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By: Cloudscome,
on 3/5/2008
By Chris Smith, illustrated by Aurelia Fronty. Barefoot Books, 2007. (review copy) Chris Smith has retold this Jewish/Arab fable of how the city of Jerusalem came to be. In the back of the book he says, "If you ever happen to be traveling, and come to the point where Europe meets Asia, and where Asia meets Africa, you will find a city bursting with history and mystery. [...] This story gives an
By: Cloudscome,
on 2/27/2008
Kersplatypus by Susan K. Mitchell, illustrated by Sherry Rogers. Sylvan Dell, 2008. (review copy from publisher) In our house we've been enjoying this latest book by Susan K. Mitchell. It's a quest story of a little platypus looking for his place in the world. He wanders through the Tasmanian countryside asking other animals to help him find where he truly belongs. My five year old son enjoyed
By: Cloudscome,
on 2/20/2008
by Lynne Barasch. Lee & Low Books, 2007. Hiromi Suzuki's father was born and raised in Japan. He was trained in the male sushi tradition in Japan and came to New York in 1964 to work at his company's NY restaurant. He married and had a daughter. His American life influenced the way he raised his daughter. When she began to beg him to take her to fish markets and let her help in the restaurant
By: Cloudscome,
on 2/4/2008
by Sneed B. Collard III, illustrated by Phyllis V. Saroff. Charlesbridge publishing, 2008. (review copy) This is another wonderful nonfiction picture book by the award winning author of Wings, which I reviewed last week. Sneed does a fine job of showing all the ways teeth are important to a variety of earth's creatures. Teeth "slice, stab, crack, grind, mash and munch." Mammals, reptiles,
By: Cloudscome,
on 1/30/2008
Illustrated by Josee Masse. Barefoot Books, 2007. (review copy) This delightful picture book is a musical poem spoken from a Caucasian mother to her adopted Chinese daughter. It sings of tender love surrounding the child from birth. Mother love supports this child from both her first, biological mother and her second, adoptive mother. It is truly one of the few books I have found about adoption
By: Cloudscome,
on 1/28/2008
by Sneed B. Collard III, illustrated by Robin Brickman. Charlesbridge publishing, 2008. (review copy) This is a well written and gorgeously designed informational text about all sorts of wings. From Galah parrots of Australia and Gambian Epauletted Fruit Bats to Madagascan Sunset Moths the variety and beauty of all sorts of winged creatures are described and illustrated. Brickman has painted and
By: Cloudscome,
on 1/15/2008
Last week at the AASL Reading and the Elementary School Library Media Specialist conference we talked a lot about how to encourage and support classroom reading programs. We shared about our programs, book talks, displays and activities to promote books from our libraries. We talked about No Child Left Behind and how testing was driving so many reading programs and eliminating the necessary time
By: Cloudscome,
on 12/27/2007
I've brought a stack of books home from the library for our Kwanzza reading. I'm putting together a suggested reading list for young children; mostly folktales from various African countries and American titles. These aren't stories about Kwanzaa. I haven't found any really good fable or folk tales that center on the particular holiday the way Hannukkah has a rich folklore and Christmas has a
By: Cloudscome,
on 12/14/2007
by: e.e. cummings (1894-1962) little tree little silent Christmas tree you are so little you are more like a flower who found you in the green forest and were you very sorry to come away? see i will comfort you because you smell so sweetly i will kiss your cool bark and hug you safe and tight just as your mother would, ..... read the rest here. We have a picture book with this poem
By: Cloudscome,
on 12/12/2007
After yesterday's post on gift books I am remembering some of my other favorite Christmas books. I plan to read these to kindergarten through second graders in the library in the coming week: Tree of Cranes by Allen Say. Houghton Mifflin Co.,1991. I think this is my favorite Say book. He tells us of a time when he was living in Japan as a boy. He disobeyed his mother by playing in the neighbor's
By: Cloudscome,
on 12/11/2007
In the December Carnival of Children's Literature, Kelly (Big A little a) is asking for our suggestions for favorite gift books. Here are mine: One Winter's Night by John Herman, illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon. Philomel books, 2003. Martha is a cow about to give birth to her first calf. She is out alone at night in the deep cold snow, searching for a safe warm place. The full color
By: Cloudscome,
on 12/10/2007
I just saw via Jen Robinson that Marie over at a Readable Feast is having a contest too. She is giving away a basketful of books from Little, Brown, and Co. All you have to do is spread the word about her contest and she'll enter you in the drawing. Titles include: We Belong Together: A Book About Adoption and Families by Todd Parr (ages 3-6), Hug Time by Patrick McDonnell (ages 3-6) and seven
By: Cloudscome,
on 12/3/2007
