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.

Hank and Fergus

 By Susin Nielsen-Fernlund nd Louise-Andrée Laliberté

Brutal.  Absolutely brutally bad.

Hank is a kid with a birthmark on his face who has an imaginary dog friend named Fergus.  It's made obvious in the beginning that he has this dog friend because he can't make real friends.  Probably because he gets teased about his birthmark and is embarrassed and then acts out.

 So a new kid moves in next door and tries to be friends with him and Hank gets all defensive and is horrible and mean to him.  So they're both horrible and mean to each other.  Which is usually how these things go down.

Then they make up and give each other presents in the most formulaic and artificial turnaround you could imagine.  See, making friends isn't that hard.  You just aren't trying!
No, I get it.  The moral of the story, that they explain in the last few sentences, is that having a birthmark on your face isn't so bad.  In fact, everyone has something weird going on.  Look at this kid; he's got a scar on his stomach!

This book won the Mr. Christie book award.

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.

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.

Friday Post - Waddingtons "Dix"

Waddingtons "Un Monde Des Jeux - Dix"

I found this at the thrift store and picked it up because my mum used to have a copy.  We never played it properly when I was a kid because we didn't know the rules and nobody sat down and explained it to us.  We lost the box and everything, so my mum got rid of it.

I read the rules when I got it home and it's basically dominoes, but you add to 10.  It says 5+ on the box, which is probably accurate.  I let my daughter play with it a bit and she happily moved them around on the coffee table in arbitrary pairings.

I hope this comes in handy down the line.  I've been looking up other games by this company, but I can't find anything so far.

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.

Little Bear and the Marco Polo

 Written by Else Holmelund Minarik

Illustrated by Dorothy Doubleday

What a disappointment.  I usually love the little bear books.  They've got tons of repetition, so they're great little readers, and they focus on little bear's character.

This one is all about how his grandfather was a captain of a ship and then settled down and got married.

 There's a bit about the bears of the world.  The rest is typical patriarchal "what is marriage" garbage.  And, whatever, obviously I'm married and have kids, and lots of people are married and have kids, but books about that are BORING.

I don't care what Grandpa bear did.  I want to hear about Little Bear's pretend adventures.  That was what was so great about the earlier books.  (The other 5 books in the series were written 40 years before this one.)

Sendak did the pictures in the original series.  They got a new illustrator for this book, and it shows.   Just what is going on here with Grandpa bear?

No crosshatch, either.  Crosshatch is so, so charming when done well.

My daughter didn't really notice how bad it was, but she didn't ask to read it again, like the other books.

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.

Friday Post - Number Mats

 This is a "Teacher's Friend" product published by Scolastic.  I found it at the thrift store for a dollar.

Not all of the resources in this series are useful.  A lot of them are redundant or too simplistic.  This one is great for a few reasons.

First off, we love identifying numbers.  It's a favourite game.  So a box full of foam numbers that you can match up on cards is a fantastic activity on its own.

The cards with stars to count are great right now, too, because they're organized in basic dice patterns.  I'm learning a lot about teaching addition now that my daughter is working on beginner math.  It's interesting to see which concepts are easy and which are difficult.  She can count forwards and backwards to 10, and she can count up to 29 (Sometimes 30), but adding two numbers together makes no sense to her.  She has, however, memorized that 2 plus 2 is 4, and if she sees two groups of two, she will recognize it as four objects without taking the time to count.  Learning by rote and repetition has helped her understand elements of addition already, so I'm totally embracing the idea of her memorizing dice patterns and not bothering with written out math equations.

Lastly, the wipe off cards for practicing writing are fantastic.  She gets so angry when she makes a mistake and can't erase it.  This way there's no stress. 

This is the best dollar I've ever spent.

Friday Post - Chutes and Ladders

 Retroland has a pretty good post about this game.

This is a pre-2000's version.  Ebay says it's from 1999, which makes sense, I guess, looking at that boy with the burgundy vest.  That's a pretty dated style.

But, as you can see, it's totally PC by this point, at least.

It was really interesting to read the article on Retroland and discover that this has always been a game about morality. I've never had a copy in my house growing up, so I never played a version like this. They got a bit carried away here, too.  Just look at the arbitrary rewards.

