Marvel-ous

I bought David his first comic book.

We went to the AMC Theater for the free summer movie on Wednesday. They showed Happy Feet. I'd heard some reviews on the movie that said it was pretty bad...that the singing/dancing got in the way of the storyline. I didn't think it was quite that bad; of course, since I didn't shell out any cash to see it, that probably helped considerably!

It was a mob scene...scores of little kids everywhere, lots of piercing little voices (mostly whining for popcorn) and some baby cries here and there. I gave our tickets to the teenaged usher and said, "Boy, you've gotta be just loving your life right now!" He gave me a surprised and haggard look, but quickly pasted a smile over the top of it. "Nah, it's not bad," he said. Yeah. Riiiiight.

So anyway. The story wasn't too bad, and on the contrary, I thought some of the music was really cool. Granted, some audiences aren't going to catch the pop cultures references through song. I get that. But I really thought the combination of the almost-Gregorian chants with Stomp-like rhythm and the hip-hop music took a lot of talent to put together. Those aren't easy styles to blend, and they did a good job with it. (Of course the kids aren't going to appreciate that, either. But I also think their brains benefit from the exposure.)

After the movie I dragged the kids into Borders. "Can we go to the kids' area?" asks David immediately. "Not today, I'm here for a particular magazine, it should be really quick." He was somewhat put out, but he saw a magazine with a photo of Darth Vader on the cover, and he plunked himself down on the floor to flip through it. Fine with me!

I could NOT find my magazine. I checked in Art. I checked in Computing. I checked several times. I got frustrated and finally admitted defeat and asked. "It's called Layers, like 'many layers of rock.' Although in this case it happens to be Layers as in 'many layers in Photoshop.'" She looked it up and she couldn't find it, either. It eventually emerged, buried behind some other titles. I LOVE this magazine. (I don't have a subscription...yet!) So I have the kids put their finds back, and a sudden thought strikes me. I once read an article about teaching kids to read; it was written by a long-time teacher who was often given the classes of the poorest-performing students. It was her job to more or less babysit them during the time they were supposed to be reading. They were in high school, and many of them were barely literate. Not content to just make sure they didn't get into trouble, she took it upon herself to really teach them how to read. Her "secret" was to make her classroom into a veritable library. Many of the students would refuse to read a book of any kind, but they didn't mind going through a comic book. She bought boxes and crates of comics from garage sales, and brought them in. She snapped up romance novels and "bodice rippers." Parents and administrators were aghast...these were NOT educational materials!

She asserted that reading fluency was gained through practice. If kids absolutely hate what they're reading, they read less. Less reading = less practice = lack of fluency. Her theory was that it didn't matter WHAT the kid read, as long as he kept using his head to decode letters into words, words into thought. Her success rate was quite high; kids that were deemed "too dumb" to learn to read went from reading comics to graphic novels to short stories to books. One girl had fabulously literate and educated parents, and she wouldn't touch a book with a 10-foot pole. The teacher handed her a particularly over-the-top romance novel and the girl came back a week later with wide eyes. "I had no idea books could be like that!" she exclaimed. It turns out that the parents were trying to get her to read Chaucer, and wouldn't let her read anything that wasn't of the same caliber! Soon after that she started absolutely consuming books by the truckload, and went on to get into college and major in...literature!

David's material for reading practice isn't Chaucer, but it also isn't terribly inspiring. How far can you get with "The dog and the rat ran." ?? The readers geared towards the beginner also aren't exactly thrilling story lines...and David is pretty reluctant to read, and even more reluctant to spell and write. If you want him to add up the price of a couple of items and sort out the coins to pay for it, he's eager to do so. If you want him to use a ruler or a scale or a thermometer to measure something, that's fine, too. He'll make you a bar graph, he LOVES to cook, and he always chooses to do History first thing. But reading? Meh. He's pretty lukewarm to almost-cold on it. So, knowing full-well that he's sort of into this Superhero thing at the moment, I wondered if there were any comic books among the magazines.

And surprise! There was Spiderman. Of course there were many more, but this one looked particularly geared towards David's type. Apparently there are so many flavors of the various superheroes...I just happened to stumble across the right line.

