Tuesday Storytime: Spring!

Now that we're solidly into warm weather, I wanted to do some traditional "season" books, and I found a nice set of them: two weeks of spring books, and then a week about rain and mud!

It's Spring!
Linda Glaser, illustrated by Susan Swan
ISBN: 0761313451
Cut-paper dioramas in bright but naturalistic colors.  Amazingly intricate illustrations.

The rhyme scheme in this book is a little clunky at times, or perhaps I just wasn't feeling the rhythm properly, because it made me stutter a few times in storytime despite pre-reading and practicing beforehand.  Glaser has put together a perfect intro to how spring progresses, with straightforward but lyrical descriptions of natural processes and how the season progresses.  Swan's intricate and colorful dioramas and scenes enhance the immediacy of what is being narrated, and helps to ground the info in the real world.  It's not even that long!  Very good season book - probably one of the best I've read, despite the bad fit of the rhymes to my speaking cadence.


When Spring Comes
Kevin Henkes,illustrated by Laura Dronzek
ISBN: 9780062331397
Pastels and fluffy indistinct borders make everything seem fuzzy and soft and new.

This is a much more fanciful approach to spring, but still in the realm of the naturalistic.  The drawings are a lot more loose, and take a few liberties, but overall remain true to life and focused on nature.  This book's theme is waiting: if you wait, spring will do this, and that, and that other thing.  It also directly addresses the reader "I hope you like umbrellas" & etc, which I always like when that happens.  Makes the storytime seem more directly interactive and attentive to the focus of the children listening/watching.  Sweet and short.  A good length here: long enough to be a final book on it's own, and short enough that it can fit in the middle with a set of other shorter books.


And then it's spring
Julie Fogliano, illustrated by Erin E. Stead
ISBN: 9781596436244
Colored pencils and scraggly people and environments focus on the wait for spring to green up the landscape.

I don't like this one quite as much as the others, because the illustrations, while interesting, aren't as visually stimulating for little ones (there's a lot of detailed info and cute little grace notes for older or individual readers to pick up).  The narrative is entirely about the long wait for spring to come through and change the brown of the landscape to green. The only thing I don't like about this one is that the focus through the book is on seeds that were planted (presumably a garden plot from the illustrations) and the very end has the green flooding over the landscape, but doesn't show the garden plot we've been concerned about throughout the book.  It's a bit jarring to end without seeing whether the seeds have come up or not!