For some time we have been adding days, weeks, or months of celebration and remembrance to our national calendar, some of them amusing or frivolous, others earnest and important, others profoundly serious. Truly, as you’ll see from these stories, we do need those cultural moments to celebrate and to contemplate.
Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/Cartoonists-Day-and-Front-Street-Books.mp3 Author John Cech Air Date 5/9/2006 Cartoonist’s Day Transcript The funny line drawings that we today refer to as cartoons have been with us for probably as long as people have drawn on the walls and floors of caves or in the wet sand of beaches. The name actually […]
Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/Lola-Haskins-Mrs-Robinsons-Joyful-POetry.mp3 Author Lola Haskins Air Date 4/25/2006 The Joy of Poetry Transcript Mrs. Robinson was my sixth grade teacher. She was a tall, raw-boned woman, who called herself not Martha Robinson–in fact, I didn’t know her first name until I was long an adult–but Mrs. Barnette Robinson, in memory of […]
Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/Earth-Day-Reflections.mp3 Author Lola Haskins Air Date 4/20/2006 Earth Day Reflections Transcript Now I think all of us intellectually understand the need to set land aside for when we’re gone. But there’s a long term problem even so because, more and more, we see the out of doors as having nothing […]
This recording is part of a collection of poems called Poetry Speaks to Children.
Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/Spring-Flowers-and-Childhood.mp3 Author Kevin Shortsleeve Air Date 3/20/2006 Spring Flowers Transcript As a child I marked, with special reverence, the clockwork of spring flowers. The bulbs and blooms of spring in New England were reliable timepieces by which a child might know what clothes to wear or anticipate the end of […]
That’s the familiar theme from Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker,” dancing to the sound of the Shirim Klezmer Orchestra on a CD called The Golden Dreydl.
For Shelley Fraser Mickle, the holidays are not only a time for celebration, but also for waiting.
Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/Playing-Hooky-for-National-Cookie-Cutter-Week.mp3 Author Heather Tomasello Air Date 12/1/2005 National Cookie Cutter Week Transcript This is National Cookie Cutter Week, reminding me that the winter holiday season is fast approaching. It just doesn’t feel like the holidays until I’ve burned at least two sheets of gingerbread men and taken a “Cookie Hookie […]
Listen to the Recess! Clip https://recess.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/Geography-and-the-Imagination.mp3 Author John Cech Air Date 11/9/2005 Geography Awareness Week Transcript While it’s Geography Awareness Week, we wanted to mention some books that bring the subject of geography alive in unusual ways for young readers. Geography and culture are intertwined, and facts can be woven together by the imagination. Did […]
