Tuesday Storytime: International Festival - Italy! Pizza Party

We took a brief break from our wintry books to participate in our county-wide international festival; we're celebrating all things Italian for these two months, and it was requested that at least one of the programs at every location be thematically matched to the festival at some point.  Our book club is already enthusiastically participating, as are many other community partners, so I wanted to make sure our storytime was a team player as well.

We (along with most of the other storytimes in the system) decided that a "pizza party" would be the easiest age-appropriate way to incorporate the festival into our routine, not least because finding age-appropriate and storytime-appropriate books about Italy proved quite difficult for this age group.  The slightly older kids had it easy with Strega Nona, but you try getting a not-quite-two-year old to sit through Strega Nona, and then two more books as well?  Not for me.

Pizza at Sally's  
Monica Wellington (Apple Farmer Annie)
ISBN: 0525477152
Sally's Pizzeria is downtown, illustrated with a strange mix of collage and flat line-art.

Sally grows tomatoes in the community garden, and gets her cheese from the cheese shop next door, and she spends all day (there is a clock face in the top corner of most pages, showing the day's progression) preparing the ingredients and making pizza for her customers.  Short, factual, and peppy language.  A perfect introduction to the concept of making pizza, with a recipe in the back.


Pizza Pat
Rita Golden Gelman, illustrated by Will Terry
ISBN: 0679991344
In the vein of "This is the house that Jack built..." with really lovely illustrations, and great language.

The language on this is fabulous.  Another one of the dreaded "leveled readers" (this one is a STEP into Reading book) I love to show that they aren't necessarily all joy-killing slogs.  Here we have delightful rhymes: "This is the cheese, all white and sloppy, that topped the sausages, spicy and choppy, that sat on the sauce, all gooey and gloppy, that covered the dough, all stretchy and floppy..." heavenly to read.  The illustrations are sweet and filled with color and movement and intention.  There is a twist ending (mice steal the pizza from poor Pat) that might be a bit of a downer for sensitive listeners, especially since the final illustration is drenched in pathos, but most will simply think the fat pizza-stealing mice are funny.

Secret Pizza Party
Adam Rubin, illustrated by Daniel Salmieri (Dragons Love Tacos)
ISBN: 9780803739475
A pizza-loving raccoon has a brilliant plan to get access to humans' pizzas.

Poor raccoon.  He keeps getting chased away from the pizza by people with brooms.  He can't even forage in the pizzeria trash without getting shooed away.  He has a great plan tho - he'll host a SECRET PIZZA PARTY!  Mainly to avoid the brooms, but also because secrets are awesome!  His plans are not thought through very well (his escape route in particular needs help - he's found all the broom-related locations in town, in addition to broom-wielding robots!) but he does manage to get back home for a sad little quiet furtive "party" until he sees the giant pizza bash next door, and hatches a new daring plan.  I got a lot of strange looks from the grown-ups, but the kids loved it to pieces, and I always enjoy reading something openly narrative and a little off-kilter.

    

Summer Reading Program 2014. Week 7: Food Science Rejects; Round Two

More fun "food" books for storytimes that didn't quite make the cut for my Food Science programming this year!

This is the "interesting but ultimately unrelated" round of eliminations.

First off:

Secret Pizza Party
Adam Rubin, illustrated by Daniel Salmieri
ISBN: 9780803739475

This is a thematic sequel of sorts to Dragons Love Tacos, but it's a perfectly fine stand-alone book.  This raccoon, occasionally decked out in classic spy gear (trench coat, vaguely fedora-ish hat) just wants pizza, and he tries his hardest to steal everyone's slices, but the people in town are too smart for him, and now he's pining away for lack of gooey delicious pizza.  The cure for a mopey raccoon?  Throw a Secret Pizza Party for him, and let him crash his own party and steal his own pizza!  Well, until he gets a bit carried away again.  Cute story, really cute illustrations, just not quite what I want for this program.


How Big Could Your Pumpkin Grow?
Wendell Minor
ISBN: 9780399246845

This is just an odd little book.  The author starts with pumpkin-weighing contests at country fairs, and moves pretty quickly into straight imagination, with some weird, garish, overdramatic, and occasionally fairly creepy illustrations.  He envisions pumpkins as large as hot-air balloons, acting as lighthouses for ships, standing in the lineup at Mount Rushmore, and lurking menacingly at the end of the Grand Canyon.  I like the idea, but I really do worry about giving my little ones pumpkin-related nightmares!  I've considered it before for fall, halloween, and pumpkin themes, but I've always wimped out at the last minute.


The Honeybee Man
Lela Nargi, illustrated by Kyrsten Brooker
ISBN: 9780375849800

I was sad that I couldn't quite make this fit.  I'm planning a bee-themed storytime eventually, specifically so I can use this book.  This sweet old dude keeps bees on the top of his apartment building in the city, and he carefully tends them, knows their habits, and keeps them safe as much as he can - and then harvests their honey and gives it away to his neighbors to remind people of how useful (and necessary) bees actually are.  The actual factual info is well-incorporated into the story, and there is a lovely nonfiction spread at the end with a great overview.  The endpapers also have cutaway or cross-sectional black-and-white scientific drawings of bees and bee-related objects.  Very excellent book.