The Miracles of Jesus

 By Tomie DePaola

This is a fantastic book.  The pictures are done in the style of Medieval religious paintings.  The stories are written so that a three year old can understand them.  Mostly.

 But the miracles of Jesus are all pretty great stories and reasonably entertaining for children of any age.

I've sifted through a lot of terrible Christian books and I haven't seen anything better than this.  My daughter was intrigued.  Confused, but intrigued.

We don't do a lot of religion right now because it all goes over her head.

The Real Mother Goose

Illustrated by Blanche Fisher Wright

Hey, hey, hey!  It's the full book!  And it's widely available and constantly being reprinted.

This is a great compilation of all the essential nursery rhymes with tons of early 20th century Classical revival style illustrations.  Very Ars Nouveau, I think.

I'm no art historian, and I recognize that that description is kind of terrible.

 Look at this Robin Hood.  So effeminate.  Tall and lean with a baby face.  Pale blended watercolours with a fine outline.  I love it.

There are many, many full page illustrations, and most pages have smaller illustrations intertwined with the text.

The text is a little old fashioned.  A lot of death and gore and stuff, just the way it's always been.  But you can always pick and choose which rhymes you read aloud.  It's a big thick hardcover.

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?

Jack and the Beanstalk

 By Rosemary Wells and Norman Messenger

I can't tell who wrote the book and who drew the pictures.  It looks like they both wrote it?  Maybe they both worked on the pictures?

The pictures are pretty decent.  I don't mind them.  And the writing is simple enough to understand, so I'm really happy about that.  I want to introduce my daughter to these stories as young as I can because we come across the references so often and I'd really like her to be able to understand those references.

Every time I run into this story it's told in the most long-winded fashion.  The only version that she was familiar with before this was the Mickey Mouse cartoon.  It isn't that bad, but I really can't stand that stupid harp.

This version has Jack living with his mother and rescuing his father, which is more exciting.  And it has the hen laying the golden eggs as well, which the Disney version left out.

Over the Hills and Far Away

 By Chris Conover

This is exactly the kind of book that I would like to write.  It's a traditional nursery rhyme illustrated stanza by stanza with gorgeous and engaging pictures.

The final two pages have an arrangement of the melody with some accompaniment.

Changes I would make are that the melody should have been present in some manner on the main pages so that I could sight sing as I read (maybe even with chords so that I can play guitar and read it.)  The arrangement at the end seemed a little iffy for piano.  It would have been nice if it had been an early/intermediate level piano piece for a young student.

All in all, it's pretty great, though.

Young Canada's Nursery Rhymes

 Illustrated by Constance Haselwood

Originally printed as a British collection of nursery rhymes in England, it was re-titled and shipped to Canada back when it was first settled.  A copy was found more recently and it was reprinted.

These original illustrations are fantastic.  The rhymes chosen are not all the most popular ones, which makes it a fun little book.  I'm happy that it exists and that I've found it, but it isn't nearly as appealing to my kids as other collections that I've found.

Ring-A-Ring O' Roses

 By Alan Marks

This is a fantastic collection of nursery rhymes.  I've been searching the library for something decent, and this one was hiding in the bookshelf at home.  The words are slightly different than what I'm used to in some cases, but it's close enough to the versions found in the Oxford collections.

Each page has several poems, and the pictures for the poems are blended together.  There's a lot of play with perspective in the paintings and the characters and settings are a-typical.

All of the standard rhymes are in there.  All of my kids' favourites.  I don't think I'll be able to find anything much better than this.

Over the Hills and Far Away

 Collected by Elizabeth Hammill

This is a collection of nursery rhymes from "around the world", but mostly just from the states.  They include a fair number of staples from England or Ireland, but they also have some more modern playground rhymes.

 Some of the best rhymes are the Chinese-American ones because they work in English, possibly are originally written in English.

Some of the worst are the Native American rhymes.  Most of the non-English rhymes, in fact, have been translated poorly.  Maybe there's a way to read them that works.  But without any notation to accompany them, they're just rhythmless rhymeless words.

 There are, however, hundreds of poems and songs in this collection.  It's a big heavy book.  So it doesn't really matter that some of them aren't to my liking, because there's tons to choose from.  There's tons of art to choose from, too.  Each set of pages is done by a different artist in a different style.

