Dolly Parton - The Book Lady

Country music legend Dolly Parton grew up as the fourth of 12 children on a rundown farm in Sevier County, Tennessee, near the Smoky Mountain National Park. Poor in material possessions and isolated from the outside world, her family only went to the nearest town a few times a year. But because young Dolly loved to read, she dreamed big dreams. "In my books," she recalls, "I would read about kings and queens with their velvet clothes and big diamond rings. That's how I knew there was a world outside the Smoky Mountains. And because I felt comfortable in those stories, I knew it would be OK for me to go out into that world. My books kept me from being afraid."

The rest is history, of course, and even with her enormously successful career as a singer, musician, song-writer and actress, Dolly Parton has never forgotten her humble upbringing in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. In 1988, she founded the Dollywood Foundation to develop and administer programs for children in Sevier County, Tennessee. These programs are designed to reduce the school dropout rate, support adult literacy and after-school tutoring, and provide emergency support for children's school clothes and supplies. The mission of the foundation is to: "Dream More ... Learn More... Care More ... Be More..."

Since 1995, the foundation's main focus has been Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, a unique educational initiative to promote literacy and improve the lives of children through books. From birth to age 5, each preschool child receives, absolutely free, a personal hardcover book in the mail from Dolly Parton. By age 5, a child has acquired a 60-volume library of age-appropriate books, plus a special bookcase to store the books in. The first book in the series is The Little Engine That Could ["I think I can, I think I can…"], and the last book is Look Out Kindergarten: Here I Come, as the child prepares to start kindergarten. All children in the community, regardless of income, can participate. Over 200,000 books have been given to the children of Sevier County as "a gift of encouragement" from Dolly Parton.

The Imagination Library program was so successful in Sevier County, Tennessee, that it is now available to any community with a local sponsor willing to pay just $27 a child per year. There are more than 175 communities in 25 states, supported by private funding, replicating the Imagination Library program, with even more in the works.

Now known as The Book Lady, Dolly laughs when asked if her book program had been a lifelong dream. "No, I never dreamed I'd be involved in an educational program. I hated school!"

To learn more about the Imagination Library, contact:
The Dollywood Foundation, 1020 Dollywood Lane, Pigeon Forge, TN 37863
http://www.dollywood.com/Foundation.htm

Who can resist finding objects hidden in a picture?

In this activity, all the hidden items contain paper! Stumped? Answers are contained in the "key" in the PDF version.

(Click the image to enlarge. You can print out the PDF version to make copies for your class).

Tell your class about Paper U's online interactive hidden pictures activity located on the Paper U website! Click the Fun and Games icon, and then select Hidden Pictures. Have fun!

Have You Ever Played a Game with a Tree?
You can, while visiting Forests For Our Future at Innoventions at Epcot®!

Forests For Our Future, located at Innoventions at Epcot® at the Walt Disney World ® Resort, is a unique forest experience that combines discovery, entertainment, and lots of family fun. Since opening in October 1999, the ever-changing Innoventions has allowed guests to discover the technological wonders that are changing our world, through hands-on experiences that activate the imagination.

Innoventions is where you'll find TAPPI's Forests For Our Future, where millions of guests from around the world are discovering the science and technology of forest products while enjoying a feel-good experience at one of the world's greatest theme parks. Once guests step into the fascinating world of Forests For Our Future, they come to understand how the forest products industry is protecting the future of our world's forests while providing the products we all need.

At Forests For Our Future, guests can play a fast-paced game of TAPPI's Total Tree-via, take a virtual tour of a managed forest, see and touch the technology used by real foresters, and can even make their very own piece of paper.

The Forests For Our Future web site at www.forestsforourfuture.org is a great way to become acquainted with the exhibit. Visitors can take a virtual tour of Forests For Our Future while listening to their choice of soothing nature sounds. Site visitors can also play some fun interactive games, such as Forest Memory, Animal Scramble, and Timberland Search, each designed to reinforce the Forests For Our Future message.

www.forestsforourfuture.org

The first schools in the American colonies taught reading, writing, and the keeping of accounts. Later on, more advanced classes in classical languages, history, and literatures were added. In 1647, the Massachusetts Bay Colony enacted a law, known as "ye olde deluder Satan" Act, that required every town having more than 50 families to establish a grammar school to prepare students for college. [source: Outline of American History, Chapter 2: The Colonial Period at http://usinfo.state.gov/usa/infousa/facts/history/ch2.htm]

The world's largest pencil is located in front of the castle of the Faber-Castell family near Nuremberg, Germany. It is triangular in shape, 12 meters in length, weighs approximately 600 kg, and is made of Weymouth pine.

