More Summer Reading: It's a Sequel!

First, an update: when I finished reading Tedd Arnold's Magdalena Catalina Hoopensteiner Wallendiner Hogan Logan Bogan Was Her Name in Curious Girl's kindergarten class yesterday, they said, "We have to do something for you," and Fabulous Teacher sent CG over to pick up the Very! Special! Project! they had made for me: a Thank You Susan book, for which every child had written a sentence and drawn a picture. "You're a good friend," wrote one boy, and "I love you," said another child (who then came up to me and said, "I love you because you're like a mother to me.") I got hugs, and many of them wanted to explain their drawings to me. They also gave me a gift card to Big Bookstore, but it's the Thank You book that I'll be treasuring for a while. Reading to kindergarteners is a great gig.

Today is the last day of school, a little half-day (during which CG's kindergarten class is going to lead the school in singing the German State Song, something she's very proud of). She'll have a mix of summer camps and family time this summer, and I'm feeling alternately stressed and relaxed about the rest of the summer (note to the world: we professors do not "have the summer off," and even if my professorial side did, my administrative work continues apace. May and June are crunch time in my office, and next year I'll be better prepared for that). All of which is to say that a book like The Double-Daring Book for Girls is just my speed at the moment. The sequel to The Daring Book for Girls (which I reviewed for Mother Talk) is similarly formatted--lots of short activities/information for girls, on everything from stargazing to how to make a scarecrow, how to throw and catch a football, how to whittle. Mel invited the Mother Talk bloggers to participate in a virtual book shower for the sequel, and invited us all to double dare our readers about something in the book. She challenged her Brownie troop to see who could tie a sarong the fastest.

I looked through the book for activities I'd want to do. There are plenty (stargaze, make a lava lamp, do lanyards (which I learned are called scoubidou by some people), calligraphy. But I'm really drawn to the more encylopedic sections of the book. I love the list of collective nouns* for animals (a rhumba of rattlesnakes! a business of ferrets! an unkindness, or a conspiracy, of ravens!); I love the list of moons (January's Wolf Moon, July's Buck Moon or Thunder Moon). The randomness of these sorts of entries makes the world seem so captivating, and I love just flipping pages.

There's a section on slumber party games that includes "This is a What?" I know that game as "This is a Spoon," and I think of it as a rainy day game--I learned it as a thing to do on a rainy summer afternoon at a cottage on Georgian Bay. Sit around a table, or in a circle, and the leader holds up a spoon, passes it to the right, with the following dialogue:

• Giver: This is a spoon.
• Receiver: A what?
• Giver: A spoon.
• Receiver: A what?
• Giver: A spoon
• Receiver: Oh, a spoon!

Then the receiver turns to their right, and starts the dialogue again.

Seems pretty simple and not too interesting, yes? Well, the leader gets one object going, and then starts another object moving around in the other direction (or you can have two people start simultaneously). pretty soon people will be playing roles of both giver and receiver, flipping heads around to keep the dialogue going. It's very, very funny. Give it a try.

So what's your favorite rainy day game?



*The OED says that an unkindness of ravens is obsolete (last citation was 1486); it doesn't list the rattlesnake sense of rhumba.

Kindergarten Reading Roundup

I'm here, blogging in my head more than on the screen. Some book posts are pushing their way out, though!

I've been reading every Wednesday, just before the end of the school day. Here are most of the selections, not in good order:

• Wemberly Worried, by Kevin Henkes. A great story of a little mouse who's veeeerry worried about the start of the school year.
• Tree-ring circus, by Adam Rex. What happens when circus animals escape? Read this joyously illustrated book and find out!
  
• Ookpik : the travels of a snowy owl by Bruce Hiscock. Curious Girl's class uses a phonics-exploration program that has a snowy owl puppet (Echo the Owl) as a prop to lead the kids in their letter/sound correspondence chants. CG loves Echo, and this book about the journey of a snowy owl who heads south to look for food was a big hit with the class. Full of great facts about owls, and with great, big picture spreads.
  
• Chester's Way, by Kevin Henkes. I heart Kevin Henkes. Both Wemberly and Chester's Way have lots of little side dialogues in the illustrations, and they just hit on the adventurousness and intensity of kid-friendships and explorations. This book is about the challenges facing Chester and Wilson when Lily moves into the neighborhood (yes, Lily, as in the marvelous Lily's Purple Plastic Purse).
  
• The Family Book, by Todd Parr. Like all of Parr's work, this raucously colored book celebrates diversity--this time diversity of families (some of whom look like each other and some of whom look like their pets, for example).
  
