Summer Reading Storytime, space, week 5

Our 5th week of summer reading, and another week of themed storytimes for the little kids to go along with the program themes. Today we're looking at Science and Exploration!

Cece Loves Science
Kimberly Derting and Shelli R. Johannes, illustrated by Vashti Harrison
ISBN: 9780062499608
Cece and her science partner Isaac are documenting a science experiment for class: everything from coming up with a Hypothesis to Testing Parameters, to the Experiment itself, and Documenting Results. They're trying to see if Cece's dog Einstein likes vegetables. I'd like to see some interesting science-based story-stretchers based on this book and some of the narrative and scientific elisions it makes, but that's just me being picky. It's cute and fun and Cece is a great science-based protagonist.

Life on Mars
John Agee
ISBN: 9780399538520
Our intrepid ungendered protagonist marches steadfastly around on Mars, missing the forest for the trees, or in this case, the giant red alien monster for the dirt and rocks and one pretty flower. At least until he gets back to his spaceship and discovers that SOMETHING is out there in a cute little finale.

Mae Among the Stars
Roda Ahmed, illustrated by Stasia Burrington
ISBN: 9780062651730
A fictionalized account of "daydreamer" Mae Jemison, who made history as the first African-American woman astronaut, AND in space. An excellent if slightly trite rendition of the "follow your dreams and don't let the haters (or well-intentioned realists) get you down" tradition of inspirational storybook, with illustrations that drag the quality up by main force.

Tuesday Storytime: still space, even though the SRP is on a break for the 4th

This week's selections were chosen by my coworker:

The Babysitter from Another Planet
Stephen Savage
ISBN: 9780823441471

The Moon (Bamboo and Friends)
Felica Law, illustrated by Nicola Evans
ISBN: 1404812822

Chicken in Space
Adam Lehrhaupt, illustrated by Shahar Kober
ISBN: 9780062364128

Summer Reading Storytime: space, week 4

My coworker picked these out, they're super cute!

Planet Kindergarten
Sue Ganz-Schmitt, illustrated by Shane Prigmore
ISBN: 9781452118932
Really cute gloss of the first day of kindergarten as a mission to space, and it holds together quite nicely. I especially like the touches of having various kindergartners be various types of aliens just through hair and clothing and poses. Very fun, and lots of nudge-nudge wink-wink about what things "really" are. Short and cute.

Kitten's First Full Moon
Kevin Henkes
ISBN: 9780060588281
Kitten roams outside at night and discovers the moon, the night, and a nice puddle of what looks like milk, but is in fact the reflection of the beautiful moon. Soft, gentle, and sweet. A classic.

On the Launch Pad: A Counting Book About Rockets
Michael Dahl, illustrated by Derrick Alderman and Denise Shea
ISBN: 1404805818
Lovely little counting book with BRIGHT simple illustrations of rockets getting ready to blast into space. Super short and sweet, with lovely primary colors and nice textural color washes and collage pieces to add depth and visual interest. An excellent visual walkthrough of the process (very simplified) of getting a rocket ready to liftoff and head off into space, centered into a counting book where the visual elements match the number of that particular page. Hard work to set it up, but it's a breeze to read through, and a delight to look at the finished design.

Summer Reading Storytime: space, week 3

My turn again!

Three fun ones about rockets and heading off into space, to tie into our program this afternoon where a team from the local amateur radio club will be using HAM radios to ask questions of an astronaut (an actor in costume, hidden in the building).

Hedgie Blasts Off!
written and illustrated by Jan Brett
ISBN: 0399246215
Hedgie works the clean-up crew for the Professor's space program, but something's gone terribly wrong, and the robot that they want to use to for the mission has malfunctioned. Only someone Hedgie's size can fit into the rocket, so Hedgie finally gets to realize his dreams of being an astronaut, as he heads out to the mini-planet of Mikkop and the malfunctioning magic geyser that shoots up the sparkles needed to nourish the beautiful tourist-pleasing plants of the tiny planet. A cute look at astronauts, eco-tourism, conservation, and the interdependence of life, even on tiny little planets in outer space, all narrated by a humble Hedgie.

