Tuesday Storytime: Chickens

A bit off the beaten track, but hey, Chickens and baby chicks!

A Chicken Followed Me Home
Robin Page
ISBN: 9781481410281
Nonfiction Q&A style fact-book targeted at the very youngest readers/listeners. Very good info, well presented.

Big Fat Hen
Keith Baker
ISBN: 0152928693
The classic counting rhyme gets a facelift with a slightly-oversized bright collection of spreads.

Big Red Barn
Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated by Felicia Bond
ISBN: 9780060207489
A sweet and gentle look at a person-free day on the farm with animals and their babies.

Tuesday Storytime (& LAST SRP): Monster Foods

Our last summer reading program - I feel like I've missed so much of the program this year because I've been assigned to other tasks away from the circulation desk, and also had to miss several program days.  It seems to have gone smoothly and everyone in my programs enjoyed themselves (and reported good things about the others).  Now for the long awaited recovery period until next spring!

Book Lists for Storytime and Summer Reading were identical this time around, so titles are in the order I gave them, and simply listed the once.

Monster Chefs

Brian and Liam Anderson

ISBN: 9781596438088

Monster Chefs have to find something new for the king to eat, but keep coming up empty-clawed.

Very cute, and the twist at the end is very nice (I very much appreciate the character design of the twist.)  The king of monsters is tired of eating eyeballs in ketchup, and demands his four chefs venture into the world to find something new to eat, or become dinner themselves.  Each finds an animal, who is clever enough to talk themselves out of being dinner, to the sadness of the chefs, except the last chef, who goes in a completely different direction (no pun intended) to get themselves out of the stew. 

Betty Goes Bananas

Steve Antony

ISBN: 9780553507614

Betty the baby gorilla has a bit of a temper problem, exacerbated when she encounters a recalcitrant banana.

I love the way that temper tantrums are presented here, with a quick escalation, and a just-as-quick calming - just the way kids themselves at that age operate.  Betty really wants to eat that banana, but things just keep going wrong!  It won't open, then it is open, but SHE wanted to open it, then it BREAKS!  Whatever will Betty do?  Throw a tantrum, of course.

LMNO Peas

Keith Baker

ISBN: 9781416991410

Lively peas in costume frolic thematically around giant pastel capital letters.

I normally don't read straight alphabet books in storytimes, and even number/counting concept books are difficult, because they're soooo limited as far as actual story arch.  It's just a straight recitation of things, with a common theme or a silly catch, or perhaps both (looking at you, chicka chicka boom boom) but not much substance.  LMNO Peas is not the best storytime read, but it's at least cute and has enough interesting vocabulary to get through a recitation.  These peas are alphabet peas, and they have professions and interests that span from A-Z.  The drawings are quite detailed, but the pages are large and well-filled, so they're visually interesting even to the kids in the back rows.  It helps that Baker has a great ear, so the reading (despite the vocabulary lessons) is smooth and the rhymes and cadence just flows right out.  Makes it so much easier when it rolls nicely out like that.

Tuesday Storytime: Valentines Friends

So many good books about friendships and valentines!  Too hard to narrow down to just three, so I like doing multiple storytimes - there will be more love going around next week!

Friendshape

Amy Krouse Rosenthal, illustrated by Tom Lichtenheld (Exclamation Mark)

ISBN: 9780545436823

The duo behind the visually punny Exclamation Mark returns with a set of four shapes who are excellent friends.  Previously reviewed here.

The four friends (a red rectangle, green equilateral triangle, yellow square, and light blue circle) extol the virtues of friendship in a series of visual puns and clever wordplay.  For example, "Friends welcome others to join in" has the blue circle exclaiming "so glad you could stop by!" to a red octagon (get it?) while "Friends play fair and ..." has the yellow square friend at the end of those ellipses, so kids can learn the phrase "fair and square" on their own.  So cute.  I don't know how much the littles got out of it, but the parents had a blast.

The Day it Rained Hearts

Felicia Bond (If You Give a Mouse a Cookie) 

ISBN: 0066238765 

It rained hearts, so our heroine collects them to decorate and send as valentines to her friends.

