School Time Books

Not as good as _Me on the Map_, yet a good jumping off point to introduce concepts of time.

This book would probably be fun for a 3 or 4 year old who is learning to associate the time of day with different types of activities (e.g., breakfast at 8am). However, I bought it to help my 6 yr. old learn how to read an old fashioned analog clock (he's quite proficient at decoding the digital ones) and it doesn't do that trick well. For one, the text/story line is very simple and each time is generally 1 hour after the previous one (a few at 1/2 hr intervals), making guessing easy. Also, I didn't realize until after I bought it that each page has pictures of both digital and analog clock faces that relate to the time of day the text refers to. As a result, to use it I have to try to cover the digital clock face with my finger before he can take a peek at it.

This is a unique concept: show a flash of what is happening in various countries at different times of the day. We are taken on a journey around the world, at one hour increments to see what is happening. Some of the time frames are strange, like a 2 am snack in the pantry in England!

We see a child getting read a bedtime story in Brooklyn NY USA, partying in Puerto Rico, shopping at market in China, barbeque in Australia, handcrafting in Samoa, etc.

The pictures are cute, with lots going on in the illustrations to talk about. There isn't a real story here, I assume the point is to show various cultures and talk about the detailed illustrations. The only thing that bothers me is the snapshot of what they are doing can be so limiting, for example, having England illustrated as snacking in the middle of the night and Russia being depicted as a cat knocking an item over and waking up the inhabitants of the house. How real is that of a depiction of their society? It is a cute book but doesn't have enough of a true depiction of different countries for the parent to have a discussion with the child.

For a taste of other cultures I prefer "Children Like Me".

Blumberg is a psychologist in the city of Baltimore, Maryland helping students and working in conjunction with teachers, social workers, and other school professionals. This book is her story- both inside school and in general. As the mother of an intellectually limited child herself, one of Blumberg's focuses is on increasing the interaction and understanding between health workers and the parents of the children she works with. Additionally, Blumberg is a staunch proponent of behavior management to help students, both inside and outside the classroom.

Quote: "Prevalent here are the success stories of children whose lives I helped transform, and included to are the tales of the naysayers who said `It can't be done.'"

I chose this book because I am about to begin teaching in a city school and am looking for tips and inspiration anywhere I can find them. Unfortunately, this book had very little of either. This book, short as it was, contained too much of Blumberg's life story outside of schools, and not enough just about working with the students. Ultimately, I'm sure she has helped many students during her career, it was just a bit too self-congratulatory a work for me.

this has very realistic illustrations and is acompanied by a stuffed apollo astronautbut don't let this full you i do not recomend this for children under the age 7. this is a nice book about children intrested in space. i thought something like this would be more expensive.

This book is great for teaching second graders time. They each use a small clock to move the hands as time passes while the pigs are trying to get to the beach. I have tried this book with a second grade class and they loved it! Great way to integrate literature and mathematics.

This book talks about GETTING a potty chair, (and talks about "is it a boat? can i put my toys in it? etc), but it never talks about going potty, or what to do on the potty chair. At the very end of the book, it simply reads, "I know what to do with a potty chair... do you?"

This is a great book it is full of mystery and suspense! This book has alot of exciting parts where the hardys are in really tight or risky situations. There is lots of mystery in the book because othere racers in the cometition are trying to sabotage peoples equipment. The hardys have already been sabotaged once so they are trying to find out who is doing tis and but them. There is alot f mystery in this book and i sugest you read it!

The Worst of Times - A Story of the Great Depression by James Lincoln Collier is very sad. I think that if you have a strong stomach you would be able to read this. Amazon.com recommended the book for readers age 9 to 12. I am 9. I didn't like all the gory deaths but it was very well written. I'd give it 3 stars. Even though it was very well written, it was so sad that I couldn't really enjoy it.

Before I read this book, I thought that there weren't really poor people in America. I thought beggars were all con artists. This book really affected me. The story is told from a seventh-grade kid's point-of-view. After I read a chapter, I would have to watch a funny TV show to get the book off my mind, especially late at night so I could sleep.

The book is a good lesson about the Great Depression and Capitalism. It helped me understand about Social Security, Unions, and unemployment taxes. I think Capitalism is good but sometimes, when things start turning ugly, the government should get involved. That's what happened after the Great Depression.

The book made me appreciate what I have. It would be a good book for kids who are spoiled and have had everything that they needed. If they read this book, they will understand that poor kids really do exist.

The book spends a lot more time talking about Fleming and things going on around the time of his life and less on the specific topic of the creation and adoption of standard time - definitely not what I expected given the title.

Although Time Lord weighs in at fewer than 250 pages, this book took me a great deal of time to read in part because it constantly put me to sleep. Usually the combination of history/biography/science is favorite of mine, and finding out where our notion of time originated sounded like a fascinating topic to me. In the end, however, the story just isn't that exciting and it felt like the author was padding the book with unrelated filler material.