My Jewish friends tell me that Hanukkah is not one of the most important Jewish festivals. It's a minor holiday compared with Rosh Hashanna or Yom Kippor. According to Eric Kimmel, in his introduction to the anthology A Hanukkah Treasury: "There is no special synagogue service for Hanukkah. The holiday is largely celebrated at home. And although Hanukkah certainly is a religious holiday, it is
By: Cloudscome,
on 11/26/2007
Yesterday we were driving home from church listening to NPR on the radio. Someone was telling a funny story about a chicken driving a truck - I can't remember exactly what it was about. I was thinking of something else at the time. Buddy, my five year old, was in the back seat listening carefully to the radio. He pips up, "Chickens driving a truck? That sounds crazy. Chickens don't drive, do
By: Cloudscome,
on 10/26/2007
by Nikki Grimes, illustrated by Shane Evans. Orchard Books, 2007. We just got this book into our library and it is a charmer. The story is told in poetry, of a cat named Gorilla and two girl friends each named Cecilia. One Cecilia has three brothers and the other (the story's narrator) has none. She begs her mother for a pet and gets a cat; not just any cat but a fierce, independent, clever, "
By: Cloudscome,
on 10/24/2007
by Janice N. Harrington, pictures by Shelley Jackson. Melanie Kroupa Books, 2007. This book is a wonder. Ms. Jackson is a poet, a librarian and a storyteller, and she shines in crafting the music of this story. The word choice is exquisite and the timing is perfect. The chicken chasing queen is a young girl who lives on a farm and loves to chase Big Mama's chickens. Especially one chicken: "Her
By: Cloudscome,
on 10/16/2007
Traditional African-American Spiritual, illustrated by E. B. Lewis. We had this book at our school book fair last week and I fell in love with it. The text is the traditional song and as I stood there browsing the books I had the chorus running through my head. It made me smile to remember a little boy I knew when Buster, my 20 year old son was a baby. Junior is grown now and a daddy to his own
By: Cloudscome,
on 10/1/2007
by Bobby Lynn Maslen & John R. Maslen. This is a series of beginning readers that come packaged in a cute little box. They are each about eight pages long and tell a funny story in just a few short words. They are much more clever than many beginning readers, leaving space for the reader's creative leap of comprehension between simple text and minimalist line drawings. Much of the interest and humor come from the child's understanding of, for example, what a dog is likely to do with a lady's hat.
With monochromatic sketches and a maximum of three words per page this story is told: Dot has a hat, a lovely floppy hat with a big flower on it. Mag wants a hat too. When he gets a hold of Dot's hat, it starts looking damp and droopy. The text doesn't need to explain that the hat ended up in Mag's mouth. When Dot gives up on the hat in discouragement Mag is still happy to wear it with a doggy smile. My five year old son Buddy loves that story and reads it with plenty of giggles. He reads it with a combination of emerging decoding skills (focusing on beginning and ending sounds, sounding out the short vowel words, and guessing from context clues.) His eyes track from text to illustration and back to text. I can see the wheels turning in his head, culminating in a star-burst smile when he gets to the end of the book and reads with proud satisfaction "The End."
My oldest son Buster loved these books fifteen years ago when he was starting to learn to read. He was stuck for a while at the letter-by-letter sounding out stage. When we found BOB books he took great delight in the humor. They were books he could read with a limited sight word vocabulary and shaky decoding skills, but they involved some complexity in story line. At first reading some of the stories are hard to "get". They aren't obvious. They require some thinking and some inference. That's a difficult thing to include in a book with such a limited vocabulary. Buster appreciated the respect the authors gave him in honoring his wit and experience of the world by writing stories that required his intelligent participation to bring to life.
After I found this series for Buster I started using them in my first grade classroom. At the time I was a first grade teacher with a broad range of abilities represented in my students. That is usually the case in any classroom. I found it particularly challenging in teaching reading because their tender egos come hard up against the increasing pressure from parents and teachers to succeed in reading. Anyone not excelling begins to feel like a failure. Maslen & Maslen are masters at reaching the four to seven year old audience with a delicate balance of presentation, reinforcement, enticement and celebration.
There are five sets in the BOB Book series, focused on short vowels, word families, compound words and long vowels. The website has links and printable activity pages as well.We have used the first to sets most heavily, finding them just right for readers on the verge of sounding out short words and building a sight word vocabulary. If you have a beginning reader aged four through seven these books are right on target.
This review is part of the Mother-Talk BOB Book blog tour.
