Our theme this year is Fantastic Reads and Where to Find Them, and so all of our selections this year are a little fantastical. Our statewide theme is health-focused, so as the summer progresses, lots of the stories will focus on fantastical foods, but for the first storytime, we're going with Fantastic Friends.
Larf
Ashley Spires
ISBN: 9781554537013
Larf is a hipster sasquatch who is conflicted about being the only sasquatch - especially when he maybe isn't?
This is a sweet story about the pros and cons of putting yourself out there to find a friend, and will be especially resonant with shy or introverted or self-sufficient kids (and adults, tbh). Larf lives alone with his rabbit Eric, and is happily solo, until he sees an advertisement for a sasquatch at a nearby city, and begins to ponder (and sweat) the idea of having someone else around. What if's and catastrophizing abound, and a somewhat obvious twist at the end will have the adults laughing.
Dinosaur Kisses
David Ezra Stein
ISBN: 9780763661045
Dinah hatches out and sees a cute pair of fluffy animals kissing. She wants to try, but dinosaur kisses are dangerous to everyone else.
Dinah tries very hard to kiss the other inhabitants of her prehistoric world, but fails miserably; head-butting them, stomping them into the ground, even eating one by accident! When a sibling hatches out next to her, she's overjoyed to finally have someone to share her own style of dinosaur "kisses."
Hey, Al
Arthur Yorinks, Richard Egielski
No ISBN in book: Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1986.
Caldecott winner. Al and his dog Eddie are fed up with the hard life. A paradise of birds seems great, but there's a really big catch.
This story is a really excellent showcase of how much storytelling you can pack into a very short narrative, with tight word choices and excellent illustrations. It even has a delightful Icarus and Daedalus shout-out in there. Beautiful language, great characterization, and a sharp message about creating your own happiness and not being duped by things when they're too good to be true.
Showing posts with label Dinosaur Kisses. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dinosaur Kisses. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 14, 2016
Tuesday, July 8, 2014
Summer Reading Program 2014. Week 4: Dinosaurs
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.
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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