Space Boy 
written and illustrated by Leo Landry
ISBN: 9780618605682
While no formal diagnosis is given, this book seems written with Spectrum individuals in mind. Nicholas is headed to bed, but the world is too noisy. Dogs are barking, kids are crying and playing, cars are zooming outside; there's nothing for it but to drag on the spacesuit, head out back to the rocketship, and head to the moon for some peace and quiet. But after a while, and once he's settled down, he realizes he misses his family, (and hopes things have settled down there also) and heads back home to bed. Very sweet, and a good allegory of taking time to yourself and creating a quiet place in your mind (or backyard) to retreat to when things get too overwhelming.

Otter In Space
written and illustrated by Sam Garton
ISBN: 9780062247766
I dearly love the Otter books. They're just too adorable for words, but this one might be my favorite. After Otter Keeper takes Otter (and friends) to the Space Museum, and there's a familiar breakdown in the gift-shop when money never goes quite as far as it ought to, Otter (and friends) hatch a plan to find a moon rock of their very own in their back yard, building space suits and rockets and rock-retrieval-systems to help with the very hard work. They pick an excellent moon rock from the garden (and by excellent I think they picked the biggest, dirtiest one they could find) and dragged it triumphantly inside, whereupon Otter Keeper comes home from work and is Not Pleased. Compromises are made, rocks are washed, and Otter (and friends) decide that Pirate Treasure is an easier journey than Moon Rocks for tomorrow.

 

Summer Reading Storytime: Space, week 1

And we're off to the races!

These were selected by my coworker.

8 Little Planets (board-book/cut-out book)
Chris Ferrie, illustrated by Lizzy Doyle
ISBN: 9781492671244
Sweet little rhymes are filled with easy facts and fun info about all the different "official" planets.


Best Frints in the Whole Universe
Antoinette Partis
ISBN: 9781626721364
I've read this cutie before about two alien "frients" who get into a spectacular argument over sharing and responsibility and owning up to mistakes. Very cute, and full of fun tongue-twisters for the reader.

Earth Space Moon Base
Ben Joel Price
ISBN: 9780385373111
Funky 1950s esque story about a tag-team of astronaut, robot, and test monkey who have to save the world (and their moon base) from scaaaaary moon aliens.

Tuesday Storytime: Monster Trucks

Last storytime before summer reading kicks off, and I ended up with a trio of books about monster trucks and a room full of ONLY girls! I love it. The girls and their moms really got a kick out of the "non-traditional" theme, so it was a win (unintentionally) for everyone!

Elbow Grease
John Cena, illustrated by Howard McWilliam
ISBN: 9781524773519
Elbow Grease is the smallest (and the only ELECTRIC) truck in the demo derby, but he and his slew of older brothers don't let that bother them. He's got the most gumption, and that's all that matters. When he stays up all night (skipping his nightly recharge) to play hookey to get to the big-name derby across town, his brothers show up to support him as he tries his best to keep up with the big dogs, with a little help from a lightning storm to recharge his batteries along the way. A cute message about tenacity, brotherly love, and the inevitable influx of electric cars into every facet of life.

Monster Trucks
A Bobbie Kalman Book
ISBN: 9780778730194
Photo-book, mainly used for key-words and for the real-life photography of the monster trucks involved. Lots of technical details glossed gently over in favor of getting to the general point: big tires, safety cage, fancy paint, fun names, lots of history, squishing cars.

Mighty Truck
Chris Barton, illustrated by Troy Cummings
ISBN: 9780062344786
Clarence is a normal oversized work truck, with perhaps an over-fondness for playing in the dirt, until a lightning-powered wash-cycle turns him into the blazing powerhouse that is Mighty Truck! He roams around town saving friends and strangers until he gets all dirty again, and realizes that he's just as happy keeping his secret identity a secret until it's needed again - it's way more fun to play in the dirt anyway.

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: Love

It doesn't have to be Valentine's Day to do a storytime about love, right? These were picked out by my coworker.

