It's the first week of June, and that means that Summer Reading is upon us! We're featuring STEM fields this summer, and I've been having great fun trying to match up younger-age books with our weekly themes.
The themes (and our branch Summer Reading) technically start next week, but I wanted to lead in with a more general overview of science and natural history and technology, so I started a week early.
What Is Science?
Rebecca Kai Dotlich, illustrated by Sachiko Yoshikawa
ISBN: 0805073949
Animated minimalist-featured kids cavort scientifically through a brightly colored world.
I really like this book, and I'm buying it for my own home collection. It's a delightful rhyming romp through all the "things" that science is: the study of everything from rocks and fossils to tornadoes to space, illustrated with carefree kids looking over a landscape or set-piece that exemplifies the concept. Really an early literacy nonfiction book instead of a picture book, but the format and style place it firmly into picture book territory, and I'm quite glad to use it here. My favorite book from this program.
Big & Little
Steve Jenkins
ISBN: 0395726646
Textured-paper collages against white backgrounds, text wraps around animals and is VERY SMALL.
Other than the hardship of reading the tiny little itty bitty curvy text from arms-length while holding the book out for kids to see, this was a great pick. The kids really loved identifying the animals, and the comparisons were suitably dramatic. The page of silhouettes on the back was an especial hit, with the relative sizes of several animals compared to the person's size. I prefer this book to Jenkins' later "Actual Size" for two reasons: first, I like the comparison between pairs of animals of different groups better than a straight presentation of different animals for purposes of storytime, and second, this one doesn't have a fricking giant spider in it.
Tap Tap Bang Bang
Emma Garcia
ISBN: 9781907967672
Vibrant cartoonish tempera-painted tools with googly-eyes perform their tasks without visible human intervention building up to a reveal of the project.
This was my least favorite of the books this time around, but it was the kids' absolute favorite, and it was immediately requested for checkout, so that makes me like it by association. The tools each have a "sound effect" that I don't feel I did very well, but the kids appreciated. There were the obvious "zzzz, zzzz for the drill" and "cree craw cree craw" for the saw, but there there's tools like vice-grips and clamps and hot glue guns, all of which also get "sounds" like "grippety grip" which aren't really sound effects, but whatever. I would also have liked to have more visuals of the item being worked on, to let the kids guess and anticipate the eventual nature of the project revealed at the end.
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