It's been a while since I've posted: house-selling and flu and actual paid work all piled up on me. I even missed last week's Storytime: I didn't have a voice to give it with!
Back for a Holiday Storytime this week. I like the non-major holidays because I can do storytimes for them without feeling like I'm preaching (Christmas, Easter) or all the local teachers snatch up the few good books (Thanksgiving, Fourth of July).
St. Patrick's Day
Anne Rockwell, illustrated by Lizzy Rockwell
ISBN: 9780060501976
A colored-pencil class of diverse kids present a variety of St. Patrick's Day activities in school.
I've used this in years past, and it remains my favorite St. Patrick's Day book - it's a perfect age-appropriate introduction to the idea, it's set in an American public school (albeit with an idealized racial class mix, and an unrealistic class size) and covers the basics with tact and generalities. St. Patrick is "a shephard. He didn't fight with anyone.... He went back to Ireland to teach people to be kind to each other." Another group does a skit showing Patrick driving the snakes out, and a third gives everyone a shamrock in a cup, with no mention of theology. The holiday is presented as being a celebration of the Irish, accessible and open to anyone, which is reinforced when our viewpoint character (a first-generation Irish immigrant) visits his friend Pablo's home for an after-school St. Patrick's Day treat.
Holiday Symbols: St. Patrick's Day Shamrocks
Mary Berendes, photo credits by various
ISBN: 1567666434
Nonfiction: an overview of shamrocks, what they are, how they are connected to St. Patrick and to Ireland.
We read a VERY short version of this book, reading only from the start of the text on page 7, skipping immediately to page 17 and 18, then skipping again to page 27 and finishing the book from there. Each spread has a page of very large text and a full-page photo facing it, and each page is a "chapter" in and of itself. The pages we read cut out all of the natural science of what a shamrock is, and cuts out St. Patrick's actual history. With the excisions, it made a perfect length "middle book" for my active toddlers.
I wasn't sure whether we'd have older or younger kids today, so I picked two options for our last book. Either would have been good, but we had a slightly younger and slightly more wiggly crowd today, so I went with the shorter of the two:
My Lucky Day
Keiko Kasza (A Mother for Choco)
ISBN: 0399238743
Anthropomorphic pig and fox subvert a tale of a fox attempting to get a roast pork dinner.
This is a cute tale that handily subverts the "big bad wolf" stereotype story. A fox is getting ready to hunt his dinner when a filthy, hungry, sore piglet arrives on his doorstep. This must be the fox's "lucky day," right? Well, not so fast. No one wants to eat dirty food, so the pig needs a bath, and he is a little puny, so he needs to be fattened up, and he is all stiff and sore, so he needs a massage to tenderize the meat - except the poor fox is all tuckered out, and Mr Pig, clean, fed, and massaged heads home after a very lucky day.
My alternate for an older or quieter group would have been:
Jamie O'Rourke and the Big Potato
Tomie DePaola
ISBN: 039922257X
DePaola's signature colorful sketchy style enlivens this tale of an Irish lazybones and his quest to avoid gardening.
Bonus points for a St. Patrick's Day storytime for actually including a leprechaun and being set in Ireland, but it was just too long and involved for the remains of our attention span today.
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