Amy remembers the beginning of Blue Sky Daisies
We started Blue Sky Daisies almost seven years ago because we wanted to use George Lyman Kittredge and Sarah Louise Arnold’s vintage grammar book, The Mother Tongue: Book II, with our kids in our homeschools. At the time, each of us had a houseful–and homeschool full–of kids aged 4 to 14. We had heard about The Mother Tongue: Book II from some homeschool mentors, particularly Cindy Rollins. But when we found the scans of the old book online, we were discouraged about the format. Sure, a book from 1908 is charming and definitely something to put in one’s book collection–but not so practical for using on a daily basis.
Tina said to me, “If The Mother Tongue was in a more modern-looking format, I would use it. But I struggle with this old format.” The old book is small and typical of textbooks from over one hundred years ago. Our options were either to use the antique book with its fragile pages, or print from a scan. Either way, it was awkward. But we loved what we saw inside.
We decided to tackle it ourselves and put The Mother Tongue: Book II into a format that made more sense for educators like us. We also thought it would be helpful to retain old terms, but offer footnotes and margin boxes to connect those terms with the contemporary labels (for instance, when Kittredge and Arnold introduce the copula “is,” we explain that this is now generally called a “linking verb”).
The margin boxes are new; the main narrative is exactly from the original text. When we added a footnote, we labeled it “Editor’s Note”; other footnotes are from Kittredge and Arnold.
Workbooks and Keys
The Mother Tongue: Book II is full of practice sentences taken from literature. These are not contrived sentences written by educators, but instead living sentences found in real writing. The Mother Tongue practice exercises work well in a Morning Time group setting, to be done orally with kids. But they also provide an opportunity for written practice. To that end, we decided we’d like to be able to give our kids a workbook format, rather than have them use separate paper. It seemed like something others might appreciate, so we created workbooks.
And, what good is a workbook without an answer key? We thought The Mother Tongue would be more valuable to people with an answer key. Where possible, we also found and noted the source of practice sentences that came from literature.
It’s incredible to reflect back on this project, which we did in our spare (ha!) time and without the powerful book design software that we have now. But we did have the spirit and energy of Edgar Guest’s poem, “It’s Couldn’t Be Done.” Here are a few lines:
There are thousands to tell you it cannot be done,
Edgar Guest, “It Couldn’t Be Done.” third stanza
There are thousands to prophesy failure,
There are thousands to point out to you one by one,
The dangers that wait to assail you.
But just buckle in with a bit of a grin,
Just take off your coat and go to it;
Just start in to sing as you tackle the thing
That “cannot be done,” and you’ll do it.
We were a small start-up publisher at that time and our original Mother Tongue book covers reflect that. Now that Blue Sky Daisies has over a dozen book titles in print, we decided that the books that started it all deserved an updated look.
