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by Susan Meyers, illustrated by Marla Frazee. Harcourt, 2001. This is an adorable picture book full of babies of every ethnicity and family profile. The facial expressions are completely endearing. Frazee's simple drawings perfectly capture the way babies show every emotion from surprise, contentment, pleasure, sleepiness and anxiety. The watercolor sketches of family groupings show affectionate, bewildered, exhausted, adoring, and smitten parents, grandparents, siblings and friends. There are traditional pairs, single parents, same sex partners, transracial families, multi-generational families, and neighborhood gatherings scattered across pages of babies being their precious selves.

The text is simple and repetitive: "Every day, everywhere, babies play games ~ peek-a-boo, pat-a-cake, this-little-piggy, roll-the-ball, ride-a-horse, jiggety-jiggy." Little ones listening to the musical rhymes will want to sing along after the first few read-throughs. People with babies or expecting babies will love browsing this book over and over. Big brothers and sisters getting used to the idea of a new baby will delight in studying this book. I especially thought of Jenna, as I remember she was looking for a book for her son that included illustrations of multiracial families including one sibling adopted by another family and a new baby on the way. This book does a beautiful job of including everyone in the joy of living with babies. It would be a wonderful baby shower gift or big sister/brother gift. Highly recommended!

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Story and pictures by Niki Daly. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006. We found this latest adventure of Jamela in the library this week. Last winter I reviewed Where's Jamela? and found it to be delightful. In Happy Birthday Jamela she is up to her old tricks. She goes shopping with her mother and grandmother Gogo to buy a party dress and shoes for her birthday. She finds the perfect pair of princess shoes but her mother wants her to have strong sensible school shoes. When they get home Jamela "wished that, somehow, when she opened the box, she'd find the Princess Shoes inside. But when she looked, a pair of strong black school shoes lay there like heavy bricks. They smelled nice - but they could never, ever be birthday girl shoes." This is an example of the poetry and charm of Daly's writing. He manages to capture the child's point of view perfectly.

She gets an idea to decorate the shoes with sparkly, glittery treasure bits. She is so excited to show her mother the decorated shoes, but her mother reacts with anger and sends her out of the house. Siting on the curb Jamela talks to the neighbors about her predicament. Fortunately Lily, the artist living down the road happens by and she is delighted with the decorated shoes. She suggests they make more to sell in the market and the next day they do. The shoes are a big hit and they make enough money for Jamela to pay her mother back and then some. She ends up getting both party and school shoes for birthday presents. I really like how Jamela is creative and bubbly and bursting with the joy of life. I adore Daly's illustrations of her. His watercolors perfectly capture the soul and spirit of this charming little girl. Daly is one of those artists you just have to wonder over - how can he make such evocative, expressive paintings of their faces with just a few lines and a wash of color? It's a beautiful mystery to me.

This book was just published last year but it reminds me a bit of what I have read about Daly's older book Jamela's Dress. In that one Jamela was dancing around in some beautiful fabric her mother had purchased to make a special dress. Jamela ruined the fabric, angering her mother. As it happens a photographer took pictures of her dancing and sold them for a good price. Jamela gets part of the profit and is able to pay her mother back. I like the theme of joyful creativity, celebrating beauty with abandon, and ingenious schemes for making money to make up for extravagant mistakes. Jamela is a strong, thoughtful, vibrant girl character who makes a dramatic impact on the world for good. She runs into difficulty but always find a way to salvage the situation, with the help of the loving adults around her.

Another particularly nice thing about these books is that they are so multicultural. Because they are set in modern South Africa they are populated with adults and children of every skin tone and ethnicity. There is no special mention of this diversity, it is just part of normal life. There are a scattering of Xhosa words and phrases in the book, including the Happy Birthday song, which makes it clear that this is a particularly South African story. Buddy likes that about the book and wants me to sing Happy Birthday to him in Xhosa at his birthday coming up. I hope I am up to the task.

