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.

Where is Baby's Belly Button

 By Karen Katz

This one is also very popular.  It's a lift-the-flap book.  Plus it's all about body parts.  This is one of the very few books that my youngest will ask to read.

There is one African-American baby and there is one East-Asian baby and the rest are white.  Equal numbers of girls and boys.

So that's something.

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.

And It Was So

 Published by the Westminster Press Philadelphia
Illustrated by Tasha Tudor

This book is not bad at all.  Totally Presbyterian, but the parts they pull from the bible are heavily edited to be understood by kids, so whatever.

 The only problem I have with it is that it pulls from way to many sections.  It starts with Genesis, which is great.  And then it moves on to a whole bunch of psalms.

It sneaks something in there about the son of God being born and how he loved children and stuff, which is nice.

The pictures are really nice.  But it's all blonde white kids, and there's this one page about spreading the news throughout the world that has bunch of kids in traditional outfits from foreign countries.  It's a bit white-savior/racist.  But it's an old book, too.  Maybe there's a new edition?

Where Does Electricity Come From?

 By Angelo Gangemi

Published by GS science

This book wasn't so good.  Electricity is complicated, and the target audience here is too young.  I don't really feel like I understand electricity, and this book really highlights the things that I don't understand.

 Spin a magnet and get electricity on the wires!  First of all, I don't really understand magnetism.  I understand THAT it works and HOW it works, but why?  It may as well be magic.

On a side note, I learned about magnets entirely in French, and we just called the iron filings "fer", which meant nothing to me at the time.  It was all very mysterious.

The book has a section on generators and batteries and all the basics, but each paragraph has about three to five simple sentences.  It just leaves so many questions.  And I end up having to try to answer them off the top of my head.

I was hoping this book would talk about the dangers of electricity, or how it works in the house, but it really did neither.

And then I thought about how I have a serious phobia of being electrocuted that I developed after years of sitting through the hydro presentations for kids that included slideshows of serious burns on young children.  So maybe my kids don't need to know about these things until they're much older.

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.

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.

The Tiny Seed

 Eric Carle

A lot of these books are available as big hardcover books, but I like the board books better.  This one doesn't really make sense for the under two crowd, but it has nice colours and it can be pulled at and chewed on this way.  Having smaller pages doesn't take away from the art, and they didn't edit the books when they made them smaller.

This one is all about seeds from a flower going through all the seasons and finally falling to the ground and making a new flower.  It's about all the seeds that don't make it and why they don't make it.

And then there's this page near the end about how the flower is so big and everyone thinks it's so amazing.  This could have been left out.  My kids just don't care about that.

And then the flower dies and sends off new seeds, continuing the cycle.  It's a good teaching book about the life cycle of plants.

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 Doorbell Rang

 By Pat Hutchins

This book was almost good.  My daughter loved it for the direct repetition on each page.  Plus it has a catch at the end; the doorbell rings, but they don't tell you who it is.  "BUT WHO IS AT THE DOOR?"  She would yell at me, never satisfied with my answer.

My husband, on the other hand, found it too repetitive and a little bit creepy.  He also hated the art.

It's a math story about 12 cookies divided many different ways.  But they don't tell you that it's 12 cookies, so maybe it could be a fun math game for an older kid?  maybe.

Personally I didn't love it or hate it.  But I didn't keep it in the house for very long, because I think owning it and reading it every single night would wear on me.

Bears On Wheels

 By Stan and Jan Berentsain

Not Berenstein, as everyone seemingly used to pronounce it.

This book is amazing!  It teaches basic math!  I wouldn't call it an amazing counting book.  There are better books for that.

 The bears' shirts are different colours and the different vehicles that they ride or drive have different numbers of wheels.  It has 2+2, 1+3, 1+4, 5+5 and a few others.  Nothing incredibly difficult.  It's just a nice visual representation of the concept of adding and is really appealing to preschoolers.

My daughter seems to understand addition and I sincerely believe that this book made a big impact on that development.

Max and Ruby's Treasure Hunt

By Rosemary Wells

My husband hates the art in these books, but I guess I'm just used to it from my childhood.  I don't have any serious attachment to these books, but they aren't bad.

 This one is a treasure hunt.  The clues are hidden in an envelope that folds down!  Exciting!  If only the answers are easy enough for a three year old to get.  But just in case, they put pictures of the answers all over each page.  Kind of frustrating.  But exciting for kids.  There was a lot of standing up and yelling out the answers.

They get a little into rhyming at one point.  Here, they have different things that rhyme with "Hickory Dickory Dock".  Hmmm...  Which of these did the mouse run up?

This is kind of nice, because it's where we're at with learning to read.  My daughter was willing to work out what the words were.

All in all, it's a pretty decent activity/story book.

Ma Journée - Mes 100 Premiers Mots

 Published by Scholastic

This book wasn't too bad.  It had a fair number of basic words, some great activities on each page to talk about, and a fun family of cats?  or bears? or something?

 They have some different words AGAIN.  I haven't seen the word "foulard" for scarf in a long time.  It is so frustrating to have so many beginner French books with so many different names for clothes.

Do you say espadrilles?  Or Soulier?  Or Chaussure? Because in English we just say "shoe" and "running shoe".  (and sure, there ARE words like "sneakers" or "wellies", but you don't get into all that nonsense with ESL students under the age of 10.)

I literally looked up the difference between all the terms just now on French Wikipedia, so now I get it, but I have never, in all my years of speaking the language, understood why there were so many terms for one item of clothing.

Back to this book.  The gimmick here is that it has labels for all the items, and when you pull the tab, the labels disappear!  Can you remember their names?

