Tuesday Storytime: Airplanes and Airports

With school getting out, there's lots of travel on the horizon, and air travel is stressful for lots of adults. Books about the process can help kids understand what's going on, and provide a sense of control and familiarity with the system, even if the adults are still longing for those mini-bottles.

The Airport Book
Lisa Brown
ISBN: 9781626720916
Really detailed comic-strip format (almost reminds me of a Richard Scarry book) follows a family (and a "lost" stuffed Monkey) through the process of getting to, through, and waiting in an airport, then getting onto, into, and settled into a flight, and then back out the other side. VERY detailed, and very darkly humorous about the lines and the waiting and the boredom.

Airport
Byron Barton
ISBN: 0690041691
Same idea as the first book, but much more simple. We also have more impressive clear blocky illustrations of airplanes, cockpits, and radio-control towers in this book, which leaves a more powerful visual impression. This simplified version really streamlines the human-centered portion of the process.

Miss Mouse Takes Off
Jan Ormerod
ISBN: 0688178715
From the perspective of a stuffed mouse lovey, we get the same process one final time. This time we really feel the boredom and time spent in the air, as well as the ample opportunities for things to get lost or mislaid along the way. We also get our first view of an airplane bathroom, which was VERY interesting to the kids. Details were about midway between The Airport Book and Airport, which works well for a final impression.

Tuesday Storytime: Airplanes!

Finally my turn again! When you're only doing storytime every other week, it's a long time when one gets cancelled. Last week we took a tour through some airplanes, as families look forward to holidays and visiting far-flung family or friends.

Airplanes Soaring! Turning! Diving!
Patricia Hubbell
Other than wanting to indict them for grave abuse of exclamation points on their title (seriously, people have to type that out) this is a seriously adorable and fact-filled early interest book about airplanes. Reads quick, a few fun vertically-oriented pages to mix things up a bit, and lots of weird faux-historical illustrations.

A B Cs on Wings
Ramon Olivera
Very well done. Super quick and easy to read, lay-out is STELLAR. Paper is crisp and weighty, colors are rich, designs are clear and stylized. Really truly super book.


Airport 
Byron Barton
Another good "slice of life" by Barton. This time we focus on the process of getting TO the airplane: all the boring bits of arriving at the airport and processing through the waiting rooms and into the plane. It's VERY dated: the illustrations are quite 70s, and of course there's no security to be seen, but the gist is the same, and a kid isn't going to notice the finer details. Perfect for making air travel seem routine and calm, while still keeping the fun and excitement of airplanes themselves.

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: Builders and Construction

Back to non-thematic storytimes this week.  No holidays, no National Month of whatever, just me and whatever quirky theme my strange mind has dredged up in the last few weeks.  I do love picking out picture books to present to kids.  It's a fun mix of curating content and balancing ages and lengths and art styles and how complex or difficult the wording is... so much to think about.  When I choose badly, and the storytime goes poorly, it's quite frustrating, but when they flow nicely, that half hour is just a delightful flow of narrative and story from me to the families.

Fix-It Duck
Jez Alborough
ISBN: 0060006994
Spunky but accident-prone Duck tries to "fix-it" with problems that are usually his own fault.

It's raining outside, so when a DRIP falls PLOP into Duck's tea, he immediately thinks the roof is leaking.  This is a job for Fix-It Duck!  But he can't reach the roof.  So he goes to borrow Sheep's ladder, and in the process, notices the camper's skylight is broken.  Fix-It Duck is on the case - but he breaks the window.  Now Sheep's house is leaking too!  Fix-It Duck can fix it, by towing Sheep's camper under Goat's shed.  But Fix-It Duck has left tools and nails and broken glass lying around, and Sheep's Jeep gets a flat!  No worries for Fix-It Duck, who offers his own truck - which can't hitch to Sheep's camper.  A creative re-use of the ladder fixes that, until a wild swerve around a curve (because Duck is a bad driver, obvs) spirals the situation beyond even what the optimistic and ever-hopeful Duck can manage to fix.  Poor Sheep.


My Apron
Eric Carle
ISBN: 0399226850
True story from Carle's childhood, where he helped his uncle plaster a building for a day.