I thought it might be possible that Buddy would not be interested in a picture book about a girl shopping for party dresses and shoes, but that was not the case. I think he was willing to roll with that theme because it is so interesting to see how Jamela will deal with her mother's anger and her shoe predicament. He has begun to express desire to have the clothes, shoes and toys of his five year old peers, and is becoming aware of the difference between what I want to buy and what he wants me to buy for him. It is a fascinating dilemma for a child. There is also an illustration of the birthday party where Jamela is trying on her gift party shoes. One of her guests, a boy about five or six, is quietly observing the sparkly shoes with a contemplative look on his face. Buddy and I speculate that this little boy would like to try them on, even if they are girl's shoes. The depth of that conflict is enough to put this book on the golden shelf for us.

Daly is an award winning author of a long list of books and a brilliant career. Take a look at some of his other titles whenever you get a chance. If you would like to see some of the illustrations and text of this particular one go to this link for Google books and see a preview. I am loving this new feature of Google books. Have you explored it yet?

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Bigger Than Daddy by Harriet Ziefert, pictures by Elliot Kreloff. Blue Apple Books, 2006. This is a story about a boy and his dad. Mom is not in the book. The little boy wants to be as big as his dad. They play at the playground and then go home for dinner. Before dinner the boy asks daddy to play a pretend game with him, where the boy is big and daddy is little. It's fun until the boy wants a drink and gets hungry and daddy says he's too little to get him anything. Then the boy has to insist that they stop pretending. After dinner (which daddy gets on the table in ten minutes!) daddy gives him a bath and tucks him into bed. Buddy's reaction to this story the first time we read it: "That's not right. They didn't do the bedtime story. How come he didn't read the story?" I had to agree - the bedtime story is missing and that's not right. I am also wondering how dad got the boy home from the playground so easily, played so cheerfully at the end of the day and got dinner ready in just ten minutes. I'd like to be that kind of dad!

Daddy Goes to Work by Jabari Asim, illustrated by Aaron Boyd. Little, Brown and Company, 2006. In this story a girl goes to work with her dad. He works in an office we he seems to be the boss. He is very patient with her, letting her wake him up early, cooking French toast for breakfast, and sharing the paper with her on the subway. When they get to the office building he has to show his ID to the guard in the elevator. I wondered about this; if every one in the office already knows the girl (and they greet her warmly), why doesn't the guard know her dad? Once in the office he lets her help send an email to an overseas client. That seems a bit of a stretch to me. Then they have a meeting and she gets to help hold up the charts and graphs while everyone smiles and laughs. I think this is more of a child's fantasy than a realistic "bring your daughter to work day", but then I've never done that so I don't know. The pictures are nicely warm and bright. I don't especially like the rhyming text. Jabari Asim wrote two board books we absolutely love but this is the first regular picture book by him that we've read.

My favorite dad-and-me book is still Just the Two of Us by Will Smith, with pictures by Kadir Nelson. Scholastic Press, 2001. The text comes from a song written by Ralph MacDonald, William Salter, and Bill Withers. Smith did an arrangement on his 1997 album "Big Willie Style" that I really like. The problem is every time I read this book I want to sing it. I want to sound like Will Smith singing it and of course that ain't happening. I think I will have to get the tune and just play it when we read the book. I adore the illustrations in this book. The father and son are so in tune with each other; the father so tender and the son growing up in the glow of his love. My favorite pages are when the dad is awake in the middle of the night, bent over the bassinet adoring his baby son, hands outstretched to cradle his tiny head. Mom is fast asleep behind him. I also love the page where dad is on the computer and the son is standing behind him waiting for him to figure out how to put the DVD in the drive and start the movie. The words are full of wisdom:

"Throughout life people will make you mad
Disrespect you and treat you bad.
Let God deal with the things they do
Cause hate in your heart will consume you too.

Always tell the truth, say your prayers
Hold doors, pull out chairs, easy on the swears
You're living proof that dreams come true
I love you and I'm here for you."

Of the three books here I would say get the first two from the library but you really need to purchase the Will Smith book and the song.

