Tuesday Storytime: Going to the Beach

Posting late this week, can you tell summer is coming?   O.o

The Twelve Days of Summer
Elizabeth Lee O'Donnell, illustrated by Karen Lee Schmidt
ISBN: 0688082033
Whimsical colorful drawings of a beach, with clever uses of borders for the increasing menagerie.

Instead of the twelve days of christmas "fiiiiiive golden rings" and etc., here we have the days of summer, notated by increasing amounts of various beach animals (plus waves, oddly enough).  It's well-written, the lines scan, the wordplay is interesting without being tongue-tying (six squid a-swimming) and the scenes depicted continually get zanier and zanier as the animal numbers grow.  As a bonus, our "little purple sea anemone" (which I've been humming since Tuesday, thanks ever so) is hidden on each page, regardless of the scope of the composition.  Well played.


Penguin on Vacation
Salina Yoon
ISBN: 9780802733979
Cute blocky "newsprint comic" style artwork enlivens a slender tale of a Penguin and Crab.

Penguin is sick of snow.  Snowballs, snow forts, snowskiing, snowsledding, all of it.  He's headed somewhere tropical!  Sadly, he's not exactly prepared for the reality of the beach - you can't skate on sand, after all.  A helpful crab wanders in to the story, teaches some good beach games, and then heads off to the pole for his own winter vacation.  The ending is strangely done - Crab visits the pole, leaves, then comes back again a year later for another visit, while Penguin doesn't travel back to the beach.  Kids won't notice, but I did, and wondered why the story was structured like that?  Regardless, adorable and a very short read.


The Seashore Book
Charlotte Zolotow, painted by Wendell Minor
ISBN: 0060202149
Beautiful paintings of serene seascapes adorn a sweet but slow narrative.

I really hesitated over this one, and I'm glad I had a smaller, more sedate group for Storytime, because with a larger crowd, or with some of my more energetic kids, this would have gone over like a lead balloon.  It's beautiful, and descriptive, and not actually very long, but it's all essentially a dream sequence, and it's simply not very exciting - it just narrates a stereotypical "platonic ideal" of a day at the beach, from before sunrise to after dark.  It worked, and everything was lovely, but it very easily could have been simply too sedate.