To be fair, Sir Sanford Fleming is an interesting and admirable character. Intelligent and hard working, he was a self-made man who emigrated from Scotland to North America to seek his fortunes. In addition to the creation of standard time, he was also largely responsible for the trans-Pacific cable and the trans-Canadian railway.

While Fleming's accomplishments are all duly noted by the author, much of the book felt like filler material. Entire chapters are spent waxing philosophical about the "nature of time" and how various notions of time affected everything from art to literature. If you happen to have done postgraduate study in art or literature, you may genuinely enjoy these distractions, but I found them to be a bit too much. Blaise spends as much time (one chapter) discussing Sherlock Holmes as he does discussing the actual Prime Meridian Conference.

Time Lord is not without its pleasures. It is truly fascinating to read how the world worked (or attempted to work) with an infinite number of local times, and how the advent of rail travel in particular created the need for time standardization. It was also interesting and, at times, amusing to study the role politics and national pride (particularly between the British and the French) played in the entire affair. Unfortunately such topics do not constitute the majority of the book, as they are what I was most looking for.

If you or the person you are shopping for enjoy this genre, you might first want to consider The Measure of All Things (which chronicles the creation of the meter) or Pendulum (on the life of Leon Foucault), both of which I found to be more enjoyable reading than Time Lord.

After he set out the initial scene and made narrative inroads, the author proceeded to regale us with his views on time and why they're important. These pseudo-science views could have all made a great short story but had no place interspersing with an actual narrative. It really screamed for a good editor to sit the poor man down and say "No."

Most of Time Lord should have been about Sir Sandford Fleming, about how he grew up, about why he left home (Scotland) and crossed the ocean to a new land (Canada), his trials and tribulations, the events of his life, great and small, that shaped this great but mostly forgotten man. Then after three or four hundred pages of this, an author can permit himself to give his personal views in a few pages.

Instead of doing this, Clark Blaise reverses the precepts and gives us 200 pages of his Views on Time and how Deep the Concept is. He gives us a mishmash of poetry and literature and badly thought out espresso philosophy. Nothing about Fleming. I would have loved a day-by-day account of the Prime Meridian conference, or of Fleming's days as chief engineer of the Canadian Pacific Railroad. No such luck.

After finishing the book, I went to the shortish wikipedia entry on Fleming and found more facts there than in Blaise's book. Until someone writes a better book, that might be the best thing to do.

Vincent Poirier, Tokyo

How could i possibly pass by such a title? As an avid fan of Doctor WHO, the original time lord, captured the eye firmly enough. But this is hardly a book of science fiction, although few novelists could adequately depict the subject. This book is the rendering of one of the 19th Century's most notable autodidacts. An almost penniless emigrant from rural Scotland, Sandford Fleming revolutionised the world's concept of time. In this fascinating, but rather disorganised, account, Blaise weaves numerous themes around Fleming's aim to make the world's time measurement coherent - and universal.

The prompt for Fleming's quest was a missed train in Ireland well into the era of the Industrial Revolution. Driven by steam, that age first used that power to raise water from coal mines. Applied to transportation of goods and people, one of steam's legacies was changing the nature of time. Factory workers now laboured to the clock, and travel speed increased dramatically. Rail travel quickly overtook animal prowess, but also revolutionised our lives. In North America, the spread of the land led to rail companies becoming the index of industry, and a force in politics and society. Each rail company kept time according to its head office. Its schedules granted it dominion over time, leading to such anomalies as the city of St Louis, which observed six different railroad times. This, in addition to the common practice of each town marking its own time by the sun's overhead passage.

Without question, Blaise' most eloquent chapter is "The Aesthetics of Time" in which he renders the influence of changing concepts on time on the arts, notably impressionism and literature. While the world was moving toward more uniform means of dealing with time, the arts recognised that the established "natural time" with its easy, regular flow - "time's arrow" - had been demolished. Readers and viewers came to accept disjointed time in stories and paintings. Blaise uses Cailllebotte's "Paris Street, Rainy Day", which was composed from a string of photographs, as the prime example. Nothing is still and the figures appear detached from "normal" concepts of time. In a similar manner, novelists could break up stories into disconnected parts, skipping about in the chronology to build new forms of narrative. Blaise' own narrative follows their pattern, forcing the reader to accept his irregular presentation. Given the quality of Blaise' insights and ability to discuss them, this book is half the size it might be.

Fleming's missed train kept him apart from most of this social upheaval. A tightly focussed engineer, his aim was standard time around the planet. He understood the desire for a "prime meridian", but wanted a mechanism that would transcend national or commercial interests. He devised a complex scheme with a time centred within the Earth. It would have obsoleted every clock and pocket watch in existence, but had the advantage of universality. Ocean shippers also favoured a standard scheme, with nearly all ships using Greenwich, England as their temporal starting point. Resistance from nations who'd already established their own primes obstructed Fleming's project, which came to a head in Washington, D.C., in 1884. A prolonged, three-week negotiation ultimately led to the standard time zones we live within today. In Blaise's view, Fleming is justifiably renowned for his contribution to this achievement. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]