I don't think I'd buy this book, but it was pretty great to take out of the library.

The Real Mother Goose - Book One

 Traditional (Rand McNally & Co)
Illustrated by Blanche Fisher Wright


These are traditional nursery rhymes.  It's a little board book with a good selection and 1920's style art.

I like it.  It's basic.  It's exactly what I'm looking for in a nursery rhyme book.

Also, I got it second hand for a dollar, so the baby can chew on it.

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.

Hansel and Gretel

 By Cynthia Rylant
Illustrated by Jen Corace


I wasn't a fan of this one.  I was torn with the art, because I'm drawn to it, but it's also very hipster.  I don't think my daughter liked it much.

The text was pretty dreadful, too.  I mean, Hansel and Gretel is a weird story from a series of weird stories, and the author is trying to make sense of the abstract details when, really, she should just let it be.

The hipster art is actually pretty good as far as the depictions of the characters.  Their lifeless expressions make the story pretty damn creepy.  But then there's the delicious cottage...  with almost no colour.  I know that usually the cottage is drawn in a particularly gaudy fashion, but surely there could be some compromise?  It doesn't look like it's made of baked goods.

The witch is frightening, because of the bland and understated way in which she's drawn.  My daughter loved the story, but hated the book because the whole thing was way, way too scary.  On top of it all, I took issue with all the extra passages talking about how brave Hansel and Gretel were, like this is supposed to be some moralistic tale or something.

I got this book out because I felt like I was doing my children a disservice by not having fairy tales in the house.  But now that I've had such bad luck finding good ones, I'm pretty apathetic about adding any to our library for the time being.

The Oxford Nursery Treasury

 By Ian Beck

A generic book of Nursery Rhymes!  We've been looking for something for a while, but it's hard to know if something is good or not without seeing it first hand, so I'm going through whatever the library chooses to stock.


 The rhymes are some of the better ones taken from the full Oxford Book.  The accompanying pictures aren't bad, either.

But there are stories as well, and the stories are dreadful.  The tortoise and the hare, for instance, have a bet involving vegetables and they write the hare to be particularly odious so that you can feel particularly great about him losing to the tortoise.  I spent the entirety of "The Princess and the Pea" hoping that the two 12 year old royals didn't end up married at the end (of course, they do), and my daughter didn't care much for the story either; she cut in at the end to ask the only really important question, "DID THEY EAT THE PEAS!?!?"

It was reading this book that made me realize that I really hate most fairy tales.  I can't stand the popular ones, at least.  But I know that if I start in on things like "The Tinder Box" we'll be dealing with nightmares for weeks.  It's a real dilemma.

Friday Post - Digitized Children's Audio Books

This is an incredible link that I came across many years ago and have kept in my back pocket.  I pass it around to teachers and parents whenever possible, and now I have the opportunity to use it for my own kids.

This is a collection of children's records from the 50's and 60's.  They're all stories, mostly read by very famous actors.  Some are read by Danny Kaye.  The best of the bunch are highlighted.

Down near the bottom is the absolute best of the bunch:  the 13 clocks, read by Lauren Becall.  This is one of my favourite books of all time.  Lauren Becall is an actress that I have the utmost respect for.  She reads the text perfectly with a dry severity.  It's so compelling.

There are many more links on this page, so this is a great jumping off point if you're looking for more recordings of this kind.

First Prayers

 These are uncredited.  Some of them are traditional prayers, some are nursery rhymes, and the rest are vague rhymes about God written specifically for the book.

This is a Catholic book because it contains the Hail Mary and the Guardian Angel Prayer.

It has a fun handle on it and some cut-out pages, so the kids like it.

It's a pretty good read.  It's a nice way to say prayers with a toddler who REFUSES to say prayers.  I like to sing the Our Father with the melody we use at mass.  That song's a big hit at bedtime.

The pictures aren't special.  The prayers written specifically for the book are dreadful.  But they're short, so whatever.

The Gingerbread Man

This is published by Scholastic, and any contributors other than the illustrator are uncredited.  It's the basic Gingerbread Man story with some terrible art.  My daughter loves this story, but really I recommend downloading it off of the Gutenberg website and drawing your own pictures.