My daughter can't read, so this was useless, but distracting!  And pretty flimsy because it's a library copy, so it's being slowly destroyed.

Anyway, I wasn't that impressed.  I guess I should have learned by now that 100 words isn't actually a lot of words.

One Night in the Zoo

 By Judith Kerr

We're big fans of Mog at our house, for all of its flaws, so I've started borrowing all the Judith Kerr books I can get ahold of.  (My husband even bought a copy of When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, which is supposed to be amazing.)

One Night in the Zoo is the first one we've borrowed and I'm pretty impressed.

 It's a counting book with zoo animals doing magical things in the night, all rhyming with perfect rhythm.

The pictures are pale, but they're really charming.

It has big full-sized pages and a recap at the end showing all the animals in their groups surrounding their corresponding number.

I'll probably buy a copy of this to keep.

Very First French Words

 Published by Collins

I had mixed feelings about this one.  It comes with a CD which is good for parents who don't speak French.  The vocabulary is different than our Usborne French book.  Some of the different vocab is just a personal choice.  For instance, they use "être en collère", and I say "être fâché".  I hate that they sometimes use words that require prepositions when they could easily choose something else because trying to explain French prepositions to a 3 year old is a nightmare.  I learned it by ear because I was in an immersion class and was just copying a teacher that I listened to 7 hours a day.  We don't have that luxury here.

 The art is terrrrrrible.  Very obviously computer assisted.  And I can't stand that stupid monkey.  They were really trying too hard to appeal to the kids.  But they do try to work the vocabulary into a bit of a story and make pages that you can actually talk about in a bit of detail.

Ultimately, though, there just isn't enough to talk about.  The Usborne book has waaaay more vocabulary, and every page is littered with so many details and multiple recurring characters that you could read it forever.  As much as I found this Collins book useful, it wasn't $15 worth of useful.

Friday Post - Preschool Music Lessons - The Music Tree

My daughter is tired of listening to me teach students downstairs while she watches television elsewhere.  She's started asking me for lessons.  So I decided to give them to her.  She's three years old.

Now, that's a crazy age to start music lessons at, and normally I wouldn't start a child at this age.  I'd tell the parents to sign them up for a general music class of mostly just singing and dancing and not a lot of real technical learning.  But this is different, because my daughter lives with me.  I can make the lessons 5 minutes long and teach her whenever she's interested, which may be once or twice a week, or may be once every two weeks.  In between lessons, we do what we always do: sing, clap, dance and listen to an eclectic selection of music.

  As far as learning to play the piano goes, I don't have high expectations and I don't worry about teaching new concepts every time we sit down together. We're learning from The Music Tree, because I always start with The Music Tree.  It's flawed, and it requires a lot of personalized modifications, but it's the best option there is for teaching music to really young students using proper notation.

The first half of the book is all pieces on the black notes. Most pieces only have 2 notes going back and forth.  I give her a sticker every time she finishes playing a song.  I waited a month before we graduated from quarter notes to half notes.  She's starting to play the pieces properly and independently, which makes her so proud.

After 65 pages of kiddie pieces, there are a few final pieces on the grand staff, but getting to that point is not so important.  If my daughter learns to do rhythms, interval reading and ear training, that's enough.  We'll wade around in the beginning of the book until I feel like she's ready for that final step.

The biggest problem with the book is pages like this.  It's definitely a book for teachers because it's way too wordy for the kids.  I find that these big pages with all the extra information, which is supposed to prepare students for more difficult music ahead, don't contain enough practice material and aren't age appropriate.  The accompanying work book is a real waste of time except as a fun colouring book for kids who already understand the concepts.

Furthermore, a three year old can't move their fingers independently, and four year olds aren't much better.  I've had eight year olds who really struggle with good posture and finger independence.  So the idea that they would play hands together at age 4 is pretty presumptuous.

As a book for older kids, "Time To Begin" fails completely.  It's so boring.  Five pages in and a 5 year old is ready to quit.

Halfway through this book I'll probably skip to something else.  Probably Music for Little Mozarts, if only for the colouring and activity books.  I have a giant grand staff mat that I made for group classes long ago, and we'll learn to sight sing with it.  I also have so many great little music books from the thrift store, too, that we can bounce around a fair bit until she's ready to learn to find and play white notes.  That way she doesn't have to progress at all and she can still feel like she's actually playing music from a book like her mama.

Winston and George

 By John Miller

Illustrated by Giuliano Cucco

This one isn't so stellar.  The crocodile bird cries wolf.  The crocodile remains friends with him anyway.  The bird is threatened and learns a lesson.

 In case you don't learn enough about crocodiles and crocodile birds through the story, there's a page at the back with some information about them.  My kids were uninterested.

The art looks way better in these pictures than it looks in the books.  The book is super long, and I feel like the pictures really lose their focus because of the dimensions.  Plus some of the pictures are super messy.  I wasn't a fan.

This was okay library fare.  We didn't read it twice.

Blue Hat, Green Hat

 By Sandra Boynton

Everyone gets this one, right?  I think.

My daughter didn't mind this book.  My son was OBSESSED with it.  As soon as he learned to walk (just before his first bithday), he would find this book, rush over to me, place it in my lap and sit patiently while I read it.  When I finished, he would grab it, flip it, and throw it back in my hands for another read-through.

It was pretty impressive because otherwise he hated storytime and wouldn't sit still for anything.

He obviously didn't understand the content.  He liked it, and still does, because it's really simplistic and very rhythmic.  He still mimics the rhythm of the text with melodic nonsense words every time he picks it up.