related to my Source account (and later Compuserve) back in the late 80’s when the Internet was first gaining mass appeal.

If you’re at all interested in the growing popularity of online communities, their history and perhaps their unrealized future, I highly recommend reading Howard’s book.

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Gratuitous plug for Joe’s new book.

In Joe’s words:

As some of you may know, and some may not (surprise!), I and Matt Dooley have been working on publishing a children’s book for the past couple years called ‘Watching the Hokies with Daddy’, with the not so long-term goal of having many other versions using the theme of other colleges and universities throughout the nation, such as ‘Watching the Seminoles with Daddy’, or ‘Watching the Volunteers with Daddy’, etc.
I’m proud to announce that the first book, ‘Watching the Hokies with Daddy’ was published just before Thanksgiving and is currently in stores throughout Richmond, Roanoke and Blacksburg.  Yay!  Sorry I didn’t let you know earlier, but the web site was an abomination (and still isn’t that great) and what little free time Matt and I have had recently has been spent working on a number of issues.  But thankfully things seem to be balancing themselves now and I wanted everyone to know that it isn’t a myth anymore, that the book is actually out there now.  More information at http://www.titan-media.com
If you know any parents with young Hokie fans, or small children that need to be converted, they make excellent xmas gifts.  hint, hint.  And you might be able to talk the author into signing them too.

Congrats Joe! I know you and Matt have both put a tremendous amout of work into the book. I wish you both great success.

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Matthew Homann’s [non]billablehour posted some information from Eide Neurolearning Blog about the benefits of family dinner:

According to a Harvard study, family dinners were more important than play, story time, or other family events for building vocabulary. And “families that engaged in extended discourse at the dinner table, like story telling and explanations, rather than one-phrase comments, like ‘eat your vegetables,’ had children with better language skills, said Dr. Catherine Snow, a professor of education at Harvard and the researcher of the study. Parents should be encouraged to use adult-level vocabulary and encourage back-and-forth conversation with their kids. It also helps social skills. Today, 65% of families with kids under the age of 6 have dinner together 5 or so nights per week, but that drops to 50% if a family has kids age 12 to 17.

How true. We routinely have discussions at our dinner table and include our daughter in them at all times. Recently she and I had watched both The Incredibles and the first 3 Star Wars movies together. Some people would argue that those films may be a little “old” for her - but they didn’t hear our dinner conversation either…

She held a solid, hour-long conversation with me about the use of good and evil in film and how having both creates an essential tension in the plot line to carry the audience through the story.

My daughter is 4 years old…and she understands concepts like this because we talk, talk, talk (and laugh) at dinner. Her vocabulary has grown at an incredible rate over the last few months and more and more, she’ll ask “what does ... mean?” when she isn’t sure about a word. I’ve also noticed that she actively works her new words into her sentences. It’s as if she’s captured the word and now she’s trying to own it.

Funny…all this reminds me of a story my parents used to tell about my sister and I. She and I were at the dinner table one night and I babbled something that she didn’t understand. She told me to “PLEASE, enunciate your words!”. She was 4. I was 3.

I have fond memories about our dinner table. Aside from when the family was on vacation, it is one of a few spaces where we all came together to enjoy one another’s company, my mother’s wonderful cooking and stories of the day. I want my daughter to have the same…

So when you sit down tonight with your family - or complete strangers…remember to eat, drink and talk. There is no greater pleasure in life.

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