You Are My Happy
Hoda Kotb, illustrated by Suzie Mason
ISBN: 9780062887894

A mama bear and her cub nestle down for the night and recite a list of the day's activities that made them happy, all of them centered around exploring and being together, and ending with the title phrase. A litttle on the cutesy side for me, but the artwork elevates it immensely.

Poor Louie
Tony Fucile
ISBN: 9780763658281

Louie has the best life a chihuahua can have; dinner at the table, movies with mom and dad, long walks, shopping, he has it all. Until things start getting strange. He has to eat on the floor now?! And the cute clothes are all being packed up... ? And Mom's lap keeps getting smaller and smaller. And everyone keeps saying "Pooooor Louie" in this very sad and concerned tone of voice, but sometimes laughing a little. What gives? But baby fever conquers all (as it always seems to) and Louie comes out ok in the end, even if he DOES have to share the stroller with his human baby brother now.

Love Monster and the last chocolate
Rachel Bright
ISBN: 9780374346904

Love Monster loves his friends, but he also loves chocolate. And when you have friends AND chocolate, it's very hard to figure out what is the right thing to do. So when he gets back from his vacation to find a box of chocolates, he's all in a tizzy. Without even opening the box (this is important) he starts pondering the possibilities. A good friend shares, but should he maybe open it first and eat one or two of the ones that he really really really likes FIRST? Or is that not quite friendly? What if his friends can ONLY eat those kinds? OR what if his friends eat ALL of them up and don't realize that he never got one to eat himself? What if there's only ONE in there that he likes and someone ELSE eats it and then there's a whole bunch that he doesn't even like? He gets all flustered, but then he runs out of the house to his friends playing on the hill and explains everything all in a rush, and they just laugh and tell him to open the box - there's only one in there, and they had saved it just for him.

(it's cuter and takes less time to explain in the book, I swear) 

Tuesday Storytime: Airplanes and Airports

With school getting out, there's lots of travel on the horizon, and air travel is stressful for lots of adults. Books about the process can help kids understand what's going on, and provide a sense of control and familiarity with the system, even if the adults are still longing for those mini-bottles.

The Airport Book
Lisa Brown
ISBN: 9781626720916
Really detailed comic-strip format (almost reminds me of a Richard Scarry book) follows a family (and a "lost" stuffed Monkey) through the process of getting to, through, and waiting in an airport, then getting onto, into, and settled into a flight, and then back out the other side. VERY detailed, and very darkly humorous about the lines and the waiting and the boredom.

Airport
Byron Barton
ISBN: 0690041691
Same idea as the first book, but much more simple. We also have more impressive clear blocky illustrations of airplanes, cockpits, and radio-control towers in this book, which leaves a more powerful visual impression. This simplified version really streamlines the human-centered portion of the process.

Miss Mouse Takes Off
Jan Ormerod
ISBN: 0688178715
From the perspective of a stuffed mouse lovey, we get the same process one final time. This time we really feel the boredom and time spent in the air, as well as the ample opportunities for things to get lost or mislaid along the way. We also get our first view of an airplane bathroom, which was VERY interesting to the kids. Details were about midway between The Airport Book and Airport, which works well for a final impression.

Tuesday Storytime: Gardening

These three adorable stories were chosen by my coworker.

Dandy
Ame Dyckman, illustrated by Charles Santoso
ISBN: 9780316362955
Adorable. A dedicated lion daddy tries to keep his lawn beautiful in the face of fierce competition and judgement from the other neighborhood daddies, but he's thwarted when his baby daughter finds and adopts the one dandelion in the whole yard. He tries to decapitate it sneakily, but fails until the very last moment, when he (and the neighbor guys, who are also daddies too) realize what's truly important. So adorable and cute.

The Carrot Seed
Ruth Krauss, illustrated by Crockett Johnson
ISBN: 0060233516
A classic for a reason. The value of persistence, of knowing something in your heart, and keeping the faith in the face of everyone telling you to give up. All in a cute little minimalist story about a kid growing a carrot.

