Tuesday Storytime: Seeing Stars

A good set of books today, for a fairly large crowd.

Our Stars

Anne Rockwell

ISBN: 0152018689

Lovely factual and old-fashioned book examines stars, the sun, planetary and lunar orbits, comets, meteors (shooting stars), and constellations in clear illustrations and simple age-appropriate language, using the correct terms and explaining them straightforwardly.

The Sun is my Favorite Star

Frank Asch (Happy Birthday Moon)

ISBN: 0152021272

Skirt-wearing white child waxes lyrical about our own personal star: the sun. Beautiful fuzzy-edged and warm-toned imagery, and very short and sweet (and repetitive) sentences.

Fancy Nancy Sees Stars

Jane O'Connor, illustrated by Ted Enik (in the style of the original artist: Robin Preiss Glasser)

ISBN: 9780062572752

Fancy Nancy loves fancy words, and also loves stars. Her class is headed for a night trip to the planetarium when disaster strikes and the trip is cancelled, but her family makes the best of it (as they always do) and the class trip is saved (perhaps by a wish on a shooting star?)

Tuesday Storytime: SRP Space: Rockets Away!

First set of books bequeathed to my trainee: rocketry is cool and fun. I don't blame her at all for choosing these for her first round.

The Moon (a Bamboo and Friends book)
Felicia Law, illustrated by Nicola Evans
ISBN: 1404812822
Bamboo and friends admire the moon and then take an imaginary rocket journey up to see it.Very cute combo of nonfictional information and cute preschool thinking styles.

On the Launch Pad (a counting book about rockets)
Michael Dahl, illustrated by Derrick Alderman and Denise Shea
ISBN: 1404805818
Counting down the iconic 10, 9, 8 with really good pictures and informational text, and a fun horizontal spread at the end that requires you to turn the whole book sideways.

Roaring Rockets
Tony Mitton, illustrated by Ant Parker
ISBN: 061388857X
Trippy wordplay and anthropormorphic animals traveling up to the moon and back down into a splashdown in the ocean.

Tuesday Storytime: Summer Reading Program theme is SPACE! This week: Going to the Moon

Last week was CRAZY!

Still, storytime was fun and we did our first round of space books. I mixed things up a bit, because with a trainee storyteller on board, I feel obligated to give her the first choice of the summer-reading space-themed book sets so she can continue to feel as comfortable and engaged as possible while she's still on-boarding during this first summer. So that means she grabbed all the "good" sets I picked out and worked into coherent and easy fun themes. Ah well. I didn't have time this spring to plan things as far ahead as I would have liked, so it only seems right that I should suffer instead of my trainee.

What that means in practice is that all the "odd" sets or themes that are slightly too long or too advanced conceptually, those are on me this summer. I really wish there were more nonfiction books designed for very young readers and listeners. There's just so much for older elementary school kids, and just a drought for the little preschoolers, and especially for things like space and dinosaurs and sharks, they WANT good nonfiction: I just don't have access to it to give it to them.

Our first space adventure is going to the moon! I had only two books this time: I read the Kellog tome as both the first and last book, splitting it up right before the kid lands on the moon, and reading Barton's book in the middle as a bit of a break.

If You Decide To Go To The Moon
Faith McNulty, illustrated by Steven Kellog
ISBN: 9780590483599
Beautiful Kellogian spreads of space and lunar landscapes and a stirring and somewhat preachy return to earth.

I Want to be an Astronaut
Byron Barton
ISBN: 9780064432801
Barton's minimalism works really well for this aspirational declaration of all the things the potential (female?) astronaut wants to accomplish. Stark and powerful and colorful.

Tuesday Storytime: Dogs

We decided to give it one last week to let our trainee get one more set of self-selected books done before the summer: our kickoff is later this week, so we had a bit of wiggle room to work with.

Dog's Colorful Day

Emma Dodd

ISBN: 0142500194

Cartoony oversized style, with messy colors all around. Silly fun, especially since all the colorful spots are perfectly round and perfectly colored in, regardless of their sources (grass stains, chocolate smears, pollen). 

Spot's First Walk

Eric Hill

ISBN: 0399208380

Spot takes a walk through the yard and around the garden and pond in this lift-the-flap book. 

I Don't Want a Posh Dog!

Emma Dodd

ISBN: 9780316033909

Slightly more refined art than the first one in this trio, but still messy and colorful. A girl runs through all the types of dogs that she isn't interested in, with lots of funny illustrations of them all.