Finding Our Voices After the Election

We're getting to work. We're empowering our girls to be strong leaders. 



3 days after the election, we held an emergency book club meeting.  We've been following Hillary in our book club for a year... we first talked about it when we did our Gender Stereotypes chapter-- and we noticed the different treatment Hillary got compared to the male candidates.  We took note at how she reacted and responded to criticism and bullying.  It's been a lot to process the election results on many levels-- but specifically within what we'd been focused on in our mother-daughter book club, it's tough to reconcile how a woman who worked so hard and had so much experience lost to a man who had no experience and a poor work ethic.

We read Still I Rise by Maya Angelou, we made beaded safety pins to wear to show we are allies (above), we talked about how we feel and what we can do, we quilted a square for Hillary's quilt, we wrote to Hillary to thank her for being an inspiration and role model. 

We are girls. We are women. We are mothers. We are strong. 
We fight for what's right and for what we believe in. 
#motherdaughterbookclub #stillirise #hernextchapter#stillwithher

Our quilt square for Hillary's Thank You Quilt (All Hands In)



Still I Rise..


Letters to Hillary

The Night Gardener

The Night Gardener

So our mother daughter book club

read a book that was actually by my

suggestion that I think everybody

thoroughly enjoyed. It was called 

The Night Gardener. It was about 

two Irish siblings who have been

abandoned by their parents. They

want a job and at least a nice warm

bed to sleep in. They find their-

selves employed by a family

who lives in a spooky old

house and has a bad history.

DO NOT read this book

until you are the age of 

at least maybe older. It

depends if you like scary stories.

This is a picture of the food we brought

for our book club discussion. Some of 

the foods that are mentioned in the

book are biscuits, sausages, tea,

chocolate truffles (in Britain chocolate

is considered candy) and potatoes!

(we had potato chips.) It was delicious.

I was the discussion leader and I 

had five questions. That turned out to 

be perfect. Book club this month was awesome!

-Kaia

Turtle in Paradise

Turtle In Paradise by Kaia

Turtle in paradise was a really good book,

written by Jennifer Holm. She wrote a book

about a girl named "Turtle"(yes I know it's

a weird name). Turtle is named for her

hard shell and soft underbelly like a 

turtle's. But she doesn't let her name

make her the butt of the joke. When she has

to move to Key West she doesn't complain

or cry. I admire Turtle's courage a lot during

this book when she has to go through a lot

of different circumstances. She stays

calm and carries on as they say.

So, we had a book club.

These are pictures of the cut-up that appears in this book!

A cut-up is a whole bunch of different foods cut up together.

There's avacados,onions,papaya, just to name a few.

We did this book club in April but I just wanted to do

a review on it cause this was a really good book that

if you haven't read it already should totally read. Oh and if you

loved this book like I did there's a sequel "Full of Beans."

Vanished

This month in book club I got to lead.  I got to choose a book for everybody to read and then I asked my own questions about the book.  The book I chose was called Vanished.  It is a mystery book.

The main character in it is a girl named Neela.  The book is about a veena that goes missing (a veena is a type of instrument), and everybody is trying to find it. 

I came up with 8 questions and when we got to book club I asked them to everyone (I forgot to answer my own questions)!  I thought I was going to be really nervous but it was actually really fun to lead the group.  Usually it's the parents who lead but this time it was me so it was really fun.  I think people liked the book I picked.  I really like it, too.  

Now, it's Kaia's turn and she picked The Night Gardener.  

I am glad that instead of answering questions from the book this time, instead one of us kids gets to pick and we get to have our own made-up questions-- and choose our own book!

What makes book club so great is that I get to spend time with my friends and we get to read which I love to do.  And in every book there is a good role model for girls-- or anybody!  Book Club rocks!
-Zoe

The Cursed Veena

I was so excited to read Vanished by Sheela Chari because both my daughter and husband read it last year and they raved about it!    We had basmati rice, potato and pea samosas, potato curry, and ... potato chips which are Neela's favorite food!

I was very impressed by Neela's (the main character) perseverance and passion to find out the mystery of her missing veena. I loved her friend Matt!  What  funny guy!  I liked that he believed in her and helped her as but he could and never tried to take over, he had a lot of faith in her as a smart resourceful person.  I don't want to spoil this book for anyone who hasn't read it yet, but this book was a wonderful adventure in two different countries with so many characters interwoven, you're never totally sure who is innocent!  I hope one day Sheela Chari will write a sequel to this book.  I'd love to read a sequel where Neela is grown up and has a daughter who somehow gets the even sent to HER!
I give this book a solid 5 out of 5 cappuccinos!  (This will be my rating system on this blog.)
Happy reading!

-Emily

Ezperanza Rising

Esperanza Rising was a very depressing but sweet book about a girl whose father dies and she is forced to start a brand new life. She faces many challenges on her way to actually managing to be happy. Some things include her Mom getting sick, living on a farm, taking care of babies, making a friend and being separated from her grandmother and her home. One thing that I love about this book is that each chapter is named after a fruit. It will have the name in Spanish then in English. Example:
Uvas (grapes).
I am part of an awesome book club that does this and our new book is called Vanished.
I have not read it yet but it's on the way from amazon. So to wrap it up essentially I loved this book a lot! The author is very talented (in my opinion) and she did a great job on this book.