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

Final round of rejected Food Science books - I was very close to choosing all of these, and on a different day, or in a slightly different mood, I may have actually used any of them instead.


The Gulps
Rosemary Wells, illustrated by Marc Brown
ISBN: 9780316014601

I really wanted to hate this book when I saw it first, but I just couldn't.  The story is hokey and more than a little heavy-handed, but the family is so good-natured that despite it all, they're easy to root for.  The Gulps are a family of obese rabbits (minus one health-conscious daughter) heading off on their vacation in their oversized mobile home, ready to stop at every fast-food place they can find.  Instead, their RV breaks down in a field, and they are forced to live and work with a farming family (thin and hardworking, of course) for the summer, eating organic foods and pitching in on the farm.  They aren't much use at first, being both fat and unused to physical labor, but over time they toughen up, slim down, and begin to enjoy their newfound energy.  The summer finally over, they fix up the RV and head back onto the road home, stopping at an all-you-can-eat salad buffet to cement their new lifestyle.  It's cute, that's all I can say.  Somehow the heavy-handed message seems more funny and tongue-in-cheek than punitive, and no characters engage bashing either lifestyle or food-choice.  A serious contender, but I felt like I wanted to keep the focus on food itself, not people's relationship with food.  


Eat Like a Bear
April Pulley Sayre, illustrated by Steve Jenkins
ISBN: 9780805090390

I really wanted to make this work, but it was up against stiff competition and just barely didn't make it (apologies for the pun).  So, now I just have to do an animal habitat or animal diet storytime so I can use it then!  We follow a lovely collage-of-textural-materials bear through the year, month by month, through a lovely tripping rhyme sequence that covers the major food that the bear will eat that month; new spring shoots and long-dead animals in early spring through ants and clovers and trout in the summer to roots and groundhogs and moths and honey in fall.  I especially like that the story doesn't shy away from the omnivorous nature of a bear, and spends as much time on the insects as it does on plants and animal food sources.  A spread at the end passes on more factual info, broken into different sub-topics.  Really really lovely and enjoyable.  Can't wait to read it for the kids!


Cook-A-Doodle-Doo!
Janet Stevens and Susan Stevens Crummel, illustrated by Janet Stevens
ISBN: 0152056580

I have loved this book since I first encountered it for storytime a few years ago.  I try to read it at least once a year.  The grandson of the Little Red Hen (you know, the one who couldn't get any help baking?) finds grandma's old recipe book in his coop, and decides to try it out.  The traditional lazybones remain unwilling to assist, but he's got new friends now, and a turtle, iguana, and pot-bellied pig stand ready and (somewhat) able to help out!  His friends are invested and eager helpers, but not so great at cooking.  They misunderstand the directions, fetch the wrong things, and want to continually taste the in-process recipe.  Despite setbacks, and one calamity, the foursome rally and create a beautiful strawberry shortcake.  The illustrations are delicious, the animals are hysterical, and the casual nod to the classic childhood story just make me all sorts of happy inside.  Sidebars on most of the pages pass on short factoids about ingredients or utensils or processes.  As a bonus, after you've drooled over the lovely shortcake, you can use the enclosed recipe to make your own!  Love this book forever!

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.