Picture This

 By Alison Jay

This book isn't half bad.  It has a number of people, toys, animals and objects that are hidden in each page.  The pictures weave together and the story is almost circular and encompasses the four seasons.

 The art style is mid to late nineties.  Each page has cracks on it, like it's been painted on an old plate or something.  It was a trendy look at one time, but it's kind of hokey now.

The words are great for learning to read!  So that's kind of nice.  We're getting into 3 and 4 letter words, but a whole sentence is too tricky.

 My daughter is all like, "WHY ARE ALL THE PAGES BROKEN!  OH NO!"

But, it hasn't caused us any more grief than that.  As a basic picture book for a three year old, it's pretty boring.  I think it's meant for someone at least five years old.  My daughter really didn't understand how one picture led to the other.

La Glace

 By Melvin and Gilda Berger

This is a really great book with some basic information about ice.  It's hard.  It's cold.  It can be thick.  It can be thin.

You think I'm being sarcastic, but there's very little to be negative about when the source material is interesting enough and the author decides not to embellish.

For more advanced readers, there's some more in depth information about ice written in bubbles inside the pictures.

This is currently my daughter's favourite book.  She seems to like non-fiction best.  I would like to find more in this series.  Damn Scholastic Books and their unnavigable website!

The Snowy Day

This is an award winning classic.  Our edition is a board book, and I'd highly recommend getting this edition over the regular paper version.  This book is great for kids under two because of the simplicity of the text.  It's a million times better than Seuss' "Snow", because it depicts a realistic day in the snow and features simple pleasures rather than any and all snow related hobbies.

I wish our other books by Keats were available as board books, because they're slowly being destroyed.

Get Dressed Santa!

 By Tomie dePaola

It's a book about Santa having to use the potty.  So, if you're going to get a potty training book for a toddler for Christmas, I guess this is the one to get.

It's not so great.  The rhythm is uneven.  The rhyming is lazy.  The pictures are cute, though.  I love Tomie dePaola so much; I really want to cut him some slack on this one.

My daughter loves this book a lot.  But she still refuses to use the potty.

Le Lion et l'Oiseau

 By Marianne Dubuc

This is an excellent beginner French book.  There's very little text.  Basic sentences with few descriptive words aid the pictures to tell the story.  Sometimes there are no words at all, and I can just talk about the scenes in French using words that my daughter knows.

 There are a few sections of the story where the passage of time is represented abstractly, like with this tomato plant growing throughout the summer.  This is a great way to meaningfully convey both the quiet loneliness of the main character as well as the idea of summer changing to fall. 

It's a really great teaching tool for literary techniques of showing a story indirectly rather than listing facts.

The minimalist nature of the book means that the emotions of the characters are felt more poignantly by the reader.  I actually wasn't sure whether or not the book was going to have a happy ending when I first read it.  I was anticipating that the lion would just end up alone and it would be sad.  (spoiler: it has a happy ending.)

I don't think it would be possible to dislike this book.

The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse

 Written and Illustrated by Helen Ward

My daughter picked this out at the library.  She marched happily into the building, found this book, grabbed it, and ran over to one of the couches to sit and "read" it herself.

 The art is great.  Each page has great composition.  The story is told well enough in pictures so that the text is almost unnecessary.

The layout is pleasant, with a small section of cream as the backdrop for the short description of events on each page.

There is little to no embellishment of the story.  There is no attempt to draw out the characters.  The author doesn't bother describing the pictures in detail.  It's basically all I could ask for.

Plus the cover is golden.  Which is probably why it caught my daughter's attention in the first place.

Scolastic Readers in French

 These books, from the "Les Mots-outils" series are pretty good, but they're random.  They're less for learning to speak French and more for learning to read in French.

I think you're supposed to learn the words by sight, which is ridiculous.  But whatever.