Uncle Adam is a plasterer, and he has a snazzy white apron with a pocket, and works on buildings all day, coating them with protective and beautiful white plaster.  The boy Carle gets an apron made by his aunt, and spends the day as a proud and effective helper in this very short and sweet story.


Building a House
Byron Barton
ISBN: 0688842917
Barton's trademark blocky colors and thick outlines are joined by rare humanistic people.

We start with a green hill (that color blocking!) and follow in quick succession the steps of house-building, from digging out the ground, foundation and flooring, walls, rafters, roof, plumbing and wiring, finishing, and painting.  The house is built (and garishly colored) in the end, ready for the final step of building a house: standing ready as a family moves in.  Simple words and clear illustrations, but everything is accurate and straightforward and realistic.

Tuesday Storytime: Almost-Fairy-Tales

These are fairy-tale-ish stories that I've enjoyed, but aren't as long or complicated as actual fairy tales, nor as short and simplistic as nursery rhymes.  Halfway between.

Knick Knack Paddy Whack
SteveSongs, illustrated by Christiane Engel
ISBN: 9781846861444
Lively collage village full of people and activity.

This doesn't keep to the original rhyme, and the last stanza is horribly out of meter, but regardless, it's cute and fun, and a good simple introduction to this sort of nursery-rhyme song.  And yes, I do sing.  Badly today, as I'm suffering a bit of a cold, but it was sung.


The Wee Little Woman
Byron Barton
ISBN: 0060233877
Blocky shapes, thick black outlines, and bright primary colors identify this as a Barton book.

I love the simple message of this story - words have power.  A wee little woman has gone and gotten milk from her wee little cow (I'm eliding the many wee little implements and steps this process takes) but her wee little cat snitches the milk that she left on the table.  She yells, he flees, and they're both sad until he returns to find her waiting with a bowl of milk just for him.  Perfect narrative structure, perfect amount of conflict and peril (kitty looks very sad in a black page full of stars), and perfect simple reconciliation.


Big Bad Wolf
Claire Masurel, illustrated by Melissa Iwai
ISBN: 0439282438
Die-cut holes reveal aspects of the "Big Bad Wolf" who really isn't so bad in person.

The villagers live in fear of the big bad wolf, but he's really a sweet dad wolf who works and plays in the woods all day, then goes home for dinner with his cubs and then transforms into a super-scary wolf to chase them all into bed and give them kisses.   Adorable, and a nice short big-bad-wolf story.  (Another excellent one is Wolf's Coming (Joe Kulka, ISBN: 9781575059303), which is a LOT more ominous in tone - I've actually made kids cry with that one.)

Summer Reading Program 2014. Week 5: Engineering (My Original Plan)

Still no AC this week.  Very warm, despite fans.  Families still great, kids still lovely.

Because of the heat, I switched things up a bit.  My original plan was to read Willy and the Cardboard Boxes by Lizi Boyd, How a House is Built by Gail Gibbons, and Demolition by Sally Sutton (all of which I'll review below, because they are awesome books, and I'm sad I didn't get to do them this time.)  Instead, I had a whole different line-up of shorter, easier books, which I'll also review in the next post, because they are also quite nice, and the kids enjoyed them.  

My Original Plan:

Willy and the Cardboard Boxes
Lizi Boyd
ISBN: 9780670836369
A boy goes to work with his dad and spends the day with a set of empty cardboard boxes, which turn into many imaginary things.

I like this story for a lot of reasons.  First, we have a dad taking his son to work, which is nice.  Next, we have the dad being supportive and helpful towards his son's self-play activities (offering advice, giving scissors and tape, checking in on him but not interrupting).  After that we have Willy himself, creating an awesome stream-of-consciousness adventure fueled pretty much entirely by some boxes and markers.  The story is longer, but it flows well, and the ending where Willy and his dad head back home is surprisingly touching.

Demolition
Sally Sutton, illustrated by Brian Lovelock
ISBN: 9780763664930
Pencil and watercolor? illustrations of oversized but realistic construction equipment, lots of sound effects.

