Children’s Book Week

Children’s Book Week is May 7-13. Although there are no official celebrations in our area, it is a great time to read a favorite book with your favorite child or children. For more information check here.

Maurice Sendak 1928-2012

Maurice Sendak died today at the age of 83. His 1964 Caldecott Medal Book, Where The Wild Things Are, has been a childhood favorite of generations of children.

  

You can listen to Maurice Sendak read his book at BN.com. When this book was published in 1963, most books featured well behaved children (or animals)whose problems were solved by the end of the book. Perhaps taking cues from his own childhood, Sendak’s characters had untidy emotions and unsettling inner lives. He understood that children do not live in cocoons protected from everything happening around them.  In an interview he said, “. . .from their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions, fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustrations as best they can. And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things.”

Judy Blume's Reading Tip for Parents: Reverse Psychology

Try this with your reluctant reader:
Judy Blume's Reading Tip for Parents: Reverse Psychology

Baseball Books

Now that the season has started, Melissa Taylor of the Imagination Soup blog has a post up about newly published baseball related books. There are picture books, chapter books and even a non-fiction book about Babe Ruth. You can view the post here.

Happy Birthday, Beverly Cleary

Today is Beverly Cleary’s 96th birthday. In her honor, today has been designated Drop Everything and Read Day ( or D.E.A.R.) an annual event aimed at getting families to read together for at least 30 minutes. She wrote about D.E.A.R. in the second chapter of  Ramona Quimby, Age 8 in 1981.

She won a 1982 Newberry Honor award for this book and also for Ramona and Her Father in 1978. In 1984, she was awarded the Newberry Medal for Dear Mr. Henshaw. At the request of two of her readers, she wrote one of the first children’s books that dealt with divorce.

Three generations of my family have read Beverly Cleary’s books. On their behalf, I’d like to wish her a Happy Birthday and to encourage your family to read her too. Here are a couple places you can go to hear more about this author: Beverly Cleary website and KQED's Perspectives.

Magic Tree House Books

Twenty years ago, the first Magic Tree House book, Dinosaurs Before Dark by Mary Pope Osborn was published. In a walk through the woods eight and a half year old Jack and his seven year old sister, Annie, find a tree house filled with books high in an old oak . The first book Jack opens is about dinosaurs. Soon the tree house is spinning and when it stops they are still in the tree house but not the same oak tree. Through this devise of the magic tree house and piles of old and new books, Mary Pope Osborn has taken Jack and Annie on adventures through time and space and even to  mythical places. There are 47 Magic Tree House Books and 22 non-fiction Fact Tracker companion books. The Yulupa Book fair has several of these books in stock and most of the books can be ordered online as well. Credit for orders before April 20th will go to Yulupa and Strawberry Schools.

This series can be found in the Yulupa Library and the Sonoma County Library. The AR level is 2.6 to 3.3. To learn more about this series and to read the first chapters of all the books you can go to the Magic Tree House website. Please be advised that there is audio as soon as you open the site.

Dogs at the Book Fair

We love dogs around here, so the first bo0ks I checked out at the Book Fair were about dogs. The picture book I picked was Charlie The Ranch Dog by Ree Drummond and illustrated by Diane DeGroat.

Charlie and his pal Suzie are ranch dogs. Charlie likes to think he works hard on the ranch but the pictures tell a different story. But in the end, Charlie saves Mama’s garden from the marauding cows. This is a light hearted story that is true to  real dogs’ natures. The book is AR level 2.2. For more about this book check here. Oh, and it comes with a Lasagna recipe!

The next book, Travel-Size Pups Around the World by Ed Masessa , looks at small dogs and the countries they came from.

You visit countries on four continents and learn about the dogs from those places. Cute puppies and lots of dog facts. This is a Level 2 book. For more information check here.

 The Puppy Place books by Ellen Miles are about the Peterson family, especially Lizzie and Charles, who foster dogs from the animal shelter until they get their “forever” home. The book I chose was Muttley.

This book is fiction, but the author bases her dog portraits on dogs she knows, so at the end of the book you learn about the real dog, Barley. She also includes ‘Puppy Tips’ to help kids understand their dog friends. There are more than two dozen Puppy Place books including a gratuitous pug appearance, Pugsley.

You can find out more about this series here. The AR level for these books is 4.0-4.2.

2002 Newberry Award winner, Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, is about an eleven year old boy, Marty, and the dog he grows to love and tries to save from an abusive owner.

Marty faces and resolves a moral dilemma is his quest to  rescue Shiloh. The book  does have a happy ending.

The final book, The Trouble With Chickens by Doreen Cronin and illustrated by Kevin Cornell, is not about a real dog or a dog who could be real like the previous books. This one is about J.J. Tully a recently retired search and rescue dog who has retired to a farm. 

Doreen Cronin (Click, Clack, Moo Cows That Type) uses her deadpan humor and a film noir style to tell the story of J.J. and his search for some missing chicks.  Their mother, Moosh, asks J.J. to help locate Poppy and Sweetie. A ransom note complicates things as does the presence of the mysterious Vince the Funnel who lives in the farm house. The AR level is 3.8. To see a video preview, click here.

Cronin’s second J.J. Tully Mystery, The Legend of Diamond Lil, is also at the book fair.