On square 9 we have a boy who mows the lawn and gets to see sad animals at the circus.  That cat on 28 features a fair bit, sometimes dealing out punishment, sometimes rewarding with cuddles.  Higher up at 51, a girl sweeps the floor and gets movie tickets.  At 71, a boy returns a damsel's purse and she buys him ice cream.

It's all pretty ridiculous, and I can't imagine that there was ever a good edition of this crummy game.  The spinner is supposed to be easier than dice, but my daughter can throw dice now and can still barely play this game because counting to 100 is not very fun for her and the pictures are too distracting.  If the game wasn't so long and these weird stories weren't everywhere, maybe we'd get through more than half of it.  The best part is, none of these moral lessons make a dent on her anyway.  She's convinced of her own moral superiority and is quick to judge the kids on the board.  It's kind of hilarious.

My Cousin Momo

 By Zachariah Ohora

I picked this book up because "No Fits Nilson" wasn't too bad, because I like the art style, and because the cover looked pretty great.

Yeah, I judged a book by its cover.  I want to like this book because I like the art.  And I feel like I'm crazy to hate on it so much, because the internet loves it.

 Here's Momo crying after his cousins bully him for being different.  I was really hoping, from the cover, that he'd be the cool cousin. He looks SO COOL.  But no.  Being fat and wearing sweatbands makes you a huge loser.

What really gets my goat is that the main characters are angry and annoyed with Momo for being weird or different.  We accept that kind of behaviour as normal with kids.  We expect it of kids.  I remember being a weird kid.  I wasn't that weird, but every once in a while I'd deviate from a teacher's instructions and do something creative and some kids were so ANGRY about it.  I feel like this book normalizes that kind of behaviour, while being so lazy in characterizing the 'different' and 'weird' Momo as just some fat nerd.

And while this book is obviously geared at kids who already behave poorly towards others, it is so condescending.  Oh, right, they're going to suddenly discover by the last page that their cousin is cool and start dressing like him?  No.  They won't.  They're going to feel like they can never really accept him without being cast out by the rest of their peer group and at best they'll maintain an awkward relationship with him up until adulthood when maybe they'll just pretend none of the bullying happened.

There's a place between disliking someone and emulating them.  It's called acceptance.  This book completely misses the point.

It is, however, highly marketable.

Friday Post - Math Rabbit

 Math Rabbit is an excellent game.  I found it for my daughter and we've been playing it together.  I was skeptical at first because it seemed to be a weird mix of way too easy and way too hard.  But then I realized that each mini-game can be set to a different level of difficulty and that at each level there is a different list of options.

 Any game can be set to a beginner level where the user is only ever asked to count objects up to 10.  But at their hardest, the games use numbers up to 99 with addition and subtraction.

The detail with which you can customize each game means that you can tailor the questions to the student.  Best of all, the questions never automatically get too hard once you've done too many of them.

 The elephant show at the top is a game for matching numbers to equations or numbers to a group of dots.

The Calliope game is just counting to 8 and doesn't have a harder setting.  It does have a free-compose setting, though!

The sea lion show is about patterns using addition or subtraction.  (We have currently mastered "plus one" and I'm trying to teach my daughter how to do "plus 2" to any number.)

 The Balloon Matching game is just a memory game, but memory is my daughter's favourite right now.  She'll happily play this game endlessly.  I'm excited that there's the option of "number to number name" because I'll use that when she starts reading...

There's a lot of repetition in this game, but there's some serious incentive; every time you win a game, you get a ticket, and if you have enough tickets, you can buy prizes.  The game saves your prizes, there are tons to collect, and once you've purchased them, they dance around at the bottom of the screen. 

My daughter happily plays the mini-games over and over, especially if I'm around to play with her.  It's great practice!

Frog and Toad

By Arnold Lobel

We got the box set of the Frog and Toad books ("Frog and Toad are Friends" isn't pictured) ages ago when I first found out I was pregnant.  It was an excuse to pick up one of my favourite set of books.

Some of the concepts in these books are just a bit beyond my daughter, but she likes the books anyway.  The conflicts are silly, and are rarely between the two main characters.  Even when they have an argument, it never affects their strong friendship.  How could any child dislike these books; It's a whole series of stories about two characters who are animals and who love each other and do everything together.

The text is big and the wording is very simple and just a little repetitive, so it's a great reader.  The stories are short which means that I don't have to read the whole book before bedtime if I don't want to.  And Toad is a bit of a grump sometimes, which saves it from being saccharine.