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.

Pinkalicious Soccer Star

By Victoria Kann

Oh wow I hate this book.  Guess who picked it out.

Dad gets the main character a pink soccer ball, and they play soccer against the mean angry girls who only wear black.  They say "Pink stinks!" because they are bullies.

You know, I've got this thing against asking kids what their favourite colour is.  They just say stuff because they hate saying, "I don't know".  And when they say, "I don't like green", like my daughter does, it doesn't mean anything, because there are so many shades of green.  I showed my daughter my new neon-lime-green sweatshirt and she was amazed and loved it, because, actually, she doesn't hate all shades of green.

 This shade of pink, however, is the same shade as Pepto-bismal.  And it's the only shade they use in the entire book.  Colours are exciting and this book about one specific ugly shade of pink that is already heavily marketed to girls is so dumb.

And kind of racist.

The message of the book is, I guess, to believe in yourself, but it gets lost on this weird trip across the world on a unicorn  seeing other girls who like pink.  Because the other message is that it's okay to like pink (like anyone is questioning that).




Look, I like pink.  I wear pink.  Heck, I even dress my son up in pink.  (pink on boys looks so rad.)

But look at that colour.

Of course my daughter loves this book.

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.

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.

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. 

The Kingfisher Playtime Treasury

 Selected by Pie Corbett
Illustrated by Moira and Colin Maclean

This is a pretty good collection of children's rhymes, skipping rhymes, schoolyard games and the like.  They're appropriate for children a minimum of three years old.  There's lots of variety and they're organized by category.  A lot of heavily gendered rhymes about kissing boys and getting married, but that's because they're traditional. Some of the wording is not what I'm used to.

I'm planning on using it for upcoming birthday parties.

 The art looks like it's stolen from Janet Ahlberg.  They included Each Peach Pear Plum, though they use different lines.

And they seem to have a Jolly Postman, too.

Really weird.  But I guess Janet is dead now, so it's fair game?

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.

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?

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.

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.

Too Many Cats

 By Sindy McKay
Illustrated by Meredith Johnson

This was a fantastic book that I randomly requested from the library because my daughter demanded more cat books.

It's a "We Both Read" book, meaning that the pages on the left have story, and the pages on the right have one or two words with a picture.

 The story is a pretty hokey one about a girl who wants a cat and dreams that she gets ten instead, each a different colour.  It means that it's teaching kids to sight-read colours and numbers instead of learn phonetically, which is okay.  You kind of have to learn both ways, because some of those numbers are impossible to sound out phonetically.

This book was a real hit.  Before I give it back, I think I'm going to photocopy some pages and cut them up for a mix-and-match activity with my daughter. 

Friday Post - ¢25 colouring books

I found both the Alice in Wonderland and Wizard of Oz colouring books from the Treasury of Illustrated Classics published by Modern Publishing.

I was pretty excited because we watch the Disney version of Alice, which is totally botched, and it's a nice way to introduce her to the real story.

As far as the Wizard of Oz goes, we like to watch the Japanese television series from '86, which is pretty accurate for the most part.  She recognized every scene in the colouring book, as a result.

The art is bubbly and cartoony, and nothing like the covers.  It looks like the books are still available for super cheap from Modern Publishing.  I'll probably order some other stories.  These are so much better than the average franchise promotion colouring book.  They're still cheaply made, for sure, but we've gotten so much enjoyment out of them, and sometimes my daughter likes to just sit and read them.

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.

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.