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by Margaret Mahy, illustrated by Selina Young. Puffin Books, 2000.

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by Eve Bunting, illustrated by Kathryn Hewitt. Voyager Books Harcourt, Inc., 1994.

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Yesterday on the way home from daycare my four year old Buddy said, "We did bugs today. I can spell bugs: B-U-G-S!"

I said, "That's right! That's great! I didn't know you could do that. We will have to find a book with bugs in it for you to read."

He grinned into my rear view mirror. All evening he kept telling me how to spell bugs. We did find a couple of books with bugs in them, including Mercer Mayer's These Are My Pets and one of the little books in the My World series by Nora Gaynos. With a little help Buddy could read most of them. This is such an exciting time for me - watching someone learn to read is a tremendous thrill. I am looking closely at my home early reader book collection and scanning the shelves of my school library for summer books. I am looking for books at the early levels that include children of color in the illustrations. Here are a few I picked out this morning:

Yo Yes! by Chris Raschka. Orchard Books, 1993. When I was teaching first grade this was a favorite of many children, especially boys, who thought they couldn't read. The text is so simple (Often just one word on the page like "Yo!") and it is perfectly natural and compelling dialog. Two children on the street meet and hesitantly begin to form a friendship. The children are illustrated in shades of brown. Their facial expressions and body language is evocative. This book is a poem.

The Pup Speaks Up by Anna Jane Hays, illustrated by Valeria Petrone. A Step into Reading level 1 book by Random House, 2003. Level one books are intended for preschool to kindergarten children considered "ready to read". They include big type, easy words, rhyme and rhythm, and picture clues. This is a cute story that is full of animals. Bo is a little brown skinned boy (Hispanic? Native American?) with a new puppy friend. They live in the southwestern desert. They go for a walk and listen to what everyone they meet says, such as a bee that goes buzz, and train that goes choo choo, and so on. Pup doesn't speak until they meet a cat at the end of the book, which raises the readers curiosity; what will the pup say? This book is new to me and I can't wait to see how Buddy is going to like it.

Loose Tooth by Anastasia Suen, illustrations by Allan Eitzen. Based on the characters created by Ezra Jack Keats. Viking, 2002. A level 2 reader, for grades Kindergarten through second grade. This story and the others in the series take the characters from Keats beloved books and bring them into grade school. It's picture day and Peter has a loose tooth. He meets his friends Archie and Amy at the bus stop and they discuss whether the tooth will come out before the school pictures and how Peter feels about that. In the middle of the story there is a basketball game that is a little street rough, and of course the tooth gets knocked out. Peter smiles for his picture because he is planning to use the tooth fairy money to buy a basketball and that makes him happy. Suen has done a good job keeping the characters in the personalities that Keats gave them. It is amusing to see them growing up just like real children. The story is not quite as brilliant as Keat's own writing, but it is pleasing and engaging. I am going to keep this book in mind for Buddy in a year or two. Click on the book title above to go to the author's page with more of her books (lots of diversity there), coloring pages, lesson plans, videos, etc.

Small Wolf by Nathaniel Benchley, pictures by Joan Sandin. Harper Trophy, text copyright 1972, illustrations copyright 1972, 1994. A level 3 book for grades 2 -4. Small Wolf is a native American living in the Brooklyn/Manhattan area in the 16th century. He stumbles across the Dutch settlers who believe they have "bought" the land from the Canarsee Indians. Small Wolf and his father don't understand how this can be, that people would think they can own the sky or the land. Benchley does a fine job of presenting the injustice of the white settler's land acquisition and the peaceful, nonviolent strategies that Small Wolf and his family employ to deal with their loss of hunting ground, cultivated land and living space. The end of the book shows the Native American families attempting to move away from the Europeans again and again. I would love to have a discussion with young readers about the implications of this story and see how they connect it with what else they are learning in American history. What a great text to read around Thanksgiving!

I'll continue to post about what I find in early readers and I invite you to comment on books that have delighted you in the beginning reader isle. Let me know what you are finding!

