If you Google the phrase, “Mommy and I are one,” you’ll find links to conflicting evidence that that phrase, communicated either subliminally or directly, can elicit positive biofeedback in people who hear it. I don’t know if it really can make people relax or not, but as the mother of small children it seems plausible. Mommy and I are one; no boundaries between mother and child. A completely comforting and thrilling thought for a little one.

Owl Babies, by Martin Waddell, is one of my favorite picture books of all time - both to recommend for the kids at my school (we also have Las Lechucitas) and to read to my own children - probably because its theme is so universal and similar to the “Mommy and I are one” sentiment: Mommy may go, but Mommy comes back. It’s a sweet, slightly funny, and reassuring book, with some of the most clearly delineated characters of any picture book: Sarah, Percy, and Bill.

When Mama Owl goes out hunting for food, Sarah tries to reassure her owl baby brothers, Percy worries that something will happen, and Bill can only repeat, “I want my mommy.” Each owl echoes the conflicting wants, needs, and knowledge of any child whose mother has gone away for a while, and when she finally comes back, their relief, along with the reader’s, is tangible. Perfectly illustrated with gorgeous woodcuts, Owl Babies belongs on every young childs’ bookshelf.

Snowflake Bentley, by Jacqueline Briggs Martin, is a wonderful picture-book biography about Wilson Bentley, the man who first photographed snow crystals. It’s a wonderful story of perseverence and focus and perfectly relevant, too: even though the events in this book took place well over a hundred years ago, who doesn’t see the wonder in that first falling snowflake?

The pictures are gorgeous, and in fact, the illustrator, Mary Azarian, won a Caldecott medal for the woodcuts she uses to portray Bentley’s life. The text is pretty fantastic, too. It’s a longish book, for a picture book, but when I’ve read it to 6 and 7 year-olds they stay riveted to every word. Part of it is Martin’s wonderful, descriptive text: Bentley thought “snow was as beautiful as butterflies, or apple blossoms,” and part of it is the detailed illustration.

Snowflake” Bentley was a truly inspirational man, and even small children can recognize that his life illustrates a life with purpose and meaning, and his devotion to finding a way to photograph snow personifies the idea of keeping a dream alive.

Hey - if you liked that last post about baby board books, I have another review that’s been published on Associated Content about great books for your baby. Click here if you’re interested

Say that five times fast!

If you have a child, say, under 2, and if you are looking for board books for said child..yet don’t want to be bored yourself (get it? get it? board…bored), Leslie Patricelli has a series of hilarious board books that are fun for kids and for moms and dads. That’s a monumental task that she achieves quite nicely!

Patricelli’s book feature a smiley, oval-headed baby who she uses to illustrate concepts such as opposites (yummy, yucky; big, small; quiet, loud) or familiar baby things like a blankie or a pacifier. The baby itself is simply drawn, but it is his expressions and reactions that are what brings the humor (I think the baby is a boy baby although it’s not obvious its gender). That, and the word choices she makes to illustrate the concepts.

Here’s a sample from Yummy, Yucky:

Apple pie is yummy.

Mud pie is yucky.

You can probably guess the illustrations for this: the baby is trying the apple pie with a lick-smacking grin. On the page about mud pie, he’s holding a glob of mud (with a worm sticking out), with a grossed-out look on his face.

Very cute!

Leslie Petricelli also has a website with a very cute yummy/yucky game that would be fun to play with baby on your lap!

1st grade just finished studying bats and my contribution was to read Hello, Bumblebee Bat, by Darrin Lunde, which is a very fun little book about the smallest bat species in the world. We don’t have this book in our library, which is okay, because I read it on Lookybook, which is an AWESOME digital library of picture books that is completely free! It’s like having a whole other library at your fingertips.