Lola Plants a Garden
Anna McQuinn, illustrated by Rosalind Beardshaw
ISBN: 9781580896948
I Love the Lola books (and their baby brother set, the Leo books). They're an import from Great Britain, so there's a few small anachronisms, but this lovely Black family is a perfect showcase for lots of great stories about childhood, sibling-hood, and just general life from a kid's perspective. In this installment, Lola and her mom learn about gardens, and head off to the store to try their hands at a garden themselves. Mom plants more responsible things, but Lola is off to the races with lots of fun plants. At the end Lola and mom plan a garden party to introduce Lola's friends to all her new amazing plants.

 

Tuesday Storytime: Springtime

Not the most original of themes, but when you have cute books, what are you gonna do?

Finding Spring
Carin Berger
ISBN: 9780062250193
It's time to hibernate and wait for Spring, but little bear is waaay too keyed up for that. As soon as Mother falls asleep, he's off and searching for Spring. He finds something amazing, decides THAT is Spring, tucks some into his coat and heads back to his den for his long nap. When he wakes up, the "spring" in his coat is all melted, but when he heads back to where he found it, he finds spring for real. Lots of fun interactions with busy forest animals, and really cute illustrations.

Our middle "book" is actually a two-fer, with two small boardbooks tucked between the longer reads:

Funny Bunnies (boardbook)
Piggy Toes Press, 2011
ISBN: 9781615245949
Cute little rhymes on succeeding spreads with colorful backgrounds (one of my littlest ones was DETERMINED to announce the colors of all the backgrounds, including - with great pride - "MaGENta." Adorable all the way around.

A Little Book about SPRING (Leo Lionni's Friends series, boardbook)
Leo Lionni and Julie Hamilton
ISBN: 9780525582274
Frederick the mouse and his friends pledge allegiance and undying love to the season in vogue, with colorful backgrounds and springtime activities cutely (and very briefly) described.

Silver Seeds
Paul Paolilli and Dan Brewer, illustrated by Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher
ISBN: 0670889415
Because April IS Poetry Month, y'all. This is a sweet little hard to find book that takes the first letters of various spring topics and uses them to create free-form poetry about that subject. So, for short:

Sliding through the window
Underneath the door
Nudging us out to play

makes SUN. Get it? That's pretty much all there is, but the paintings are luminous, and the choices for verse are moving and sweet and powerful. I am not really a poetry person, but I love all of these, and I love that I CAN love them and introduce them to kids with a clear and bright conscience so hopefully they learn to love poetry themselves too.

Tuesday Storytime: Farm Animals

These were selected by my coworker.

Peppa Pig and the Easter Rainbow
No Author Listed
ISBN: 9780763694388

When it rains on the Easter Egg Hunt, things could have been ruined, but Peppa and her friends look to the Easter Rainbow for inspiration and find out that everything's better when it's multicolorful!

The Cow Said Neigh!
Rory Feek, illustrated by Bruno Robert
ISBN: 9781400311712
This building-rhyming story details how wanting to be something you're not can sometimes cause the whole farm to self-destruct. In a fun and zippy way, of course, with everything coming (mostly) all right in the end.

No Sleep for the Sheep!
Karen Beaumont, illustrated by Jackie Urbanovic
ISBN: 9780152049690
Poor sheep in the barn just wants some shut-eye but EVERY OTHER ANIMAL is up, and heading NOISILY to bed in that self-same barn. How on earth is Sheep ever going to get to sleep with all this racket and all these neighbors?

Tuesday Storytime: Candy!

I've wanted to do this storytime for a LOOONG time, ever since we got the book Ganesha's Sweet Tooth, but it's been hard to find a good time. Easter is approaching, and at least in the US, it's become secular enough that I can get away with having a somewhat tangentially related storytime - so candy it is!