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by Jane Kurtz, pictures by Rachel Isadora. Greenwillow Books, 2005.

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by Ann Cameron, illustrated by Ann Strugnell. Knopf, 1981.

This time of year we start to get a lot of talk about summer reading lists. What are you recommending? I am gathering my own list of beginning readers, story collections and preschool age story books, thinking ahead to extra time cuddling with my sons and reading the afternoons away. Today I picked up The Stories Julian Tells to peruse while waiting for my next class to come to the library. It's one that causes me to laugh out loud even in the quiet library.

Julian is a boy with a big imagination and a quick wit. His little brother Huey is the perfect foil for all his exploits, and together they get in and out of trouble on every page. When their father makes a special lemon pudding for their mother, saying it will taste like "a whole raft of lemons. It will taste like a night on the sea" Julian and Huey are set to guard it while he takes a nap. It is too good to resist tasting, however, and they boys end up shivering under the bed waiting for him to wake up and discover what happened. Fortunately their father knows just how to encourage them to replenish the supply.

In another chapter their father decides to order a garden catalog and teach them about growing vegetables Julian teaches Huey about the garden cats that come from catalogs. Once again their father is able to bring that around to a clever and satisfying resolution.

These stories are highly recommended by Jim Trelease in his Read Aloud Handbook, and for good reason. They are written on about a second grade level, so if your early elementary child is looking for some good independent summer reading it might work well for that too. There are seven books in the series all about the Bates family and their friends and neighbors. Ann Cameron says,

"I always thought of Julian as Everychild, having experiences that belong to children the world over. Julian, his brother Huey, and his friend Gloria are African-American children, but the text never says so. This book has a richness of language that children love, and its black-and-white drawings--by the artist Ann Strugnell--are some of the most beautiful I've ever seen in a children's book. "

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Somehow growing up I got the feeling that there was something racist, and therefore shameful, about the Brer Rabbit stories. Maybe it was the way black people are portrayed in The Song of the South. Maybe I heard friends scorning the southern black dialect written into the Tales of Uncle Remus by Joel Chandler Harris. In any case, I have avoided them for most of my life. What treasures I have been missing!

I have been reading Julius Lester's How Many Spots Does A Leopard Have? to my first graders and we love it. The children are on the edge of their seats. The language is beautiful and clever. Every story sparks discussion.

Since I am looking for a new author study to carry the kindergarten through to the end of the year I decided to look into Lester's Tales of Uncle Remus. I learned from reading Augusta Baker's introduction to The Adventures of Brer Rabbit that the stories had been told to her by her mother, who had heard them from her mother. Ms. Baker is the former Coordinator of Children's Services of the New York Public Library and Storyteller-in-Residence at the University of South Carolina. She says,

"It wasn't until several years later, in college, that I learned about the importance of these stories as true American folklore. Dr. Harold Thompson, a leading American folklorist, gave a lecture on people from the West Coast of Africa who had been captured and sold as slaves. Some were settled in the southern states where they took stories from home about a hare - Wakaima - and adapted them to their new surroundings. Wakaima became Brer Rabbit and the clay man became the Tar Baby."

She says she tried reading Harris' books several times, but never could get past the dialect which was like a foreign language to her.

"Despite the drawbacks in Harris’s text, I still loved the stories and appreciated Brer Rabbit as a cultural hero and a significant part of my heritage. However, I was telling the stories less and less often because of the dialect.... How could I represent our African Background and the relationship between Africa and black America to primary grades? How could I show the fusion of the different African cultures and the cultures existing in American and the West Indies?"

When she first reads Lester's The Knee-High Man and Other Tales in 1972 she found them to be "black folktales told perfectly." Lester went on to publish four volumes of Brer Rabbit tales, as well as many other books for children.

