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: Colors Everywhere

A very colorful storytime this week, with a small crowd - still recovering from the back-to-school exodus. 

Baby Bear Sees Blue

Ashley Wolff

ISBN: 9781442413061

Baby Bear and Mama Bear explore the forest and all the different bright and beautiful colors it showcases.

Lucy Lady Bug

Sharon King-Chai

ISBN: 9780553510058

Lucy Ladybug has no spots, so she sets out into the world to try and find some. She doesn't find the traditional spots like the rest of the ladybugs have, but she has a delightful series of adventures, and meets some new friends along the way.

Bear Sees Colors (Bear and Friends)

Karma Wilson, illustrated by Jane Chapman

ISBN: 9781442465367

This concept book addition to the "Bear" book series is VERY RHYMEY, so if you tend towards getting sing-song lines stuck in your head for days (hello friends) then beware! It's cute and sweet and full of great colors and good lines, and it's just the perfect length for storytime. Wilson and Chapman struck gold with this concept and this set of books; they're all really solid reading time choices and this one is no exception.