Book Review: How the Dinosaur Got to the Museum by Jessie Hartland

We're still on a dinosaur kick around here.  Actually, when are we not loving dinos?  We have been especially interested in all things large and skeletal and big-print making creatures since spring break a few weeks ago when we drove out to western Mass to see some real dinosaur footprints in situ.  (More about that adventure later!)  For now, suffice it to say it was awesome.  Our museum book this week fit right along with our talks about how things like dinosaurs get to museums and what happens along the way.  So without further ado we present our thoughts on:

How the Dinosaur Got to the Museum by Jessie Hartland

3-year-old:  My favorite part of the dinosaur going to the museum book was when the guy [security guard] was going to fall over the bones.

5-year-old:  I have wondered at a museum how a dinosaur gets there.  My favorite part was when the dinosaur hunter found the bone.  And that’s it.  What?  Don’t write that!  Mommy:  So next time we go to the museum what are you going to remember about this book?  5-year-old:  Goo-goo.  (Silly giggles.  I include it because he checks on me to make sure I'm writing exactly what he says.)  That they [dinosaur skeletons] were really dug out by the paleontologist.  And it [the diplodocus] was really broken up after it died. 

Mommy:  Like all of Jessie Hartland museum books, this one is a treat!  I learned so much myself reading this with my boys!  Get ready for a longer read than perhaps most preschoolers are used to, but with the repetition my boys stayed engaged.  By the end of the “house that jack built” type expanding and repeating story my boys were filling in the pauses I gave them.  The vocabulary is fun for an adult to read out loud yet the content simple enough—with wonderful illustrations!—that my kids were able to follow along with the process of getting those dino bones to the museum. 

My five year old was so taken with the book that he wanted to read the extra info at the back of the book, but my three year old slid off my lap and started rummaging for another new story to read.  (That’s par the course around here.  Just including that bit as a guide for you checking out this book for your own read or with children.)

(probably best for children 4+)

Exhibition Highlight (and unabashed plug): Sacred Gifts, Brigham Young University

It's the eve of Good Friday and I'm in the Easter mood.

I spent most of the afternoon on the floor playing with my kids in our living room.  Up on the mantel--as yet unframed--is an 8x10 print of Franz Schwartz's Agony in the Garden.  I kept looking at this print today with Easter on my mind.  It is by no means as spectacular as the original, but it holds a dear place in my heart nonetheless.  

Every time I see it I am reminded of my introduction to the artist and his paintings, especially this one.

Last winter, as my accountant husband was in the throes of his busy season, I left him alone in Boston and took my kids across the country to stay with my family for a semester while I interned as a curator's assistant at the Brigham Young University Museum of Art.  The internship is a requirement in Harvard's Museum Studies program and honestly I was not sure how my family and I were going to swing it.  It all worked out wonderfully in the end, and I had the supreme blessing of working with Dawn Pheysey, then the Religious Art Curator.  She had been instrumental in creating the Carl Bloch: The Master's Hand exhibition a few years ago and was preparing for a sort of follow-up/expanding exhibition involving the religious art of Bloch and several of his contemporaries.  I was taken on to assist in research and label text drafting artworks and background in what has come to fruition in Sacred Gifts.

I'm sure I will talk more about all this in due time.  It was a huge learning and growing time for me and my views on museums and their relationship/resource to my family.  But for now I just wanted to give a teensy background into why I am saying--get to this exhibition!!

If you can at all, get to this exhibition.  It will strengthen your faith in God and great art if you've got a kindling.  It will restore your faith in God and great art if you're in doubt.  It will magnify your faith in God and great art if you're already on fire.

If you've already been, go again during this Easter season!  If it's your first time, there is no better time!  The final weeks of the exhibition are approaching, and some of the artworks will never again be on exhibition at BYU (and likely anywhere but their home location in Europe).  Prints do not do any of these justice.  You may think you've seen a Bloch but until you see one in person you just don't know what you're missing!

And the iPad is awesome.  My dad and son agree, so there's all the reason you need for seeing the exhibition several times--once without to just soak in the art itself, once with the iPad to enjoy the extra features, once while your kids hog it the whole time . . .

Plus **bonus** you'll get to read some of the words I wrote.  :D  I mean, I guess if you got this far you're already reading what I'm writing.  But this is just me barfing up words into a blog post.  The words on the wall (as it were) were highly researched, thought-out, weighed, edited in collaboration with Ms. Pheysey and others, and printed VERY BIG and all official on the wall.  It's a tad exciting, no?

I would absolutely love to hear what you thought of this exhibition if you were able to see it, or even read about it in an article somewhere.  Did you learn anything?  Did your kids recognize Jesus, though he may look different in some of the images than we are used to?  What gifts do you recognize in this Easter season?