Summer Reading Program 2014. Week 3: Animals

Had an ENORMOUS group this morning for our Family Storytime - lots of toddlers, lots of babies, lots of relatives visiting from out of town.  Excellent group tho, and the stories flowed so well!

Mr. Tiger Goes Wild
Peter Brown
ISBN: 9780316200639
Stylized stiff animals and buildings inhabit a faux-victorian world until Mr Tiger loosens up.

Mister Tiger is prim and proper, just like all of his neighbors, in a starched jacket, tophat, and excellent manners.  Until he just gets sick of it, and starts going WILD - walking on all fours, roaring, even going for a skinny-dip in the town square fountain.  His neighbors and friends are scandalized, and suggest that if Mister Tiger wishes to behave wildly, he should do so in the wilderness - which he does, until he gets lonely and heads back home.  Once there he discovers that his wild behaviors have loosened up his neighbors too, and everyone is now just a little bit wild.

Polar Opposites
Erik Brook
ISBN: 9780761456858
Soft-edged pictures carry the background story of two friends packing for a trip to the tropics, while the text busies itself with defining opposites.

I love this story.  Lots of science and lots of solid information packed into a showboat of a story of two good friends who live on opposite poles.  Alex the polar bear and Zina the penguin are opposites in so many ways, and the story lists a great number of them, while the artwork begins with their homes and shows them cleaning, packing, and traveling to the tropics for a vacation together.


The Wide-Mouthed Frog (pop-up version)
Keith Faulkner, illustrated by Jonathan Lambert
ISBN: 9780803718753
A variety of pop-up animals highlight the story of a boastful wide-mouth frog who goes around comparing dinners with everyone.

I love this book so hard, and with a group this big, it was perfect for a SUPER QUICK, super fun ending story.  It's VERY VERY short, but the pop-ups are fun and the kids get a kick out of the ending, especially when the storyteller gets into it and makes funny faces and voices (which I was happy to do today).



For the afternoon, with the older kids, I switched it up with a few longer books that I rarely get the chance to read, even though they are excellent storybooks.

We started again with Mister Tiger (he's one of the featured Summer Reading titles, which is why he gets to go twice) and then moved on to One Cool Friend and then a new one for the blog:

Two Bad Ants
Chris Van Allsburg
ISBN: 9780395486689
Stylized line drawings chronicle the story of two ants who shirk their duties and face a perilous world.

Van Allsburg is a freaking genius, and one of the true sorrows of my professional life is that I work with kids too young to really get his stories, so I can't read them at work as often as I would like.  Something about his approach and his slightly-slanted viewpoint makes me think of Neil Gaiman or Lemony Snicket, or even Saki.  Just delightful, and just a smidge perverse in a lovely subversive way.

Next week we're celebrating our nation's birthday by NOT having any programs, and then after that we're on to dinosaurs!

Summer Reading Program 2014. Week 1: Robots!

Long day of programming for me - it's been since last summer that I had to do more than one program in a day, and I forgot how draining it is to be "on" and "performing" for an audience more than once in a day.

I got my undergrad in theatre, and while I enjoyed playing "bit parts" I always knew that as an introvert, I didn't have the sort of energy that would let me be a performer.  I love the science and the discipline behind acting, but it isn't for me.  Days like this remind me that I made a wise choice to be a tech nerd instead.

So - Robots!

First off was the Family Storytime for the wee ones (ages 0-5)

Clink

Kelly DiPucchio, illustrated by Matthew Myers
ISBN: 9780061929298 (library binding)
Obvious brushstrokes. lots of detail, bright colors, and an old-timey feel.

Clink is an old-fashioned robot, designed to make toast (he burns it) and to play music.  Sadly, he's a bit out of date, and also has a tendency to lose parts when he's excited.  All of his friends in the robot store are newer than he is, and are quickly bought by excited customers.  Clink gets depressed and lonely because he's not chosen, until a very picky young man comes into the store, looking for the one perfect thing.  

I found Clink specifically because I was looking for robot books, and I really like it.  It's a teensy weensy bit long for my family storytime group, but the story was quirky enough to hold their attention.

Doug, Unplugged
Dan Yaccarino
ISBN: 9780375866432
Yaccarino's trademark color-blocked minimalist expressive spreads.

Hate to say it, since it got so much attention, and everyone loves it so, but I really like Boy + Bot much better.  I'm sort of sad that I didn't go with my first inclination and use it instead, but this one didn't do badly either - I just didn't like it as much.  Doug is a great robot child - his parents plug him into the wall in the morning to download information while they go off to work, and today he's learning about the city.  The info-dump isn't particularly interesting (and it's difficult to read in a storytime situation - very small print, scattered along a busy circuit-board pattern) so Doug is easily distracted by a pigeon, which then prompts him to investigate the city in real life, learning about everything that his infodump failed to inform him about - wet cement, a cool fountain on a warm day, the rush and clatter of subway trains - until he finds a human boy and learns about the best thing of all - play.

