Tuesday Storytime: Pumpkins

Continuing our month-long Halloween party;

Pumpkin Soup
Helen Cooper
ISBN: 0374361649
Lush oversized oils and wild imaginative scenes.

I really love this book a lot.  It's perfect for halloween storytimes for my area and age-group because it isn't about halloween or pumpkins, it's about friendship and quarrels and wild imagination and regrets and sacrificing and compromise, but it's GOT pumpkins and wild imaginations and scary possibilities, and walking out in the dark, so it gets at many of the same fears from an oblique approach. Similar, but a bit more obvious, is Bear Feels Scared, by Karma Wilson (another potential for later this month).  Anyway, it's beautiful and sweet and if I didn't always use it for pumpkins and halloween every year, it would go very well with Three By the Sea, by Mini Grey, which deals with essentially the same plot, and possibly The Lapsnatcher, by Bruce Coville or On Mother's Lap, by Ann Herbert Scott.

Duck & Goose Find a Pumpkin (boardbook)
Tad Hills
ISBN: 9780375858130
Duck & Goose series in miniature.  Cute, innocent, and faux-naive drawings.

Short and sweet.  Duckling and Gosling see Thistle (a swan cygnet, I believe?) wander by with a pumpkin, and they head off in an industrious search for one of their own, looking in allll the wrong places. Kids find it impossible to resist answering the series of questions with forceful "NO"s that get even louder and more excited and exasperated the longer the hapless babies look in silly places.  Thistle re-appears at the end to offer a pointed tip, and the quest ends in success.

Pumpkin Cat
Anne Mortimer
ISBN: 9780061874857
Sweet naturalistic drawings show the life-cycle of a pumpkin, from seed to jack-o-lantern.

Cat and Mouse are growing a pumpkin, and they walk through all the steps necessary to create a home for a plant and then make it grow. It gets a bit repetitive, as the call-and-response of "What now?" doesn't change AT ALL through the whole book.  Regardless, a very simple and factual explanation of where pumpkins come from, for the very littlest listeners, and the Cat and Mouse make for sweet and adorable narrators and proxies to watch.  The final page does say "Happy Halloween" as the Mouse makes the pumkin into a "surprise" for Cat (a jack-o-lantern), so be aware.