• Abe Lincoln Crosses a Creek, by Deborah Hopkinson and John Hendrix. This fictional tale of Abe Lincoln describes an outing he might have had with a boyhood friend on an afternoon's play by a raging river. Hendrix' illustrations are so vivid, and the text plays with the illustrations, talking to the illustrator as though he's drawing the pictures while we read. The kids loved the idea of a president as a kid.
  
• John Coltrane's Giant Steps, by Chris Raschka. We love Raschka's illustrations and words--Charlie Parker Played Bebop is another family favorite, and this book about John Coltrane uses words and pictures to give the feeling of Coltrane's classic Giant Steps.
  
• Silly Lilly and the Four Seasons, by Agnes Rosenstiehl (translated from the French). This cartoon-paneled book is just plain fun. I brought in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home just to hold up to show the kids that even grownups read paneled-books too.
  
• 365 Penguins, by Jena-Luc Fromental and Joelle Jolivet (also translated from the French by an uncredited translator). This delightful oversized book tells the story of a family who get, mysteriously by mail a penguin a day, and go through amusing bouts of trying to house and feed them. Lots of math fun is mixed in with the story, and the illustrations rock.
  
• Leo Loves Round, by Eli Goldblatt and Wendy Osterweil, an out-of-print book by my friends Eli and Wendy, whose son Leo has now graduated from college. But this book about all the round things Leo loved as a boy is just a delight: Leo loves round. He loves balls that bounce, roll, float, and fly..... If it's in your library or at a used book store, pick it up.
  
• Borya and the Burps, by Joan McNamara, a Russian adoption story that looks at the disorientation a baby might face and the little things that help families connect
  
• Through Moon and Star and Night Skies, by Ann Turner and James Hale, an adoption story about an international adoption
  
• Sammy Spider's First Rosh Hashanah and Sammy Spider's First Hanukkah, by Sylvia Rouss. The Sammy Spider series is a lovely, colorful way to introduce kids to Jewish holidays, and the singsong repetition of "Silly Sammy! Spiders don't [insert holiday action here], spiders spin webs!" always makes for good group participation.
  
• Martin's Big Words: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr., by Doreen Rappaport and Bryan Collier. Interesting comments in the reviews at Amazon, which focus on objections by some readers that there aren't any women or white people in the illustrations. (I think it's a good thing for white kids to read books without white kids in the illustrations, some of the time--for starters, that's a mirror of the experience that children of color have quite frequently in picture books, and it's a good thing to upset that white reading privilege. Lack of women might be more problematic, but I'm not reading this book as a big history of the whole civil rights movement, but rather a way into a good biography, with an emphasis on MLK's language.) The illustrations are gorgeous.
  
• Ann and Liv Cross Antarctica, by Zoe Alderfer Ryan and Nicholas Reti, a story of the first women (Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen) to reach the South Pole, packaged with a lot of kid-inspiring messages about the importance of following one's dreams.
  
• A River of Words, by Jen Bryant and Melissa Sweet, a biography of William Carlos Williams, with fantabulous collage artwork and a great presentation of a young boy who loved words who grew up to be a doctor and poet. This is a book that will work for kids of wide age ranges, as a fair bit of poetry is built into the illustrations and endpapers. Most of that poetry was over the heads for kindergarten so I didn't read it all--they were more interested in the biography. After we read this, we wrote an imitation of his "This is Just to Say," as the kids came up with ideas for a couple of places in the poem where I'd left blanks for them to fill.
  
• Munschworks: The First Munsch Collection, by Robert Munsch. This volume contains The Paper Bag Princess, The Fire Station, I Have to Go!, David's Father, and Thomas' Snowsuit. I forget which of these books I read first, but the class loved it so much that they asked for another, and we ended up reading all five books over two or three weeks. Munsch is very funny, and Martchenko's illustrations add great visual interest for a readaloud. If you have the chance to listen to Munsch read his own work (which you can do on the author link above), you'll appreciate the humor even more. He reads very well.
• Skippyjon Jones, by Judy Schachner. If you've never read a Skippyjon Jones book, run to the nearest library and borrow one. Skippyjon Jones is a hysterically funny Siamese cat who has a rich fantasy life in which he is a chiuaua who runs with a gang of friends, beating bad guys. The mix of Spanish and English, and the rhythmic punning, is awesome. This book just begs to be read aloud. CG's teacher had never read any Skippyjon Jones, so I was happy to introduce her to him.
  