This is a great story, because other than the fanciful premise of it raining hearts, the whole premise is about using resources and creating things especially for friends - to make something that would appeal to a friend specifically, not to make generic or mass-market offerings.  The prosaic matter-of-fact storytelling puts the emphasis on creation and consideration of individual quirks and interests, and the illustrations hit them again, even when the text moves on.  Very sweet, very straightforward, and good for a bit before Valentines Day, because of the focus on creating and sending the hearts. 

No Two Alike

Keith Baker (LMNO Peas, Big Fat Hen)

ISBN: 9781442417427

More lyrical and mellow than his previous books, but lush and beautiful; both visually and to read.

Keith Baker is a fantastic artist, and I've enjoyed his concepts.  His illustrations for Big Fat Hen are utterly scrumptious (I've used both it and LMNO Peas in storytimes before) so it's nice to have another by him, and I'm enjoying this meditation on friendship and individual differences very much.  It's a bit of a conceptual leap for littles, but it's still beautiful, and the story flows nicely at the end of the storytime (it is VERY mellow, and very downbeat).  We follow two red birds through a winterscape as they explore the idea that nothing: no two nests, no two snowflakes, no two roads or bridges or fawns or even the little red birds themselves, are exactly alike, and that's precisely how it should be.  Sweet with just a tinge of melancholy.   

Tuesday Storytime: Counting with Ducks

And yes, there are enough duck books in the picture book world for there to be a three-book storytime specifically about ducks and counting.

Nine Ducks Nine (previously reviewed here)
Sarah Hayes
ISBN: 9780763638160
9 watercolor ducks hatch a plan to outwit a pursuing fox through an idyllic countryside.

This is essentially the same story as Do Like a Duck Does (Hindley and Bates, 2002 Candlewick hardcover ISBN: 0763616680), where a family of ducks outwit a fox and the fox ends up taking a swim.  To be perfectly honest, I like the cadence and the illustrations of that story better than this one.  But, this one has numbers and counting, and this one is also a longer read.

Quack and Count
Keith Baker  (Big Fat Hen, 1994 HMH hardcover ISBN: 9780152928698)
ISBN: 0152928588
Colorful and textural collages (even the words!) follow permutations of 7 ducklings.

I've used Baker's Big Fat Hen in a counting storytime before, and he's a stunningly talented artist.  This is less a counting book, and more of a math concepts book, but whatever.  It totally counts.  We start with 7 ducklings all together, and then Baker creates a clever series of rhymes for each sum of seven: starting with "Slipping, sliding, having fun / 7 ducklings, 6 plus 1."  Then 5 + 2, 4 + 3, and so on.  What's fun is to compare the different scenes with reversed sums: so we also have "7 ducklings, 1 plus 6 / In the water playing tricks" to compare with the first rhyme.  The pages are all in full spreads, with the seven ducks divided up between the two pages to match the sum in question.  Really pretty book, and really clever concept.

Five Little Ducks
from the nursery song, illustrated by Ivan Bates
ISBN: 0439746930
Colored pencils and watercolors. Bright expressive characters foregrounded against soft scenery.

Ivan Bates is a beautiful illustrator, and I love his work so much.  I try not have repeats of an author or an illustrator within a storytime, which is the other reason I didn't choose Do Like a Duck Does for this trio.  This is a simple illustration of the first verse of the rhyme, but there's a cute little story hidden within the illustrations about just why the ducklings aren't coming back each time.  So adorable.


This ended up being on the very short end on things, but I actually try to choose shorter sets of books for the early fall.  Families are coming in with their younger kids only (the older ones have headed off to preschool or kindie) and without the older kids to model good storytime behavior, it's harder for the little ones (and to be totally honest, the parents) to keep from squiggling around like mad.  This is the sort of thing you figure out over time, watching the pattern repeat every fall, and you just learn to work around it - shorter stories, more obvious transitions, really expressive stories with very narrative illustrations.