 Some of them, like the one above, are organized by level (you'll notice the A in the top, right hand corner).  The series to the right is organized by season.  Either way, it's a terrible way to organize the books.  I had to read each book to decide if it was at my daughter's level.

The way I'm teaching is by using a picture dictionary, or "Imagier", so that she learns all of her nouns first, and then we're putting together sentences by learning verbs.  These books tend to teach by common phrases, which may contain simple forms of common words, but may instead focus on adverbs, adjectives or prepositions while using a combination of verbs.  I really just want to stick to verbs, first.

These books from the "Les Premiers mots" series were much better for my purposes.  They tend to focus on one verb or preposition while varying the nouns.  My daughter learns the verb or preposition on the first page, and then she understands the whole book on the first read-through.

It's so hard to find these books to purchase them.  Some are on the French Scolastic website.

Your First Garden Book

 By Marc Brown

We have yet to start using this book.  I found it at my parents' house, and it's incredible.  It has all kinds of basic plant that kids can grow.  We should be able to start using it next spring.

 I actually like the pictures in this.  They're totally dated.  And it's full of terrible jokes and puns.

The gardening projects include planting parts of vegetables and fruits.  It even teaches you how to make your own peanut plant!

The book is divided by seasons and has recipes and other activities to pad it out.  It isn't a big book, but it's pretty packed with projects and information.  We should be able to use it for a few years.  I'm pretty stoked.

Wuthering Heights: A Weather Primer

By Jennifer Adams
Illustrated by Alison Oliver

This is actually a really great book about the weather.  Each page shows exactly the same scene with slight changes.  My daughter likes to point to all the changes, even the shifting colours on the castle.

The descriptive word is in big letters.  These were great!  My daughter loved to point to the letters and yell at me until I told her what they were.  It was trying.  But she learned a lot of letters!

I still haven't read the quotes to her, because they're still a bit much.  But I like teach her synonyms for the descriptive words, and we like to make weather related sound effects as we read.


Our copy is covered in food and chew marks.  It's been well loved.

Friday Post - Vintage Puzzle Find

 This is a Ravensburger puzzle from the 70's, printed in West Germany and titled "Spring Summer Autumn Winter".  It's puzzle number 623 5 415 1

There's nothing particularly special about it.  It's a really nice frame tray puzzle with interchangeable pieces cut in the shape of the objects in the picture.  I found it in the thrift store and it has no missing pieces!!!

 The kids are way too young for this.  I'll have to put it away for a few years.  In the meantime, I'm so stoked!

Seasons

 By Blexbolex

This is the first Blexbolex book that we ever got.  It still has large text for easy reading, but this book has scenic pictures which means that we spend more time on each page talking about the details.

There's a bit of a narrative to this book, but it isn't necessarily apparent on the first read through, and my daughter likes to invent her own stories.

 Sometimes opposite pages will be related.  Sometimes a scene at the beginning of the book will be developed towards the end.  This is a great book for babies, toddlers and older kids, as the vocabulary is varied and contains some complex ideas.

There are a few pages that are a bit weird for kids, maybe, but nothing offensive. 

For instance, whether or not you believe in hunting trophies, they exist in the world, right?  And until your child is old enough to know better, it's just a deer.

Snow

 By P. D. Eastman
Illustrated by Roy McKie

I picked this up because it was written by the author of one of my favourite books, "Go, Dog. Go!"

It's disappointing to say the least.  The meter is off, the rhymes consist of the same three or four words over and over again, the plot is pretty predictable.

The dog is cute.

The one saving grace is that it's short.  Very short.  It also helped me explain to my daughter what snow and winter were.  It rains most of the year where we are and we're really lucky to get snow.

I am a Bunny

 By Richard Scarry

This is a classic.  It's a great size and shape.  The pictures are more detailed than the average Scarry book.  It goes through the seasons and shows changes that happen throughout the year.

 The story is really simple.  It's just a sentence or two describing what the bunny does on each page.  The plants and animals are all existing varieties.  This book is particularly great for babies.