Anyway, back to the book. Hello, Bumblebee Bat is a very simple little book featuring questions and answers about this species of bat, and the information is very nicely paired with excellent illustrations by Patricia J. Wynne. There’s not much text, but there’s enough to hit the high spots: bats live in colonies, bats sleep during the day, this kind of bat eats insects, and bats find food using echolocation. Great for kids who don’t know anything about bats, and great for reinforcing things they have learned. A great fiction picture book to pair with this is Stellaluna, since Stellaluna is a fruit bat and you could do a compare/contrast thing between the 2 kinds of bats.

We finished up our storytime by making bat finger puppets, which was a big hit, although it was a whole lot harder to get 1st graders to understand that in order to cut out half a bat (which you unfold to create a whole bat) it’s crucial not to cut the crease!

Scared Witless: Thirteen Eerie Tales to Tell, is by far the best read-aloud I’ve done in my career as a librarian. I found it because I knew I wanted to do scary stories the week before Halloween, and I didn’t want to do stories from the books we already had in the library since so many of the kids had already read them..over and over and over again. So I scoured the Internet for scary stories and this book was recommended - and for very good reason! Every story in the book has a “gotcha” moment - some scary, some silly - and they all worked wonderfully to scare the pants off the kids I read them to!

I really liked the silly stories in the book. “The Ghost with the Bloody Fingers” is a classic, of course, and I ended up telling it to all the kids, from pre-k to 5th grade, but “The Graveyard Voice” got gasps and screams, then groans and giggles, from the upper grades, as did “The Mysterious Rapping Noise.”

A few of the stories were of the plain old scary “BOO!” variety, like “Lost in the Dark,” one of my favorites. I really, really enjoyed reading this book to my kids, and while the stories weren’t great literature, they were great read-alouds!

The author and her husband, professional storytellers who have teamed up for other books, have a great little website: Beauty and the Beast Storytellers.

The only bad thing about this book is that all the kids wanted it after I read it! So now I’ll need another book to read next year…Any suggestions?

I know I’m a week late for the Day of the Dead (El Dia de los Muertos), but at my school we’ve been celebrating all week long, and I probably will do some mini-celebrations this coming week as well. The school in which I work is 87% Hispanic, and the majority of our kids’ families come from Mexico or Central America, so studying Day of the Dead, while presented to the kids as studying the holidays of “other cultures” (that’s the curricular link), is actually putting a little time and energy into a holiday most of them are very familiar with. They LOVE telling me what they do in their families. They LOVE that I care what they think. And they also love reading books about it, because no matter what they might do in their family, the truth is that we are not in Mexico or Honduras or El Salvador, so we all can learn a little something about how it’s done in other places.

Day of the Dead, by Tony Johnston, is a great little (and I do mean little: it measures 5×5″) book in which a large Mexican family readies itself for the holiday. They cook, they shop, they prepare…all the while telling the children Espérense! Wait! Finally, the day comes and the family gathers up all the food and decorations and heads to the graveyard where they build an altar to their loved ones and finally have a feast.

It’s a beautifully illustrated book, and while small, can be used in an intimate setting or with a document camera, if you have one available. It’s not non-fiction, but it comes pretty close, since the plot is essentially festival preparations and then the holiday itself.

After we read this book we made masks of Senor Calavera, or, as some of the kids called him, Mister Eskeleto. You could also do some papel picado, since the cover and some of the interior illustrations are reminiscent of the traditional paper cutting craft. We topped off our Day of the Dead festivities with a great little music video called “Viva Calaca,” which the kids told me means living skeleton or living bones. Two warnings about this video: first, while highly entertaining, it’s also pretty violent (hey, we’re talking about the Day of the DEAD here) and even has a “sexy” moment; and two, the song will stick in your head AND NEVER LEAVE if you listen to it over and over again, as I did last week.