Ganesha's Sweet Tooth
Sanjay Patel and Emily Haynes, illustrated by Emily Haynes
ISBN: 9781452103624
A ... creative re-creation of the myth of the writing of the Mahabharata has a child Ganesha breaking his tusk on an interesting ladoo (indian temple sweet) - a jawbreaker! Frustrated by his tooth loss, he tries to throw it into the moon (referencing a different myth) but misses and bonks Vyasa (the legendary/mythic poet) on the head. Vyasa is intrigued by this god-child's tusk, and they strike a deal for Ganesha to write out the poem as Vyasa recites it, as long as he can eat all the candy he wants in the mean-time. Many lots later, the poem is completed, Ganesha is happy with his magical writing tusk, and there's sooooo much candy to eat!

Owen's Marshmallow Chick
Kevin Henkes
ISBN: (board book, no isbn listed, HarperFestival 2002)
I love how sweet and innocent this Easter story is. Baby mouse Owen has a full Easter basket of all sorts of traditional candies, and each one is pronounced his "favorite" as he gobbles them all up one after the other - except for the bright yellow marshmallow chick (it's a peep, but branding issues I'm guessing?) that matches his blanket and looks like a toy. That one gets played with all day (trying not to think about the sugar and sticky fallout of that choice) and put in pride of place with his other treasured toys that night, and dreamed about - and that one is of course, his "favorite."

I pulled Fairy Floss (Ann Ingalls, Migy Blanco, ISBN: 9781499802382in case we had an older crowd (still somewhat unlikely this time of year, but always a possibility) which is a pretty fast-moving but somehow slightly staid stroll through the Chicago World Fair where the delights of electric motors make treats like cotton candy (then known as Fairy Floss (among other amusing names) possible for a mass audience. Cute, but it was just a bit long and just a bit... boring? Which seems really impressive for a book about the World Fair AND cotton candy.

So instead we went with:

Bad Kitty Does NOT Like Candy (Yes I Do)
Nick Bruel
ISBN: 9781626722309
I try to not use a lot of "branded" characters (Elena/Doc McStuffins, Bad Kitty, Caillou (mostly because Caillou makes me feel homicidal) because I want to encourage kids to realize there's lots of books out there that don't have anything to do with the TV (or whatever streaming device they're watching their shows on now) - but every once in a while there's a cute enough book (or a hard enough theme) that makes me step into the branded world for a bit. This one did it for me - Bad Kitty is hungry, but not realllly hungry - she just wants candy because it looks so tasty and sweet and fun. Of course candy is bad for cats, but she eventually snags some (because bad kitty) and has to get her teeth brushed to clear out all the candy that has stuck her mouth closed. Now kitty IS hungry, and is perfectly happy with fish, because now she knows that she does NOT like candy after all.



 

Tuesday Storytime: Spring Birds

We did a bit of an experiment today with a VERY LONG but excellent book about how robins grow and develop, so we used that book as our first TWO book sessions, with a song at a good stopping place, and then read one final short book at the end. It worked ok, the kids are a bit young for this, and we had some talkers, but such is life.

Robins! How They Grow Up
Eileen Christelow
ISBN: 9780544442894
Really Really Really Really long and wordy. There was a lot of paraphrasing and eliding. However, there are ALSO two sections where an egg is stolen and eaten by a squirrel, and a fledgling is stooped on and carried off by a hawk, and I did NOT skip those sections. They were written matter-of-factly, and so I just carried on. I think one mommy was a bit scandalized, but kids don't care and they just want to know how things work. Very informational, good illustrations, SOOOOO wordy.

I'm a Duck
Eve Bunting
Will Hillenbrand
ISBN: 9780763680329
Really cute rhyming couplets show off this water-phobic duck, and how he used his friends and his smarts to develop skills and confidence to eventually go swimming with his family. Cute, sweet, and OH SO SHORT.

Tuesday Storytime: Give Me That!

Cute picks, done by my coworker.

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie
Laura Joffe Numeroff, illustrated by Felicia Bond
ISBN: 9780060245863
Classic and still funny "house that Jack built" story with unexpected and escalating situations.

Max the Brave
Ed Vere
ISBN: 9781492616511
Max the kitten desperately wants to chase mice - except he's never seen one. So he goes around to all the neighbor animals and asks them about it, and everyone is nice and helpful and truthful... except the mouse, for obvious reasons, who says that he's a monster himself, but points out a particularly gross-looking actual monster and cheerfully identifies THAT as a mouse. Max IS very brave, but that "mouse" was a bit much for him, so now he amuses himself chasing "monsters."