• How the Ladies Stopped the Wind, by Bruce McMillan and Gunnella. I didn't like this one quite as well as McMillan and Gunnella's first book, The Problem with Chickens, but that's only a slight problem. Do they really sing to animals in Iceland? Learning more about Icelandic folklore is on my summer reading to-do list. In the meantime, check out this fun book about resourceful ladies who know how to solve a problem.
• Where the Sidewalk Ends, by Shel Silverstein. CG loves "Sick" and the one about the dentist and the crocodile, and so many kids in the room had already read some Silverstein that the connections they made to the poems were lots of fun.

I'm sure I'm forgetting a few (I think we read some Mo Willems, and one of the Leonardo the Terrible Monster and one of the Knuffle Bunny books), but this gives you a sense of what I've been doing on Wednesdays at 2:00 this year. Only two more Wednesdays left: tomorrow, it's Peggy Rothmann's The Day the Babies Crawled Away, which has got to be one of the most beautiful picture books ever. I'm still debating about the last book of the year. Maybe something silly like Catalina Magdalina Hoopensteiner Wallendiner, or perhaps something new. I'll give each kid a bookplate from My Home Library. Today, at the parent volunteer breakfast, each volunteer got some bulbs or a plant from a local nursery. I was happy to get the plant (strawberries!), but truly, reading each week has been as much fun for me as for the kids. Kindergarteners are such an enthusiastic audience. I love watching them get so excited when they have connections to the books (which can be rather random, as in "my mom has the same first name as the illustrator!") and when they want to tell me about what they're reading, or about what they know about the books already. They're so happy in school. I hope that feeling lasts into grade one.

About half of the books I've read this year are ones I read sometime last year in my weekly reading gig; it's been great to see how a year makes a difference in the way kids listen to and interact with a book. I'm excited that CG has learned to read this year, and that she's interested in beginning chapter books, but picture books are really suitable for kids long past kindergarten. The complexity of the words and pictures offers a lot, and I am in no hurry to leave the world of picture books. I'm encouraging CG to collect both easy readers and picture books as we visit the library. This year of picture books in kindergarten has been just tons of fun for me--perhaps something here will make your summer reading fun, too.

Young Obama Fan, or How to Get Your Girl to Make Her Bed

Curious Girl--like most of the rest of us--has been quite charmed by the Obama girls. While she still tells people that she tried to get her mothers to vote for Hillary, but they wouldn't, and while she still wishes Hillary were president (and takes great pride in the Hillary for President sign Politica got her, which hangs by her bed), CG loves seeing photos of girls with the President. (And, she'll tell you, it's a good thing Obama got elected, because John McCain didn't want pets to go to the vet. So she's supportive of the new administration.)

CG loves to see Sasha and Malia in the news, and she's been particularly interested in learning about what the Obama family is like. We've been in the habit of playing apples and onions at dinner (where each of us thinks back on the day and says one apple (something that made us happy) and one onion (something that was not-so-happy in the day)). I read somewhere that the Obamas do that, too, although they call it roses and thorns. So now, often as not, we play roses and thorns, as well. Sasha and Malia make their own beds, she learned. So now she wants to make her bed in the morning (usually with help, but hey, it's a start, and CG is a small girl with a big bed). She was excited to learn that Sasha and Malia have alarm clocks, because she has one, too! Now all that's left is for Woman of Many Talents, who lives in DC after all, to make friends with the Obamas and arrange a playdate.

In the meantime, CG is enjoying getting her Obama fix through the young reader's edition of Obama: The Historic Journey, published by the New York Times (a free copy of which came to me via Mother Talk). It opens with a short chapter on election day (in which it's reported that Malia's question upon learning that her father would run for President was, "Shouldn't you be vice-president first?"), and then cuts back to two chapters about Obama's childhood and early political career, and then four chapters cover the election through inauguration. The text is designed for young readers (older elementary school); CG treats it as a picture book, and goes through hunting for her favorites. What does she like, you wonder? The photo of Obama in the water in Hawaii; Barack and Michelle's wedding photo, because they're fancy; pictures of Michelle on inauguration day (because she was fancy); any photo of Sasha and Malia; the photo of Hillary and Obama. What CG would have had the Times leave out: any photo containing McCain or Bush.

The photos are stellar, drawn as they are from the Times coverage. The Obamas are a photogenic bunch! (If you're interested in photos, check out Callie Shell's photoessays, and fans of Michelle Obama's fashion have probably already found Mrs. O, which I confess to looking at every now and again even though I think the focus on Michelle's fashion is a bit OTT. But beautiful.)

So, need a way to encourage your kid to make her bed? I know at least one of my friends has a kid who likes to pretend to be an Obama girl. Whether you've got kids interested in the kids in the White House, or you just want a beautiful photo tour of the campaign, it's a good read. Available, no doubt, at your local public library, your local independent bookstore, or Amazon.

I actually liked Callie Shell's Obama photos