Robot Zot
Jon Scieszka, illustrated by David Shannon

ISBN: 9781416963943

No, David!'s illustrator does perfect justice to the oversized ego of our robot protagonist.

Robot Zot is here to destroy!  Except he's smaller than a toaster-oven, and he keeps getting distracted by insulting appliances and having to destroy them.  It may take a while to get to conquering Earth after all.  But he is committed, at least until he discovers the Queen of Earth (a young girl's toy telephone) being assaulted by her evil guards (the girl's dollbabies) and falls in love.  His daring rescue is a beautiful love story.  Don't forget to page through to the very end where a comical coda is taking place in Zot's wake.

With the number of kids and the amount of energy in this particular group, again I was wishing I had a slightly shorter story, but the super-vibrant larger-than-life messy pictures and fun language did their best to keep attention focused.

Then I took a mental health break, a throat lozenge, a lot of caffeine, and got ready for our second installment!

Summer Reading Program (ages 5-12)

Thanks to a nearby child-care facility that just opened for the summer, we had a lovely and attentive group with a wide age-range, and I'm happy to say that the stories, activity, and craft all went over well with everyone (heartfelt thanks to our Children's Department for working out the basic bones of the activity and craft)

We started with Clink again, and then a new longer one for the older kids:

The Three Little Aliens and the Big Bad Robot
Margaret McNamara, illustrated by Mark Fearing

Tiny green "minion-esque" aliens and an enormous squiggly-lined robot inhabit wispy spacy environments - lots of black skies.

This is a re-telling of The Three Little Pigs, and it's fairly cute.  I will say however, that if I ever meet Ms McNamara, we're going to have words about her naming one of the aliens "Nklxwcyz."  Seriously, that's like Storyteller abuse.  Cute, but not a personal favorite.  I do like the variations on "huff and puff and blow your house down" which artfully manage to reference different spacy housing situations AND have rhyming answers from the aliens that still make sense.  A strange (long) author's note at the end explains how the aliens travel from their home planet of Mercury out through the orbits of the other planets to end up on Neptune at the other end of the Solar System.  

Then we ended the reading bit with Robot Zot again, because I really just adore reading that book.  It's trippy and wild and silly and overdramatic and perfect.

Next week I get a break because we have a guest performer coming (yay!) and then the week after that we're on to Animals!

Tuesday Storytime: (SRP Themed) Science!

It's the first week of June, and that means that Summer Reading is upon us!  We're featuring STEM fields this summer, and I've been having great fun trying to match up younger-age books with our weekly themes.

The themes (and our branch Summer Reading) technically start next week, but I wanted to lead in with a more general overview of science and natural history and technology, so I started a week early.


What Is Science?
Rebecca Kai Dotlich, illustrated by Sachiko Yoshikawa
ISBN: 0805073949
Animated minimalist-featured kids cavort scientifically through a brightly colored world.

I really like this book, and I'm buying it for my own home collection.  It's a delightful rhyming romp through all the "things" that science is: the study of everything from rocks and fossils to tornadoes to space, illustrated with carefree kids looking over a landscape or set-piece that exemplifies the concept.  Really an early literacy nonfiction book instead of a picture book, but the format and style place it firmly into picture book territory, and I'm quite glad to use it here.  My favorite book from this program.


Big & Little
Steve Jenkins
ISBN: 0395726646
Textured-paper collages against white backgrounds, text wraps around animals and is VERY SMALL.

Other than the hardship of reading the tiny little itty bitty curvy text from arms-length while holding the book out for kids to see, this was a great pick.  The kids really loved identifying the animals, and the comparisons were suitably dramatic.  The page of silhouettes on the back was an especial hit, with the relative sizes of several animals compared to the person's size.  I prefer this book to Jenkins' later "Actual Size" for two reasons: first, I like the comparison between pairs of animals of different groups better than a straight presentation of different animals for purposes of storytime, and second, this one doesn't have a fricking giant spider in it.


Tap Tap Bang Bang
Emma Garcia
ISBN: 9781907967672
Vibrant cartoonish tempera-painted tools with googly-eyes perform their tasks without visible human intervention building up to a reveal of the project.

This was my least favorite of the books this time around, but it was the kids' absolute favorite, and it was immediately requested for checkout, so that makes me like it by association.  The tools each have a "sound effect" that I don't feel I did very well, but the kids appreciated.  There were the obvious "zzzz, zzzz for the drill" and "cree craw cree craw" for the saw, but there there's tools like vice-grips and clamps and hot glue guns, all of which also get "sounds" like "grippety grip" which aren't really sound effects, but whatever.  I would also have liked to have more visuals of the item being worked on, to let the kids guess and anticipate the eventual nature of the project revealed at the end.