Celebrating Ed Emberley

Ed Emberley was born on October 19,1931. In honor of his birthday, this month's project is a thumbprint palm leaf book. I'm a big fan of Ed Emberley's picture books and especially appreciate everything he has done to bring art to all of us through his drawing and thumbprint books. Happy birthday Ed and thank you!

I made my palm leaf book from a cereal box panel. Younger children may have difficulty cutting and punching something that thick. Two solutions: Glue together two sheets of copy paper with writing on one side with the written sides facing each other or prepare the pages ahead. I used a piece of netted plastic from a tomato bag for the string. The beads at the end are cut out thumbprints on cereal box.

A couple of suggestions about the stamp pad: washable is a good idea (not what I used as my brown thumb shows). If you are using multiple colors with a group, you might want to make small groups and assign each child a color to print. Otherwise there's wiping to do in between each color.

Directions

in Spanish

A closer look at My Thumbprint Book of Animals

Lighthouse Libraries

Lighthouses were often time located in remote areas and as such had no access to city services such as libraries, opera houses, entertainment, etc. that most people enjoyed who lived in a town or city. As light keeping was a lonely profession in most cases supplies were brought to them by lighthouse tender ships. One of the items the tender supplied was a library box on each visit as pictured to the left. Library boxes were filled with books and switched from station to station to supply different reading materials to the families.

Read more about the libraries here.

And for a great adventure story and taste of life in a lighthouse in the 19th century: