Professor Astro Cat's Frontiers of SPACE

 By Dominic Newman
Illustrated by Ben Newman

Look at this book!  It's so 1950's!  But modern, too!  The cover has a lovely fabric texture with silver bits.  Some of the printed colours look like they dyed the fabric whereas others look like they're decals.  It's delightfully tactile and visually pleasing.

The facts inside are wonderfully up-to-date and thorough!  It's a real textbook laid out so that a kid could read and understand it.  It's so accessible that I read it to my 3 year old (but skip as many details as possible)

 This is one of our favourite graphics.  There's a full solar system on this page, plus a representation of the planets using round food items.  Every page relays the information in such a clear and accessible way.  My daughter often stands up on the couch and excitedly yells the facts back at us as we read it with her.  She really has a limited understanding of the information, but it'll come.  In the meantime, she still love, love, loves this book.

The pictures I've supplied do not do the book justice.  The graphic design throughout the book is astounding.  It's so well organized, especially considering the amount of information they cram in here.

The only problematic thing is that they really do include all facts, like animals sacrificed for science and the fact that the sun will explode one day and how if you get sucked into a black hole you'll turn into spaghetti.

I'm glad that they didn't skirt around these subjects, but it means that this might not be a good book for a very young, very anxious child.  Or you can just skip pages; that's what we do.

Mommy! Mommy!

 By Taro Gomi

I really like this author.  These baby books are visually appealing and really simple.

 This story in particular is so easy for a baby to understand.  Look, there's Mama!  Oh, no, where is she?  There she is!

Over and over again.

My son goes around the house saying, "MAMA MAMA!  NO!  NO MAMA!"

He would make me read this book all day if I was willing.

All Around the Town

This is a book from my husband's childhood in Britain.  It's nice to have a book of British vocabulary, and it's also nice to have a super large picture book to pour over, but content wise, this is pretty sub-par compared to anything by Richard Scarry.

First off, the printing is cheap.  Some of the colours aren't printed in the lines.  The colour pallet is pretty bland and unappealing. 

The names of the characters are annoying, and only some of them have names.  The others are just "bunny" or "cat".  Though I guess that's a pretty minor complaint.

Some of the pictures have weirdly drawn perspective problems.  I'm not quite sure what's happening with this fence.  There are worse pages.  You can still tell what's going on, at least.

Scarry employs a lot of slapstick, and this book does not.  Some of the buildings featured are based on the same building frame, which is kind of boring.  My kids don't like reading the story, which is REALLY boring, but they do like looking at all of the objects and animals.

Overall, it's worth picking up if you can find it at a second hand store, but I wouldn't spend a whole bunch of money on it.

Scat Cat

 By Alyssa Satin Capucilli
Illustrated by Paul Meisel

This is a great early reader.  It's full of tons of easy words.  I read it with my daughter and point to the words that she should be able to read on her own.

In particular, she can read "Cat", so she can figure out "Scat".

Basically every animal and person tells the cat to scat except for the cat's owner because he loves the cat so much.


 It has lots of repetition.  The problem I usually find with repetition, though, is that my daughter is smart enough that she doesn't need to look at the words once she's heard the pattern.  She also has excellent memory and it is rare that we can read a book a second time without her already knowing how it goes.

This book had enough material that I can randomly ask her different words every time we read it. 

Jack

 By Tomie DePaola

I love this author.  I wasn't expecting much from this book.  And there wasn't much to it.

 I guess it's a book about animal noises?  And some people love them and some people hate them? 
Jack and all of his animal friends go to the city to live in a big apartment building together.  And that's the plot.

They just ask the king for an apartment, and the king gives them the key for one in the city.  The end.

But, you know, the pictures are nice.

Math Fables - Lessons that Count

 By Greg Tang
Illustrated by Heather Cahoon

This is a great idea, and my daughter does ask to read it, but in practice it's a little too much in one book.

All the numbers from one to ten are represented, and each number has stories for every possible equation.

 This works well for the first few numbers.  We like to read about the squirrels and divide them up into two and two or one and three.  Great.

But later on, it gets really boring.  Especially nine and ten.  We've never read through the story about the ants.  Two eat watermellon and eight eat cheese.  Three took home bread and seven took home lettuce.  etc. etc. etc. until little hands are all over the book forcefully turning pages to get you to stop.

The rhyming and meter are pretty dreadful.  But seeing as my daughter likes the beginning and it IS actually educational, I give this one a pass.

The Tiger and the Dried Persimmon

 By Janie Jaehyun Park

This was a great find.  I really picked it up because of the cover.  Plus, it's a Korean folk-tale told by a Korean person. That alone made it seem promising.

The story is of a foolish tiger that becomes confused when he overhears a mother talking to her child and believes that the dried persimmon is a fierce monster.  As he is heading home, a cattle thief mistakes him for an ox.  Comedy ensues!

 The paintings are a fantastic blend of modern technique and traditional shapes and patterns.  Every drawing of the tiger has different proportions, making him a bit cartoony and very expressive.

I love this drawing of the cattle thief.  So much.  This book was a hit with the kids, too.

When Elephant Met Giraffe

 By Paul Gude

I was pretty unimpressed by this book.  It's about an elephant who meets a mute giraffe and becomes friends with him after accepting his silence.

 The drawings are supposed to be cute, and I guess they'd be fine if the story was any good.  The brevity of the sentences and chapters is supposed to be cute, too, but nothing really happens.

Oh look, one of them wants to be a pirate, and the other a clown, so they have a fight and then decide to play pirates and clowns together.

A lot of these types of stories teaching kids how to be good friends are told much better in other books.  The pirate/clown thing was meant as an easy laugh, but it wasn't funny. 
My daughter loved this book, probably because of the pictures and the animals involved.  I couldn't bring myself to read it twice.

Five Little Monkeys Reading in Bed

 Written by Eileen Christelow

This is part of a series about the 5 little monkeys that is obviously inspired by the "jumping on the bed" rhyme.  (There is a book in the series based on the rhyme, too, though I haven't read it.)

I got this one out in desperation because my son hated every book in the house save one Sandra Boynton book that we were all tired of.

 He really didn't like this book, either, but didn't mind flipping through it on a car trip.

It's not written particularly well; you have to bend the sentences a bit to make them match up rhythmically.  The story is okay.  The monkeys make so much noise reading books in bed that Mom takes the books away, and then gets caught reading them herself.  My daughter thought it was funny.

I kind of really like that it's a single mom with five kids.  And, like, quintuplets or something.  That's brutal.

There are lots of books in this series.  Pretty much any kid who has heard the original rhyme would go crazy for any of these books, like my daughter did.  We ended up buying the one where they make the birthday cake, and I don't mind having it around the house, even though I have the same complaints about it.

Lifetime - The Amazing Numbers in Animal Lives

 By Lola M. Schaefer
Illustrated by Christopher Silas Neal

This book is longer than pictured.  It has huge pages and is great for cuddling up to read with kids.

It is also a counting book for older kids, which I very much appreciate.

 The animals featured are random, and the objects to count reflect an amazing part of that animal's life, like a caribou dropping its antlers, or a seahorse male birthing babies.

The illustrations are in this newfangled modern style, but not twee.  They're really nice.  I'm still finding this style of illustration fresh, probably because it's so clean and simple.

Mathematically, this book is actually useful because it counts by tens for a bit, then shows hundreds of things, then finally one thousand.  It's not about learning all the numbers in between, it's about visualizing numbers.  My kids aren't really old enough to comprehend the concept of one thousand, but when they're ready, this book will be perfect.

We still look through it anyway, because the animal facts are cool.

Moo, Baa, La La La!

 By Sandra Boynton

My kids both love this book.  My youngest makes me read it repeatedly.

 Mostly because it has animal noises that he likes to copy. 

My daughter likes this page, because she's starting to understand jokes.

The ending only made sense to my daughter after she was three.  She now makes funny noises and laughs when it's finished.  It's nice to have a book that I can read to both of them at the same time.

A la Ferme

 Published by Chantecler

There is no writer credited for this book.  This company seems to still be publishing, but the books are all pretty random and not categorized in levels like the scholastic books are.

It's a real shame, because we love this book so much.

Because it's on a farm, the animals, activities and concepts are all words that we've covered while learning general vocabulary.  There are a few crazy words in there, but that's good.

Bread and Jam for Frances

 By Russell Hoban
Illustrated by Lillian Hoban

This is a classic.  Francis is a great character, and we love, love, love this particular story.  It's another one of those "teach your kid to love food" books.  Except it isn't about the parent knowing that the child is just faking their dislike of anything but chicken strips.

 In this particular story, Francis just doesn't like being adventurous with food and is satisfied with the predictability of bread and jam.  Her parents let her eat bread and jam forever and eat tasty other things in front of her until she breaks down and cries.  It's a bit much.  But it's told in a charming enough way that I don't mind reading it anyway.  And Francis is delighted in the end to go to school and have a large and varied lunch that rivals her friend Albert's.

