Tuesday Storytime: Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs are always a hit.

How Do Dinosaurs Play with their Friends? (board book edition)

Jane Yolen, illustrated by Mark Teague

ISBN: 043985654X

One of the more obviously moralistic of the "How Do Dinosaurs..." series offers conflict resolution in a dino-sized package.

This board book version MIGHT be shorter than the regular one - it's been a long time since I looked through it and I can't remember.  Regardless, there is no story to speak of, just narration of what a dino does with his friends: does he hog the swings? or pout and grump? or refuse to share? Of Course Not! Dinosaurs are GOOD friends, and so they share, and take turns, and respect other people's feelings. About half the book is spent on the bad examples, and about half on the good examples, which is a good flow for storytime, but I'm not so sure it's better for moral impressions. (Psychologically speaking things go better when ONLY the good examples are presented, oddly enough.)

Dinosaur Roar!

Paul & Henrietta Stickland

ISBN: 061335933X

One of my all time favorite dino books.  Lots of dinos, lots of compare and contrast words, so short.

I love this book so much. It's short and simple and rhythmic and the contrast words are delightful vocabulary: "dinosaur fierce, dinosaur meek... dinosaur clean, and dinosaur slimy... dinosaur spiky and dinosaur lumpy..." with just absolutely perfect bright clear colorful images and expressive faces and bodies. Really delightful, I don't even care that there's not a story there.

Dinotrux

Chris Gall

ISBN: 9780316027779

What's better than dinosaurs? Dinosaurs that are ALSO heavy construction equipment, obviously!

These steamy meany stompy powerful things are Dinotrux, and they're not playing around - life is hard work, and they're gonna get things done! Each dino-machine combo has an appropriately-dinosaurific name: "dumplododucus" "garbageadon" "semisaurs" and gets a spread to themselves or shared with another complementary mecha (they seem like mecha to me) talking about their prehistoric lives and work.  The (cute but unnecessary) catch at the end is that over the eons, they've evolved into the current batch of "tame" construction vehicles that people work with every day.  

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.