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.
Showing posts with label I Dreamt I Was a Dinosaur. Show all posts
Showing posts with label I Dreamt I Was a Dinosaur. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 8, 2014
Friday, February 7, 2014
Summer Reading Research, Round 1
Our summer reading program is really geared towards grade-school students, but my population of Family Storytime parents all have babies or toddlers. I feel a bit sad that they get left out of programming to such an extent, so this year I am attempting to match up the SRP weekly themes with additional books suitable for the younger set, so they can get a feeling that they are attending 'summer reading programs' even though it's just our normal storytime.
Our overarching theme this year is STEM, and our individual weeks are broken down into the following categories:
Robots
Space
Animals
Dinosaurs
Engineering
Food Science
I have a pretty good idea of what to use for a lot of these categories - for example, I already have all of my Robot titles (Robot Zot, Clink, and Doug Unplugged) and my Engineering titles (Willy & the Cardboard Boxes, How a House is Built, Demolition) picked out, but there were a few places where I wanted to branch out into new books, and even more (Food Science) where I don't have much if any direct experience with age-appropriate materials.
So, I've been looking about, and here's my first round of research.
Space:
This Rocket
Paul Collicutt
ISBN: 0374374848
Read February 7, 2014
Space Boy
Leo Landry
ISBN: 9780618605682
Read February 7, 2014
I'm looking for a good match for Mini Grey's Toys In Space and Reidy's Light Up The Night, which I've already decided on. I need a third story that is bright, has lots of action and color in the pages, and really short text blocks, because both of those are on the wordy side for my age-group.
For this purpose, This Rocket is going to be what I use for SRP, but I was glad to find Space Boy also. Space Boy follows a young boy (perhaps on the spectrum) disturbed by the noise and commotion of his family as he tries to fall asleep, so he dons a spacesuit and travels to the quiet, peaceful, beautiful moon. However, once there, the places he visits makes him think about the various noisy family-members and how they would also enjoy the moon, and so he returns home to them, and to bed. It's a sweet story, with odd little naive illustrations, and a slow gentle storyline. Excellent for a bedtime storytime - not so much what I'm looking for here. This Rocket on the other hand is PERFECT. Bright colors, contrasting rockets, really minimal text 'This rocket is tall. This rocket is short.' Excellent. I'm already looking forward to reading it!
Dinosaurs:
I Dreamt I Was A Dinosaur
Stella Blackstone, illustrated by Clare Beaton
ISBN: 1841482382
Read February 7, 2014
For this category, I only need one more title, to match up with Dinosaurumpus and Dinosaur Roar! I saw that this book had interesting felted-work illustrations (I really like mixing up different styles and types of artwork, so kids and parents realize that all sorts of illustrated works are equally valid and interesting) and since Stella Blackstone was the author, I was really hopeful. To be honest, I Dreamt I Was A Dinosaur wasn't as exciting as I thought it would be, but since it's paired with a truly stompy book, and a good short read, I'm ok with it being a slightly more sedate trip through dinosaur-land. (And I really love the felt and beadwork!) The only thing I have to worry about with this week now is mixing up my dino-name pronunciations!
Food Science:
Where Does Food Come From?
Shelley Rotner & Gary Goss, photography by Shelley Rotner
ISBN: 0761329358
Read February 7, 2014
This is an excellent nonfiction early-childhood book. I'm planning to use it with Growing Vegetable Soup and one other (as yet unselected) book. This one will be a great short middle read, with lots of colorful photos and obvious conclusions to draw that will make the kids feel smart for knowing the answers. It covers a lot of foods for such a short book - even includes salt, sugar, and maple syrup! The format is simple and clear - THIS is a food source, and THIS is the food that it eventually becomes - showing photos along the outer edges of the pages illustrating the plant or source, and someone (usually a child) happily eating the resulting food. Very nice nonfiction title. I'm planning to use it for regular storytime rotations as well as for Summer Reading.
Our overarching theme this year is STEM, and our individual weeks are broken down into the following categories:
Robots
Space
Animals
Dinosaurs
Engineering
Food Science
I have a pretty good idea of what to use for a lot of these categories - for example, I already have all of my Robot titles (Robot Zot, Clink, and Doug Unplugged) and my Engineering titles (Willy & the Cardboard Boxes, How a House is Built, Demolition) picked out, but there were a few places where I wanted to branch out into new books, and even more (Food Science) where I don't have much if any direct experience with age-appropriate materials.
So, I've been looking about, and here's my first round of research.
Space:
This Rocket
Paul Collicutt
ISBN: 0374374848
Read February 7, 2014
Space Boy
Leo Landry
ISBN: 9780618605682
Read February 7, 2014
I'm looking for a good match for Mini Grey's Toys In Space and Reidy's Light Up The Night, which I've already decided on. I need a third story that is bright, has lots of action and color in the pages, and really short text blocks, because both of those are on the wordy side for my age-group.
For this purpose, This Rocket is going to be what I use for SRP, but I was glad to find Space Boy also. Space Boy follows a young boy (perhaps on the spectrum) disturbed by the noise and commotion of his family as he tries to fall asleep, so he dons a spacesuit and travels to the quiet, peaceful, beautiful moon. However, once there, the places he visits makes him think about the various noisy family-members and how they would also enjoy the moon, and so he returns home to them, and to bed. It's a sweet story, with odd little naive illustrations, and a slow gentle storyline. Excellent for a bedtime storytime - not so much what I'm looking for here. This Rocket on the other hand is PERFECT. Bright colors, contrasting rockets, really minimal text 'This rocket is tall. This rocket is short.' Excellent. I'm already looking forward to reading it!
Dinosaurs:
I Dreamt I Was A Dinosaur
Stella Blackstone, illustrated by Clare Beaton
ISBN: 1841482382
Read February 7, 2014
For this category, I only need one more title, to match up with Dinosaurumpus and Dinosaur Roar! I saw that this book had interesting felted-work illustrations (I really like mixing up different styles and types of artwork, so kids and parents realize that all sorts of illustrated works are equally valid and interesting) and since Stella Blackstone was the author, I was really hopeful. To be honest, I Dreamt I Was A Dinosaur wasn't as exciting as I thought it would be, but since it's paired with a truly stompy book, and a good short read, I'm ok with it being a slightly more sedate trip through dinosaur-land. (And I really love the felt and beadwork!) The only thing I have to worry about with this week now is mixing up my dino-name pronunciations!
Food Science:
Where Does Food Come From?
Shelley Rotner & Gary Goss, photography by Shelley Rotner
ISBN: 0761329358
Read February 7, 2014
This is an excellent nonfiction early-childhood book. I'm planning to use it with Growing Vegetable Soup and one other (as yet unselected) book. This one will be a great short middle read, with lots of colorful photos and obvious conclusions to draw that will make the kids feel smart for knowing the answers. It covers a lot of foods for such a short book - even includes salt, sugar, and maple syrup! The format is simple and clear - THIS is a food source, and THIS is the food that it eventually becomes - showing photos along the outer edges of the pages illustrating the plant or source, and someone (usually a child) happily eating the resulting food. Very nice nonfiction title. I'm planning to use it for regular storytime rotations as well as for Summer Reading.
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