Now, I know kids like this, and my own kids are picky some days because they don't feel like being adventurous, and I get it.  I give them opportunities to try things without forcing them, but if I know that she's being unreasonable then I will put my foot down and force her to take a bite.  She can always ask for things that aren't on the table as long as she makes some effort towards something on her plate, which ultimately ends up in her discovering that she actually likes what I've made for dinner, anyway.  We know eachother's limits and we both make compromises.

And you know what?  Treating my kids fairly and letting them decide what they like and don't like and giving them options has worked great.  Occasionally forcing or bribing them to try things has worked out fine, too.  I guess the key thing is to know your kids and to work out a tactic that they won't find frustrating.

Books about kids with bad habits don't work.  Not unless they have a direct message to the reader about how they should change their ways.  Subtlety like this goes right over my three year old's head.

Dive In!

 By April Jones Prince
Illustrated by Michelle Berg

This is a favourite in the house.  There are fights.

The writing is really bad.  Nothing makes any sense to babies, or even toddlers.  They should have not tried to rhyme any of it.

But the concept is cute.  Working mice coming out with all of their machines and equipment to fill the bathtub with water and toys.

All of the movable pieces are super sturdy. Nothing has been broken on this book yet!  My toddler is mesmerized every time he sits down with it.

Little Bear's Friend

 By Else Holmelund Minarik

Illustrated by Maurice Sendak

This is a really interesting book because it introduces a human character into a world of animals.  When a children's book brings a human child into a make believe world, it risks breaking the fourth wall.

 The whole way through I'm waiting for the author to slip up and make it awkward, but it's doesn't really happen.  The book continues to have charming, kind and thoughtful characters doing simple things.  It's a great little reader, too.

At the end, little bear writes a letter to the little girl.  I wonder how that will go over with her parents.  But my daughter probably doesn't.

Happily, the adults are never featured.

Friday Post - Easter Cut-Outs

 By Elizabeth Teddler

Easter is coming fast, so I whipped this out and started assembling it all.  My daughter isn't ready to cut paper nicely, but she is ready to handle the decorations mostly gently while she plays pretend with them on the table.

It comes with carriages and weird bunny costumed cupid babies and real bunnies in human costumes and so many lambs and chicks.  The big carriage is made from the card on the back of the book.  It's pretty incredible.  My daughter was particularly amazed.

 We got this years ago at a book sale because we loved the art.  It seems to be out of print, so I probably should have scanned it all...  but I don't really want to print and cut it a second time and we're turning into such hoarders here...

 I'm being really careful to cut them out with generous borders or now.  I could always scan them later if need be.

A Northern Alphabet

 Ted Harrison

I love this artist!!!  We had a copy of the Cremation of Sam McGee at my parents house when I was little, and it was illustrated by Harrison.  It was one of my favourite books growing up.

 This book has a fair number of native or northern things for most of the letters.  But ukulele?  Some of them are just hokey.  But I get it.  For most of these letters, there's really nothing you can do.

I still really like this book because he took the tongue in cheek route instead of trying to be super serious about it.  And it's pretty fun to read the names of all of these northern towns and rivers and whatnot.

This is less of a baby book and more of a kindergarten or first grader's book.

The Berenstain Bears Go Out for the Team

By Stan and Jan Barenstain

I love baseball.  I grew up playing little league.  I was really, really bad at it, and my mother always wondered if it was a waste of time, but I developed some skill playing it, and I know the rules really well, so I don't think it was.

The only thing I hated about it was that I always got stuck in the outfield (because I couldn't catch the ball) and they always bemoaned when I went up to bat (because I couldn't hit the ball).

The coach would say, "oh, but Left Field is so important!  Sometimes the ball rolls out there!  Keep your eyes peeled!"  Sure I wasn't athletic, but I wasn't stupid, either.

 Unlike little league, this book isn't about winning or losing, it's about the AWFUL PRESSURE that comes with playing team sports, and how you should never succumb to it and just have fun instead.

And, on the side, there's a scene where sister bear accuses brother bear of being sexist, and Mother bear qualifies his remarks in a way that makes perfect sense.

They also put Brother and Sister on the same team.  And make sure to mention that Sister is pretty awesome at baseball, too, even though she's younger.  Take that Babar, always having the boys play every sport while the one girl remains consistently and conspicuously absent!  (I love Babar so much but it is, admittedly, a colonialist, sexist mess.)

Brother Bear and Sister Bear make it to the team!  And Mama stands up and yells at the umpire over a call that she doesn't agree with!  And Sister Bear, all embarrassed, tells her mother to chill!  And that's the end.

Really.  You never find out if they win or lose.  Because, who cares about that, anyway?