Lester gives a history of the Uncle Remus stories in his forward to The Adventures of Brer Rabbit. He gives the background of the stories coming from West African folktales. He says,

“Uncle Remus became a stereotype, and therefore negative, not because of inaccuracies in Harris’s characterization, but because he was used as a symbol of slavery and a retrospective justification for it… If there is one aspect of the Uncle Remus stories with which one could seriously disagree, it is the social setting in which the tales are told. Uncle Remus, and sometimes other blacks, tell the stories to an audience of one – a little white boy, the son of the plantation owner. While such a setting added to the appeal and accessibility of the tales for whites, it leaves the reader with no sense of the important role the tales played in black life. The telling of black folktales, and indeed tales of all cultures, was a social even bringing together adults and children. That folktales are now considered primarily stories for children is an indication of our society’s spiritual impoverishment. Traditionally, tales were told by adults to adults. If the children were quiet, they might be allowed to listen. Clearly, black folktales were not created and told for the entertainment of little white children, as the Uncle Remus tales would lead one to believe.”

Lester goes on to explain what adaptations he has made in telling the tales, and what important elements he has retained.

To give you a taste of my new found delight here is a link to some of Lester’s tales online. The first three I read this morning and just about spit my coffee across the library they are so funny. If you haven’t read any of Lester’s folktales you are in for a treat!

I believe a whole new window has opened for me on the folklore of America. I am so delighted to have the summer ahead of me that includes a front porch, lazy afternoons when the baby will be sleeping while the preschooler is in the mood to hear stories, and a bookstore gift certificate that will start me on my plan to acquire a stack of Lester’s Uncle Remus books. All we need is some lemonade and a porch swing…

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Kelly, at Big A, little a, asked for suggestions for early readers to give her son for summer reading. A lot of folks commented with their favorites and she said she would publish a pdf tomorrow so we could all print it out. I am looking forward to seeing that!

It got me thinking about working on my list of beginning readers on LibraryThing. I have been meaning to post a link to some book lists here in the sidebar. I love LibraryThing. You can sort your own books by tags, find other people who own the same books, get suggestions for other books in the same genre or author, read and post reviews and chat about just about anything.

I have quite a few beginning readers around my house. Buster, who is nineteen now, enjoyed them when he was in Pre-k through second grade. We spent those summers doing extra reading and writing work together. I taught kindergarten and first grade for many years, and I am a children's librarian now so this level of books is one of my special interests. Now Buddy is starting to read them and I have been buying more. Many of my favorites are quite old, so I am particularly interested in finding new books with diverse ethnicities represented.

If you click this link to my LibraryThing Beginning Readers list you can see our favorites. You can experiment with the different views to see book covers, ISBN and LC numbers, subject headings and my ratings. If you click the column headings you can sort them several ways. I think view E is the best one for printing, but I like view A the best because I love seeing the book covers. If you click a tag you see all the other books I have with that tag. If you click a book title see detailed information about that book. You can also see a list of similar books recommended.

If any of you have a LibraryThing account I would love to add you to my watch list. Or if you have another way of keeping and sharing book lists I'd love to hear about it! So far for me LibraryThing is the easiest, coolest, most versatile way to share lists. What do you think?

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by Lucille Clifton, pictures by Brinton Turkle. E.P. Dutton, 1973.

I first discovered this book when Buster was in kindergarten. Two boys about six years old decide to go exploring down their city street to look for evidence of spring. The boys names are King Shabazz and his friend Tony Polito. What wonderful names! The story includes characters of a variety of ethnicities without calling attention to being "multicultural" for any teaching purpose.

They walk down a busy city street full of purposeful people going about daily life. I like how the city is depicted as busy and full of interesting people, tantalizing smells like fresh baked buns and BBQ. It's not a dangerous place, but it's exciting because the boys venture farther from home than they ever have when they cross a big street. They are each determined to show their friend their courage and persistence in looking for signs of spring even though they have insisted that it is all a myth told by grown ups.

King Shabazz's mama has been talking about crops and the teachers have been talking about blue birds. I can just here the boys talking on the stoop:

"King Shabazz decided he had just had enough. He put his jacket on and his shades and went by for Tony Polito.