I Want That Nut!
Madeline Valentine
ISBN: 9781101940389
Mouse and Chipmunk have the poor fortune to BOTH find a particularly lovely nut at the SAME TIME. They muster all of their maturity and decide that Chipmunk should have it, but after a few hours of smothering this lovely nut with affection, Mouse STEALS it! Now Mouse is the one treating the nut like a visiting dignitary - until Chipmunk STEALS it back! Escalations occur, but eventually the nut is gone, and perhaps Mouse and Chipmunk have learned a bit about playing together and sharing things.

Tuesday Storytime: Animal Friends

Some cute, sweet, and slightly off-kilter stories about animal friendships.

Emma Kate
Patricia Polacco
ISBN: 0399244522
The narrator does everything with Emma Kate, and the illustrations cover everything; a rambunctious girl with a bright red dress and pigtails, and a pretty nearly life-size elephant go around doing all sorts of mundane things - going to school, riding bikes, playing sports, even spending time in the hospital for their tonsils to be taken out. At the end, savvy readers (and lookers) won't be TOO surprised when they realize why only one of the characters is in color.

Gaston
Kelly DiPucchio, illustrated by Christian Robinson
ISBN: 9781442451025
Mrs Poodle is very proud of her four kids: Fi-Fi, Foo-Foo, Ohh-La-La, and Gaston, even though Gaston doesn't quite fit the mold. All of them are sweet kids and Gaston especially tries hard and has a sweet attitude. When Mrs Poodle meets Mrs Bulldog at the park with HER four kids, Rocky, Ricky, Bruno, and Antoinette, things become much clearer, but also complicated. The solution is a bit pat (especially for anyone who has dealt with foster or adoption issues) but the sentiment is sound, and everything comes together (literally) in the end.

Elmore
Holly Hobbie
ISBN: 9781524718633
I've been holding on to this book for nearly a year, trying to figure out what angle I wanted to take with the themes in it, and I finally decided just to keep it simple and go with friendship, but there's a lot to unpack in this simple, sweet book about a lonely porcupine who just wants to have some friends, but his needles and spines seem to make things impossible. A kindly uncle and a new perspective (and very open and friendly neighbors) help to smooth things over, and at the end, Elmore has developed his own very particular method of starting friendships.

 

Tuesday Storytime: Zoo Animals

Last week's storytime books were selected by my coworker, and they're a riot of wild animal fun.

1 Zany Zoo
Lori Degman, illustrated by Colin Jack
ISBN: 9781416989905
As one kid slips from the school field trip line into a secret gate into the zoo, he's witness to some wild and wacky shenanigans that his schoolmates will NEVER believe. A counting book with some zing to it.

Hilda Must Be Dancing
Karma Wilson, illustrated by Suzanne Watts
ISBN: 9780689847882
When the jungle thumps and bumps and things fall from the trees, it must be because Hilda is dancing. She loves dancing, but the jungle animals would really like some peace and stillness. All is well when the rambunctious hippo is introduced to water ballet.

Never, EVER Shout in a Zoo
Karma Wilson, Doug Cushman
ISBN: 0316985643
If You Give A Mouse A Muffin meets If I Ran the Zoo, with zany consequences and fun rattle-trap sentences.

Tuesday Storytime: Celebrate Reading

I had a collection of spring books all selected, but apparently this is "last surprise winter" week, so instead I'll save those for next time and use this cute trio of books about reading and libraries.

Bear's House of Books
Poppy Bishop, illustrated by Alison Edgson
ISBN: 9781680100389
This is such a cute book. Four childhood friends share their one picture book every night, even though it's worn out and sticky from use, until they go on a search for a new book, and discover an entire library owned by a slightly grumpy Bear. Bear is upset at first about others using his books (especially with sticky paws and when they use a sandwich as a bookmark) but when he realizes that they only have ONE book, he quickly develops a solution. Really sweet and heartwarming.