By: Cloudscome,
on 9/24/2007
by Janet Halfmann, illustrated by Laurie Allen Klien. Preview it on the Sylvan Dell site here. This story is based on the real life ability of skinks (small blue tailed lizards) to lose their tail in order to escape danger. The sweet little skink in the story is happily sunning on a rock and eating ants when she is attacked by a crow. She loses her tail and makes her get away, leaving the crow to chase her wiggling tail.
By: Cloudscome,
on 9/20/2007
by Karla Kushin, illustrated by Melissa Iwai. Laura Geringer Books, 2007. This adorable picture book in rhyme is a poem, a song, a philosophical invitation. If you could be green...square...soft...small, what would you be? Each open-ended question takes a childhood characteristic and stretches our expectations to invite imaginative expression. My favorite verse:
If you could be loud
would you be the sound
of thunder at night
or the howl of a hound
as he bays at the moon
or the pound of the sea?
Tell me, proud loud one,
what would you be?"
By: cloudscome,
on 8/29/2007
Buddy goes off to kindergarten next week. I want tell you about the books we found at the library last week to ease us into the first day of school.
Many kindergarten books are about the anxiety that comes with the first day of school. Anne Rockwell's Welcome to Kindergarten is a book about a boy and his mother visiting school for orientation. On the first page they are approaching the school on Sunrise Street. The boy observes that "it is very big. The boys and girls coming out the door are all much bigger than me." Inside they find the kindergarten classroom and explore the room's centers for science, art, math reading, writing, weather, and cooking. He sees he'll learn to read the calendar and tell time. As they leave the building he says, "the building doesn't look to big at all. It looks just the right size for me!" The illustrations are done with bold, bright colors in a simple, child-like style. The boy, his mother and the teacher are all white. The principal is a darker shade of tan, with gray hair. Several of the other students are black or brown, including the friendly girl who sits at his table for snack. This is a sweet book for a child entering kindergarten and wondering what exactly goes on in that big brick building.
Rosemary Wells' Timothy Goes to School is all about the difficulty of choosing the right clothes to wear. On the first day Timothy wears a sun-suit his mother made him and he looks too babyish. On the second day he wears a jacket his mother made him, in order to look like the kid who criticised him on the first day. Of course he gets told "no one wears a jacket on the second day". Timothy keeps trying to dress to please until he meets Violet, a girl who understands him and enjoys his company. They become fast friends in their mutual dislike of Claude and Grace, the perfect students they had been comparing themselves to and coming up short. First day of school anxiety themes this book touches on are:
By: cloudscome,
on 8/23/2007
World Book's Animals of the World. Author: Meish Goldish. World Book, Inc., 2002. We got this one from the library because we have found so many fascinating bugs in the house and garden this summer. This non-fiction series is perfect for preschool and early elementary kids. Large full color photos of up close bugs are balanced with clear, simple, informative text in large type. Each chapter is one page, covering topics such as, "What is a True Bug?", "Where in the World Do True Bugs Live?", and "How is a Stink Bug Put Together?". There is enough factual information to satisfy initial questions and spark discussion with further inquiry, leading readers to want to pursue more research. The chapter titled "How Do Stunk Bugs Defend Themselves?" for example says,
"A stink bug's main weapon of defense is its oder. When in danger, the stink bug releases a stinking liquid from its thorax. A bird or other predator often takes one whiff of the bug's rotten smell and leaves the tiny creature alone!"
By: cloudscome,
on 8/3/2007
by Karen E. Lotz, illustrated by Colleen Browning. Dutton Children's Books, 1993.
autumn in the city
pump the pedals
race the sun
slipping
sliding
down the blockwind smells like hot java beans
tickles the hairs on the back of my neck...
This vibrant picture book shows the joys of living in an exciting city neighborhood through the seasons of the year. The little girl rides her bike, paints her toenails, plays in the snow, feeds the kittens in the alley, takes out the trash, does her homework and plays in the water sprinkler shooting out of the fire hydrant. She dances across the pages delighting in the sights, smells and flavors of a life of joy. It is a pleasure to read and my kids ask for it over and over.
The poetry round up is at Miss Rumphius today. Enjoy browsing!
By: cloudscome,
on 8/2/2007
by Richard Michelson, illustrated by E.B. Lewis. (Click that link and scroll down to see the absolutely gorgeous illustrations) G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2006. This picture book is immediately appealing to my son Buddy because it is about:
By: cloudscome,
on 7/31/2007
by Shelia Hamanaka. Morrow Junior Books, 1994. This is a lovely little book that sings of the sweetness of all the children of the earth. Children who come in the
"roaring browns of bears and soaring eagles,
The whispering golds of late summer grasses,
And crackling russets of fallen leaves
the tinkling pinks of tiny seashells by the rumbling sea."
This is a gorgeous, well-written book. I have it in my "to review" pile. Love it!Marcie World of Words