Enjoy listening to stories, singing songs and doing finger-plays in a group setting. For ages 3-5.
The Big Ideas Club is a makerspace for grade school-aged children that meets every Tuesday from 3:00-4:00 p.m. Explore low-tech and high-tech projects and gizmos to fuel your curiosity in science, technology, engineering, and math!
Get some help on your homework from our friendly and knowledgeable tutors at the Ferguson Public Library! They can help kids from kindergarten on up. No registration required!
Join us at the Ferguson Public Library on the fourth Tuesday of each month for a chance to discuss and respond to this month’s featured selection! For more information about the club and this month’s selection, please contact Ally at (314) 521-4820.
Join us at the Ferguson Public Library on the fourth Tuesday of each month for a chance to discuss and respond to this month’s featured selection! For more information about the club and this month’s selection, please contact Ally at (314) 521-4820.
Kids ages 9 and older are invited to meet on the fourth Wednesdays of the month (unless otherwise noted) after school from 3:30-4:15. Each meeting includes a game, craft, or activity, and usually includes a snack (please let us know if your child has allergies). Please join us if you have read the book or are interested in joining for future meetings.
This month’s Brentwood Bookworms selection will be The Poet Slave of Cuba by Margarita Engle:
Engle (Skywriting, for adults) achieves an impressive synergy between poetry and biography as she illuminates the tortured life of the 19th-century Cuban poet. Born a slave, Juan is kept like “a poodle, her pet/ with my curly dark hair/ and small child’s brown skin,” by his “godmother” and owner, Beatriz. She grants his birth parents manumission (for a price), while refusing to free Juan until her own death. Juan shows talent for memorization, and recites literature for Beatriz’s amusement. Despite his mother’s payment, Juan is transferred, at Beatriz’s death, to another owner, the Marquesa de Prado Ameno, who punishes Juan cruelly. There he also secretly learns to read and write—posing a threat to the Marquesa and the social order. Engle’s compelling poems shift in viewpoint among seven people, and the technique works beautifully: readers thus draw their own conclusions from Juan, his desperate parents, brutal owners, the Marquesa’s sympathetic son and the conflicted Overseer. Juan’s poems articulate both his enduring pain and dream of release (“I sit tied and gagged./ She is there, behind the curtain./ …/ She can’t hear the stories I tell myself in secret”), while recurring bird imagery signifies elusive freedom. Quall’s (The Baby on the Way ) expressionistic half-tone illustrations extend Engle’s exploration of race as a cornerstone of the social caste in Spanish colonial Cuba. (Juan and his family are dark-skinned; the women who own him use a powder of crushed eggshells and rice to lighten their complexion.) An author’s note and excerpts from Manzano’s own poetry round out this sophisticated volume. Ages 10-up. (Apr.) –Staff (Reviewed April 17, 2006) (Publishers Weekly, vol 253, issue 16, p190)
Via NoveList Plus.