Llama Llama Loves to Read
Anna Dewney and Reed Duncan (or should that be the other way around...) illustrated by JT Morrow
ISBN: 9780670013975
The standard llama llama rhyming scheme works its magic with the process of reading - from letters to sounds to words, sentences, songs, books, stories, and reading informational signs. Not much depth, but accurate and uplifting, acknowledging that sometimes words need to be memorized, and sometimes words are difficult to read or learn. Not as inspiring as some of the other more emotional llama llama challenge-facing books, but a solid introduction to the concept of learning to read as a process.

Our Library
Eve Bunting, illustrated by Maggie Smith
ISBN: 9780618494583
(minus the last three or four pages because I had a young and very wiggly crowd - I ended on the "library on the grassy meadow" spread.)
I will say, the grownups in the group really enjoyed the VERY SPECIFIC book titles that were checked out of the library in order to help the children solve their problems and overcome their difficulties. Mrs Goose made everyone sad when she revealed that the library was old and dingy, with a bad roof, and no money, and that the landlord (a weasel of course) wanted the land back, but with some judicious checking out of VERY SPECIFIC BOOKS, and a lot of hard work and effort, and a dramatic confrontation with an elderly and grumpy Beaver, the library was saved - all with the help and instruction provided by the library books.

Tuesday Storytime: Spring is Coming

South Carolina is weird. There's a joke floating around the internet about all the different seasons "false spring" "second winter" "mud season" "ice week" and that's been true here - but despite it all, the flowers are starting to bloom and the temperatures are starting to consistently creep upward, even if the graph looks a bit bi-polar about it from day to day.

These books were picked out by my coworker.

Something to Crow About
Megan Halsey Lane
ISBN: 0803706987 (library binding)
Randall and Cassie are chicks together in the barnyard, and Cassie is just about perfect. She struts better, she scratches better, she can even find worms better. Poor Randall just wants to find SOMETHING he can be good at. When he finds it, both Cassie and Randall are surprised!

When Spring Comes
Kevin Henkes, illustrated by Laura Dronzek
ISBN: 9780062331397
Sweet vignettes of the colors and sounds and sights and activities (by people and by plants and animals and nature in general) of spring. Really sweet, very good for the center position, because there's no real plot to it, but it just flows gently along through sweet and colorful scenes.

If You're Hoppy
April Pulley Sayre, illustrated by Jackie Urbanovic
ISBN: 9780061566349
Along the rhythm and pattern of the original song, this jubilant book runs through all the various happy and exuberant animals that one could be if one were "hoppy" or "sloppy" or "flappy," from the standard storytime fare to some that are way more exotic or unexpected.

Tuesday Storytime: Flu Season

Everyone has the sniffles, either from the flu, or the horrible cold going around, or the weird weather this winter, or just the wintertime blahs. Instead of Valentines, here's my love-letter to the common cold.

The Sniffles for Bear
Bonny Becker, illustrated by Kady McDonald Denton
ISBN: 9780763647568
Bear is the MOST dramatic, and I feel a special kinship with this particular brand of woe-is-me melodrama. This time around, Bear is QUITE SICK and doesn't feel that his friend Mouse appreciates the gravity of the situation: reading happy books, singing cheerful songs, playing a banjo! Just disgraceful. If only Bear had the energy to explain to Mouse how wrong he is. Take heart, after a nice nap, Bear is feeling much better, and now it's Mouse's turn to feel just a bit droopy and sniffly.

Don't You Feel Well, Sam?
Amy Hest, illustrated by Anita Jeram
ISBN: 0763610097
Little bear Sam gets a cough at bedtime and a patient Mom walks him through taking his cough medicine, before settling down in a warm kitchen with honey tea and a comfy chair to wait for it to snow.

Bark, George
Jules Feiffer
ISBN: 9780062051851
George's mom is very confused. She keeps asking George to bark, and he makes noises... but they all are from the wrong animals! A trip to the vet clears up the problem, but does leave one lingering issue to be discovered on the last page. This one is always a kid-pleaser.