I read the comic to him, pointing out what the word balloons were supposed to show, what the words showing sound effects look like, how to follow the story from panel to panel. (Of course, if you put that into edu-speak, you say that you introduced the student to new literacy media, focusing on storyline continuity, character development, and plot comprehension.) He's been dragging the comic around now for a couple of days, reading it in the car when we go places. I don't think he's reading a LOT of it, but I sometimes hear him mumble things like, "Pop!" and "What?!?!" and "Bam! Bam! Bam!"

This coincides nicely with the Marvel Comics Superheroes Exhibit at the Science Center. We've been trying to get this going since it opened, and we finally got David together with his buddy down the street.

I have to admit, I really DID go over the top. I started it, I admit it. I bought the kids costumes. I figured they'd love it, and they could reuse them for Halloween. David decided to be Flash, and Lauren wanted the Supergirl costume. (She would NOT consider Wonder Woman. Don't know why.) God bless the internet...where else can you get obscure superhero costumes for little kids in May/June? Turns out that the kids down the street were Wolverine and Spiderman for Halloween last year, so they dug out those costumes and we had four, real-life Superheroes on our hands.
There was fun galore to be had...we checked out the medical advances in artificial joints with Wolverine, DNA sequencing with Professor X, magnetism and polarity with Magneto, thermal imaging with...uh...I forget. Who turns into a ball of fire? Temperature and matter with The Ice Man.

That was actually rather funny...The Ice Man exhibit has a big drawing on the wall, but with actual metal hands. They run liquid nitrogen or something through the metal, so the hands are covered in an extremely thick layer of frost. The point here is to touch the hands and see how cold they are, and to observe whether or not your body temperature is enough to melt the ice.

So David does this, and I catch sight of the poster on the wall, which has a quick rundown of how molecules move in different states of matter. "David," I said, "this exhibit has to do with matter. Do you remember the three different states of matter?" He stops. He blinks. "Uh....air? Oh, wait! I know! Air, liquid and solid!"
"Very good," I tell him. "Gas, liquid and solid. And what is ice?"
"A solid!"
"Yup. And when your hand melts it?"
"A liquid!"
Neighbor mom drops her jaw. "Ok," she says. "Now I'm really impressed!"
"Don't be," I tell her, "We happen to have just covered that in science. It's just really good timing!"

The next exhibit is DNA and sequence. To show this, they have several blocks on a string that make up a sentence. Spinning the blocks will change the letters, which obviously changes the sentence. Now neighbor mom starts in on her kid. (Uh-oh.) "What does this say? What's this word here?"
"I don't know."
"THE!" shouts David.
"Ok, now it's his turn. What is the next word?"
"I don't know."
"Yes you do. What is this word? C-C-C...."
David is jumping up and down with his hand in the air, shouting, "I know! I know!" Finally he can take no more and shouts out "CAT!" I have been pretending to be sidetracked by this stage, and step in to usher him away. "Come look at this cool camera," I tell him, steering him out. "It shows your picture in temperatures." There's something else we'll have to work on.

We counted out seconds between lightening strikes and the sound of thunder with Storm, we tried to dispel a bad guy using high decibels (think lots of kids screaming into an enclosed space to make an animated super-villain explode), we climbed a rock wall with Spiderman, we tried to break a thread (super-duper-high-tension stuff which is the closest synthetic thing we have to spider silk. It's no thicker than a jump rope and holds 3,200 pounds. If it were spider silk (same size), it would hold....ready? It would hold 37,000 pounds. Holy spinners, Batman!) Oh yeah, and we went through a semi-dark "cave" using "sonar" (you click your tongue, listening for it to bounce back off the walls/obstacles). We lifted a car with our bare hands (um...ok, and some hydraulics) with Iron Man. We also got to color pictures of super heroes with lots of crayons, and played with some toy superheroes, too.

Afterwards we went to the Planetarium, which would have run us some obscene amount of money, but since we're members, we can get those tickets FREE. (Ya-hoo!) We saw a star show (David, having just gone through the Solar System homeschool class, thought this was SO cool) and went to the "space station." He fell in love with operating the robotic arm (again!) and by that time everyone was pretty worn out.

Still, the four of them were a major hit. A few people asked us if they could take pictures. Many ventured to guess which exhibit we'd just visited. One volunteer (I remembered him from Pi Day) said he was thrilled to share a glass elevator with four Superheroes.