Kate Greenaway, b. 1846. In the US we award the Caldecott Medal to the best illustrator of a children’s picture book each year. In Britain, they give the Greenaway Medal “for distinguished illustration in a book for children.” Many of the illustrators who have won the Greenaway Medal are unfamiliar to me, but I do know something of the work of Lauren Child, Helen Oxenbury, Alan Lee (Rosemary Sutcliff’s Black Ships Before Troy), Janet Ahlberg (Jolly Postman books), Jan Pienkowski, Pat Hutchins, Gail Haley, John Burningham, Pauline Baynes (illustrator of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books), Brian Wildsmith, and the first medal winner in 1956 Edward Ardizzone (Tim All Alone). Kate Greenaway, the illustrator for whom the medal is named, died in 1901.

Frank Gilbreth, Jr., b. 1911, co-author with his sister Ernestine Gilbreth Carey of the childhood memoir Cheaper By the Dozen and its sequel Belles on Their Toes. Brown Bear Daughter is reading these books for fun. They’re nothing like the Steve Martin movie, by the way, except for the fact that the Gilbreth family did have twelve children. All homeschoolers should read these books, especially Cheaper by the Dozen, because they have a lot to teach about education in general and about family life. The Gilbreth family didn’t homeschool; in fact, Frank Gilbreth, Sr., the dad, pushed his children through public schools, encouraging them to skip grades and graduate early. However, in another sense, Mr. and Mrs. Gilbreth were schooling their children constantly, teaching them everything from languages to typing to Morse code to swimming using a number of ingenious methods—some of which worked better than others. Bribery and the Tom-Sawyer-whitewashing-the-fence method were particularly effective.

Brown Bear Daughter warns that Cheaper By the Dozen has some bad language, and if you’re reading it to younger kids you should skip the bad words. She liked it because it was about real people and the family was interesting. She would like to live in a family like the Gilbreths, but she would want her daddy to go to church. She says it would be cool if her mom and dad were famous like the Gilbreths—not just a famous blogger, like her mom, but really famous.