Photo courtesy of Sandra Suppa, FABER-CASTELL GmbH & Co., German, from
The Pencil Pages

The oldest known pencil in existence is a carpenter's pencil found in the roof of a 17th-century German house, and is part of the Faber-Castell private collection.

Photo courtesy of Sandra Suppa, FABER-CASTELL GmbH & Co., Germany, from The Pencil Pages

The first box of Crayola crayons was sold in 1903 for a nickel and included the same colors available in the eight-count box today: red, blue, yellow, green, violet, orange, black and brown.

Binney & Smith, maker of Crayola crayons, produces nearly 3 billion crayons each year, an average of twelve million daily, enough to circle the globe 6 times.

The average child in the United States will wear down 730 crayons by his 10th birthday, or 11.4 boxes of 64's.

Question: Why do we use 8 1/2 x 11 inch paper as our standard letter size?

Answer: Standardized paper sizes actually came about as a more-or-less hit-or-miss situation, rather than a planned event. Here's the whole story of paper sizes:

The quest for standardized paper sizes began in the 14th century in Bologna, Italy. In the year 1398, a marble tablet inscribed with the outlines of four sizes of paper [small, medium, large, and extra-large] was placed in a public place to serve as a guide for the sizes of paper manufactured in that region of Italy. This appears to be the first time that paper sizes were regulated and standardized.

Centuries later, in 1786, physics professor Georg Christoph Lichtenberg of Germany noted the advantages of paper sizes having a height-to-width ratio of the square root of two (1:1.4142). The Lichtenberg Ratio has the advantage of preserving the aspect ratio when cutting a page in two. This ratio is also the basis for the metric-based ISO paper size system used by most of the industrialized nations today.

A few years later, in 1794, the French government issued a law that specified paper size formats that correspond exactly to several of the modern ISO paper sizes. Today the United States and Canada are the only modern countries in which the ISO standard paper sizes are not widely used.

The historic origins of the U.S. letter size format (8½ x 11" / 216 x 279mm) are relatively obscure. There were attempts in 1921 by the Permanent Conference on Printing, and also by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, former President Hoover, to standardize paper sizes to an entirely different 8 x 10½" format. This size was established as the standard for U.S. Government letterheads, and continued until the Reagan administration declared in 1980 that the official paper format for the U.S. government would be the 8½ x 11" size.

At the same time that the Hoover standard of 8 x 10½" paper was adopted, another committee known as the Committee on the Simplification of Paper Sizes recommended six completely different paper sizes. These sizes appear to have been selected merely because of their being traditional. What later became our familiar letter size format is simply one of these basic sizes (17 x 22") halved. Our legal size paper (8½ x 14" / 17 x 28") is also one of the papers specified by the Committee on the Simplification of Paper Sizes.

As far as can be determined, the 8½ x 11" letter size began to be used in the United States during or shortly after the First World War. There was apparently no effort made to prove that this was the optimal size for commercial letterhead. The purpose simply appeared to be to reduce the haphazard and chaotic variety of paper stocks and inventories to the most commonly used sizes.

You Might Be a Schoolteacher if...

• you have no time for a life from August to June.
• you want to slap the next person who says, "Must be nice to work from 8 to 3 and have your summers free!"
• when out in public you feel the urge to talk to strange children and correct their behavior.
• you refer to adults as "boys and girls."
• you encourage your spouse by telling him/her, he/she is a "good helper."
• you've ever had your profession slammed by someone who would never dream of doing your job.
• meeting a child's parents instantly answers the question, "Why is this kid like this?"
• you believe "extremely annoying" should have its own box on the report card.
• you know a hundred good reasons for being late.

from: Profession Jokes - Teachers

Quotations on Education and Teaching:

"A professor can never better distinguish himself in his work than by encouraging a clever pupil, for the true discoverers are among them, as comets amongst the stars."
— Carl Linnaeus, (1707-1778), Swedish scientist, the Father of Taxonomy

"Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are."
— Mason Cooley, (b. 1927), U.S. aphorist

"It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge."
— Albert Einstein, (1879-1955), German/Swiss/American scientist