__________

Another excellent book for The Day of the Dead is Yuyi Morales’ book, Just a Minute. This book features Senor Calaveras (this is the Day of the Dead connection), who comes knocking on Grandma Beetle’s door, ready for her to come with him…but Grandma Beetle is too busy to come with him just then. She has way too much to do! Just a Minute’s subtitle is “A Trickster Tale and Counting Book,” and the fun part of the book is for kids to realize WHO is the trickster in the tale. They always guess that it’s Senor Calveras, but of course, it’s Grandma Beetle.

This book got a Pura Belpre medal for its illustrations. My favorite is Senor Calaveras having a temper tantrum when he realizes that he may never get Grandma Beetle to come with him.

This is a very fun book to read aloud because, in addition to the marvelous illustrations and Grandma Beetle’s innocent (?) trickiness, there is also a natural call-and-answer sequence to the book. I have the kids practice Grandma Beetle’s responses to Senor Calveras - “Just a minute!” a few times before we start, and they love yelling it out to him as he slowly loses his patience with the not-so-naive Grandmother.

To top off this book, you could do a Senor Calavera mask or a skeleton puppet or eat some of the delicious feista foods Grandma Beetle prepares, but I have a sequencing activity that the kids and I do together using our interactive whiteboard.

November is National Adoption Month, a fact I know well as the author of two children’s books about adoption. Because of that, I’ll be spending lots of time this month reviewing my favorite adoption books for children.

Adoption books are kind of funny: a few are really great, but most are really didactic and spend a lot of energy trying to make the adopted child feel ok about being adopted. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course, but the children’s books about adoption that are also children’s literature are few and far between. Many of them are low on plot and high on sentiment. Or rather, the plot is the sentiment.

What really great books about adoption manage to accomplish is to be a great little book for children first, and a book about adoption second. The adoption stuff is almost after the fact. It can be the main point of the book, and often is, but the book doesn’t scream: Hello! I’m an adoption book!

A good example of what I’m talking about is A Mother for Choco, by Keiko Kaska. In the book, Choco is a cute yellow bird in search of a mother. (Sound familiar? It should…this is the exact same premise of the book I learned to read by reading it over and over to my mother when I was 4: Are You My Mother? by P.D. Eastman. More on that book below**).

Choco looks and looks for a mother. He asks a series of creatures if they’re his mother but they all laugh at him. Yes, the giraffe is yellow, but it’s far too tall to be his mother. Mrs. Penguin is approximately the right shape and size, but she doesn’t have stripey feet like Choco does. Choco is sad! No one will be his mother. But then he meets Mrs. Bear, who looks nothing like Choco but has the one element that all mothers have in common: love

Awww.

A perfect book for all adoptees, but particularly transracial adoptees, A Mother for Choco is that rare adoption book that, in addition to being a great read for adopted children, is a great read for all children.

——

**Okay, back to Are You My Mother? by P.D. Eastman. As I admitted, I learned to read with this book, and I readily admit it is a classic early great 1st reader…but if you really think about it, it’s a fairly cruel tale with two basic morals to it: first, don’t leave home, or else, and second, if you think anyone who doesn’t look exactly like you could possibly be your mother, you’re a nutball. The first lesson I can live with, the second I can’t.

So - I started and stopped this blog over the course of a week earlier this year, but, truth be told, it happened to be a very bad week. I’d just started up work again, my kids had just started school and I was in the midst of launching my small press’s most recent book. Plus, my other blog, Plus, my other books…

Too much!

But now I feel back up to the challenge of writing about (at least) one children’s book a day. Recently, I read an advice column in a magazine that said something like this: find a way to package the things you are compelled to do. If you can do that, the author said, you will have found a way to make a living doing something you love.

Well, I am compelled to write, and I am compelled to read. And since I most like to write and read books for children, I think I owe it to myself to work on this blog. And if, eventually, I’m able to make some money doing this - then I will have made it.

Sadly, I got too big for my britches with this review blog. By itself, it’s not a problem. But combine it with full-time work, a family, a small publishing business, and my small press blog and I can’t handle it.

I will try again some time in the future.