Tuesday Storytime: Colors and Shapes Get Together

I love concept books. They're so much fun when they take simple ideas like shapes and colors and run with them to fun places like relationships or rivalries or even a story about outwitting a cat. These three have been sitting for a while waiting for a good time, and right before summer reading wildness is as good a time as any.

Blue VS Yellow
Tom Sullivan
ISBN: 9780062452955
Two sort of scribbly balls of bright color vie over who is the best: blue claims the sky, the blue whale, popsicles, and big blue trucks, while yellow gets the sun, the cheetah, lemonade, and fast yellow sports cars. Some (very minor color related) slurs are thrown, things get heated, and they end up in a blur of green! All is well until now red wades in, remarking that Obviously, everyone knows that red is best.

Perfect Square
Michael Hall
ISBN: 9780061915130
A square starts off - it's happy with it's solid squareness, solid sides, equal edges, sharp balanced corners. But then every day of the week something dramatic happens and Square has to figure out what to do with its new - very much not square - self. First it's hole-punched and sliced to bits! Then it's shredded, then reduced to ribbons, then crumpled and wrinkled all up... By the end of the week, Square is looking forward to whatever weird thing is going to happen... but nothing does. So Square creates a window that shows all the magnificent things it's been able to create from itself. Psychologically, it's a little bit iffy, but it's very pretty and it's a good surface story about being creative and "thinking outside the box" so I try very hard to not overthink it.

Mouse Shapes
Ellen Stoll Walsh
ISBN: 9780152060916
Our mouse friends from Mouse Paint and Mouse Count are back, and this time they're hiding in a pile of blocks (or perhaps paper cut-outs, it's never quite clear) from the cat. While they wait for the coast to clear, they use the shapes to make all sorts of fun things, and eventually they even hit on a solution to scare away the cat!



 

Tuesday Storytime: Fall is Here!

With Monster Month safely behind us for another year, it's time for the rotation to begin having a solid selection of "fall" themed books, and oh there are just so many good ones to choose from. This time around I went with two solid favorites, and a new discovery just recently published.


Wonderfall
Michael Hall
ISBN: 9780062382986
A tree narrates a set of short non-rhyming poems as the season progresses from the end of summer to the beginning of winter, hitting on the start of school, Halloween, and Thanksgiving, along with blustery winds, animal migrations and foraging, and even composting! Really well done, and a delightful addition to our collection.


Mystery Vine
Cathryn Falwell
ISBN: 9780061771989
This one really needs to be done very early in the fall, so I wanted to go ahead and use it while summer is still fairly fresh in people's minds. A pair of kids follow a garden through the year in cute little rhyming couplets while a "mystery vine" grows along the fence until fall, when everything else in the garden is dead or dying - it's of course a pumpkin vine. There's a spread about trick-or-treating, but the focus is on the outdoors and the garden.


Moon Glowing
Elizabeth Partridge, illustrated by Joan Paley
ISBN: 0525468730
We follow a squirrel, bat, beaver, and bear through the developing fall into winter, as they prepare for the coming cold weather. Very sparse text, very short, not much content. Chosen to be a short final story for our typical fall crowd of very very young babies and toddlers, who are nearing (or well past) their attention spans by the last book of the day. Sweet and a bit solemn,