The Last Books for Wednesdays

Just to prove I can write about things other than houses.. here's the last of the lists of books I've read on Wednesdays this year in Curious Girl's class. (If you click on the "books fall open" tag, you can see the series of posts about books).

• Catalina Magdalena Hoopensteiner Wallandiner Hogan Bogan Logan Was Her Name, by Tedd Arnold. You can read this very silly book, or you can sing it (if you don’t remember the song from summer camp, music and some alternate lyrics appear at the back).
• Fancy Nancy Bonjour Butterfly by Jane O'Connor. This is the 3rd (4th?) Fancy Nancy book, and this series is holding up well. Opulent (as Nancy would say!) illustrations lavish detail on each page, and the story of Nancy learning to overcome disappointment is a nice mix of happies and sads (as the girls decided after we read it).
• The Seventeen Girls and the Two Teachers, by the lovely literate preschool ladies. A post about this will be forthcoming. I had a ball working on this group-authored/illustrated project.
  
• The Day The Babies Crawled Away, by Peggy Rathmann. A lovely story about a big kid who saves the day when the babies get into trouble when the parents aren’t looking. The art is all done in silhouette, a very different style from her excellent other works (10 Minutes Till Bedtime or Goodnight Gorilla, for example). It is an awesome read-aloud.
  
• Felicia's Favorite Story, by Leslea Newman. A beautifully illustrated story of a family with two moms and one daughter (born and adopted in Guatemala). When I was reading this one, and we got to the third page, where the picture of the second mom in the family appears, one girl said, "who's that?" and another said, "That girl has two moms just like Curious Girl!" Meanwhile, Curious Girl was at the back of the assembled group saying, "See, you can have two moms! People tell me you can't but it's in the book," which just kind of broke my heart while making me feel really proud, too, that she was asserting herself. We also had a small digression into why CG has two moms (short answer: because that's what our family has. Politica and I loved each other so much we wanted to be a family, so we got married, and then we wanted a child and Curious Girl came. That explanation works quite nicely for the preschool set.) (There's a whole other conversation here, about the fact that CG really has three moms and a dad, but I don't bring up the adoption angle with children who are curious about why our family has two mothers; I'm very conscious about keeping CG's first mother in a respectful place in my stories about our family, but I'm also conscious of the need to answer the question that kids are asking.)
  

Looking for some summer reading fun? Deesha's rocking post on princesses turned me onto a set of editions of fairytales that are on our summer list. And you must run, not walk, to your local library to check out Skippyjon Jones. It is one of the best read-aloud books ever! In fact, it won the EB White Read Aloud Award in 2004. I'd never heard of that award before but I'll be checking out some of its other winners and nominees.