We skipped the week of Fourth of July, and now we're back with a bang to celebrate the science of dinosaurs!
Super huge crowd today, really attentive and energetic kids, great parents. I love my storytime families so much!
I Dreamt I Was a Dinosaur was our kickoff for my youngsters this morning. I paired it with Dinosaur Roar! as I originally planned, but an AC outage left me mixing things up a bit - Dinosaurumpus was a little too energetic and long for the appalling heat, so we switched over to a cute new one I found a few weeks back called Dinosaur Kisses.
Dinosaur Roar!
Paul & Henrietta Stickland
ISBN: 0525452761
THE PERFECT book of opposites and dinosaurs, with slightly exaggerated colorful and personable dinos.
I LOVE this book. I love this book so hard that I have to stop myself from using it every time I do a Dinosaur program. I might like dinosaurs a lot - they're a great program topic, because I'm excited and the kids are thrilled. I love this book so hard I bought it for my home library and I don't even have kids! Very little coherent story, but we get a parade of various imaginative dinosaurs (no hard names here, which is part of the appeal) which nicely and smartly contrast each other, and rhyme across pages, so we have "Dinosaur fat and dinosaur tiny" on one page, and then the next shows us "Dinosaur clean (using a nail file) and dinosaur slimy." LOVE LOVE LOVE.
Dinosaur Kisses
David Ezra Stein
ISBN: 9780763661045
Naive art, a blobby excited dinosaur baby romps through her world causing mayhem as she tries to "kiss" things.
I'm not totally thrilled with the artwork here, but I have to admit that it suits the tone of the story. It's a little messy, a little blobby, a little scribbly. Like a cross between Mo Willem's Pigeon books and David Shannon's No David books. A newly hatched dinosaur (again, no names) goes around trying to kiss things, and messing up - instead stomping and chomping and whomping them, which is an issue really, until another baby dino hatches (a sibling?) whereupon the "kisses" of stomping and chomping and whomping work perfectly. Interesting to me because it doesn't end with the baby mastering the art of kisses, but with her finding someone who is suited to her own brand of rough and tumble affection instead.
This afternoon, we've got the older kids, and I think with the heat (no AC in the room), I'm going to wimp out and only do two books with them today.
Our Summer Reading Featured Book is Dinosaurs Love Underpants, which I have to be honest, isn't my cuppa, but it's cute and fun, and the older kids will like that they're listening to an adult read to them about underwear. Since I'm only doing two today, the second really needs to be a firecracker, so I'm pulling out Dinosaurumpus for the job.
Dinosaurs Love Underpants
Claire Freedman and Ben Cort
ISBN: 9781416989387
Scruffy bearded cavemen hide from caricatured brightly-colored dinos, also underwear.
The rhymes flow nicely, and the story is silly and fun, but it's not my favorite. T-Rex chases down a caveman and demands his underpants, which starts a fad, which starts a war, and as the dinos tussle over the underpants, they all get ripped up, and the dinos kill each other off. Ends with a modern-day coda with a moral lesson: take care of your underpants because they saved our ancestors from the dinosaurs.
Dinosaurumpus!
Tony Mitton, illustrated by Guy Parker-Rees
ISBN: 9780439395144
This is a delightful book - when I can manage to get through it. The story is zippy and silly, the wordplay is fast and furious, and the rhyming and rhythm are a quick syncopated drumbeat that propels you through the story - great for the listeners, great for energy, not so great when part of the rhymes are the names of the dinosaurs. Stutter just once over "deinonychuses" (dino-night-chooses) and you're sunk! With the proper preparation and a great deal of energy, this one is a fast-paced fun dinosaur read that I'm always happy to show off to a group of kids.
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