A really good pick for the middle, because it's so short and lively, unfortunately it was out of place in my replacement (oh my lord it's so hot) line-up of reads today.  Despite the fun of the book, and the great rhymes and word-play, I would have preferred that it either stick with the theme of demolition, leaving an empty bare place for the next construction, or that the creation of the park at the end was more integrated into the story.  Have to say that I like Roadwork (same author/illustrator) a little better for that exact reason, even though my go-to book for road-building is Easy Street by Rita Gray, illustrated by Mary Bono (which I also need to use again and review).  Niggles aside, I doubt that toddlers obsessed with construction equipment are even going to notice, and it's great fun to read.

How a House is Built
Gail Gibbons
ISBN: 9780823412327
Simple primary-colors and clean lines show off the process of constructing and moving into a house.

Extremely similar to Byron Barton's Building a House, but with more text and the illustrations are slightly more sophisticated, and often show chronology through inset panels (like a comic strip or "classic" graphic novel).  The small pictures can present difficulties for larger groups, but despite that, I prefer this one unless I specifically need a short read because it has much more information and more specific construction details.  I find that kids are really interested in the details, so they're willing to sit longer when they're hearing bits they haven't learned about before (plumbing and wiring especially seem fascinating).

So, I'm a bit sad that I didn't get to use these good books today, but they're a great program all together, and I'm going to hit them up again probably in the fall when school starts back up.

Storytime Potentials: My Bus, Byron Barton

My Bus
Byron Barton
ISBN: 9780062287366

So, the sad news first: the bus driver isn't Sam from My Car.  I was very disappointed.  Still, Joe is cute, and he drives around a bussload of cats and dogs (no, no conflicts here - this is Byron Barton!) to various different types of transport - cars, trains, planes, boats - until the end of the line when one extra dog follows Joe home (and there's a sneaky cat lurking around the bus on the last page!)

I love the colors.  I love the blocky minimalist forms, I love that there's no conflicts or troubles, I love the short direct statements in oversized text.

Tuesday Storytime: Wheels in the City

Got a fun new rhyming book in, and made an easy match with some of my perennial favorites.

Zoom! Zoom! Sounds of Things that Go in the City
Robert Burleigh, illustrated by Tad Carpenter
ISBN: 9781442483156
Personified objects and busy, sharp-edged, primary-color illustrations.

The main stanza rhymes are easy to find on each spread in a blocked-out section of the busy pages, but the same can't be said for the "sound effects" - which is my only quibble.  The sounds are actually illustrated into the spread, and share the same saturation and color and design as the page around it - making them a little hard to find during a busy storytime.

Not too long, not too complicated, and a nice mix of types and varieties of vehicles - from skateboards to subways to concrete mixers - all experience a day in the busy city, from earliest morning of joggers and delivery trucks to latest night of home-going partiers and tired subway riders.




My Car
Byron Barton
ISBN: 9780060296247
Bright blocky childlike shapes, in vivid contrasting colors.

Sam tells the reader directly all about his car, which he loves, washes, cares for, fuels, and drives carefully into town to begin his work as a bus driver.  (In our delivery this morning, we got a new Byron Barton book that has a bus on the cover.  If this is a sequel to My Car, I'm going to be really happy.)  Short, direct, straightforward, and still has lots of fun details - a breakdown of the parts of a car (body, chassis, wheels, steering wheel, engine) a nice snapshot of a gas station (with a really amusingly dated price tag for the gas), and a collection of street-signs to identify.




The Adventures of Taxi Dog
Debra and Sal Barracca, illustrated by Mark Buehner
ISBN: 0803706715
Reading Rainbow Book: illustrations are thick vivid oils over acrylic in grimy but vibrant colors.

This book has an ulterior motive - it's written to raise awareness of the plight of city strays.  However, that simply forms the origin story of Maxi the Taxi Dog, and at about the halfway point, it moves from being the story of his rescue into the story of his life working the streets with his taxi-driver owner Jim.  They pick up interesting fares: from the opera singer to the requisite wife having a baby to the even more requisite how-many-clowns-can-fit in the taxi scene.  The story is written in delightful rhyme that I personally find super-easy to read with feeling and humor.  There are sequels, but none are quite as good as the original.