"Look here, man," King said when they got out to the bottom step,"I'm goin to get me some of this Spring."
"What you mean, man?" Tony asked him.
"Everybody talkin bout Spring comin, and Spring just round the corner. I'm goin to go round there and see what do I see."

As their adventure unfolds, they come to a vacant lot that is empty except for an abandoned car. For these boys it is beautiful and exciting. The hear a whispery sound coming from it and creep up to peek inside. They take courage from each other, although each secretly hopes the other will want to go home instead. Together they tiptoe across the lot.

"When they were halfway to the car, Tony tripped and almost fell. He looked down and saw a patch of little yellow pointy flowers, growing in the middle of short spiky green leaves.

"Man, I think you tripped on these crops!" King laughed.
"They're comin up," Tony shouted. "Man, the corps are comin up!"

Even twenty years after first reading this I crack up every time. The boys are so earnest and full of wonder under their careful bravado. When I first read this story to Buster we were living in the city and found spring just the way these boys do - growing in vacant lots and sidewalk cracks. The joy of sudden color and vibrant new green life is the same wherever you find it, but somehow more startling and precious in an empty lot beside rushing traffic.

When the boys get to the car they find a bird's nest full of sky blue eggs. They whisper in reverent awe over the miracle. Then Tony's older brother shows up looking for him and threatening his mother's punishment for going off on their own. Buster was a bit put off by that bit, as he is young enough to take it literally. I had to explain that "Mom is going to kill you!" was more of a threat than a real prediction. We have read this book together several nights in a row and he is fascinated with the boys and their point of view. The illustrations of city life and the boy's wide eyed faces are touching and engaging. Clifton and Turkle have collaborated in a beautiful synchronicity in this little book. It's a treasure.

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by Brian Pinkney. Greenwillow Books, 2006.

My oldest son is 19 so I have been singing lullabies for a number of years. I made up a song based on my son's name that I used to sing him to sleep with, until he had to have a spinal tap done during a meningitis scare and I used that song to try to sooth him during his terror. He hated that song after that terrible night. I had to start singing him something else, and I liked the song Hush Little Baby. I could never remember the words after the diamond ring line, so I just made up some skit scat that rhymed.

Since that worked pretty well I never took the trouble to learn all the regular words to that song. I still sing it to my two younger sons now and they have both learned it that way. It's funny to hear Buddy ask me if he has the words right when he is singing

"Mama's gonna buy you a diamond ring,
Dink dinga ding dinga ding dink dink..."

Our library has just received the new Brian Pinkney book Hush Little Baby. Pinkney says in the preface that this song is a traditional southern Appalachian lullaby based on the English tradition of nursery rhymes. He wanted to put the song in an unexpected context so he

"created a narrative of a day in the life of an African American family in the early 1900s, in which Mama goes off for the day and Papa is left to tend to the young'uns. I also drew from my own experience of having two young children, a boy and a girl. I tapped into the way I use playfulness as a means of consoling my kids. I have learned, though, that playfulness goes only so far. Nurturing can be expressed in many ways. There's make-believe, improvisation, whimsy... But even after the diamond ring turns brass and the spinning top will no longer twirl, the best way to comfort any child is through love."

I love the way Pinkney has introduced the unexpected, whimsical elements in the illustrations and lyrics. A father's perspective of using humor to sooth his children is exactly what I think my boys will best love about this book. Don't you love the way men act silly to get a child to forget his troubles? Pinkney includes a firetruck on the page right before Mama comes home. There is nothing else in the world more attractive than a loving black man being daddy. Put that together with a bright red fire truck and you can't beat it for delight!

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In This Show: A listener inspired episode. Re-thinking Paris Hilton and Barbie Fandom Children’s books with strong female characters Deirdre Flint’s Boob Fairy Podcasts Mentioned: Just One More Book, Mostly News, Desperate Husbands Books Mentioned: The Bobbin Girl by Emily Arnold McCully Mirette and Bellini Cross Niagara Falls by Emily Arnold McCully America Is her Name by Luis J. Rodriguez Getting in the Game by Dawn Fitzgerald From [...]

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