Last week I picked up a copy of The McElderry Book of Grimm’s Fairy Tales for The Four-Year-Old from our local library. I chose this book in part because of its attractive and not too scary illustrations, the relatively simple language and brevity of the stories inside, and the fact that the cover copy implied that this edition had been developed specifically for reading aloud.
If I could give a book six stars, I’d give them to M. Christina Butler’s Snow Friends. My daughter made me read it three times in a row last night, and still couldn’t get enough (at one point I buried it under the stack of library books, while asking her to choose between two others for the next story–she dug through the stack, pulled this one out and pushed it onto my lap).
Sir Cumference and the Great Knight of Angleland: A Math Adventure By Cindy Neuschwander Illustrated by Wayne Geehan Charlesbridge Publishing, 2001 Age Range: 6 and up…
Grumbly Bunnies By Willie Welch Illustrated by Tammie Lyon Charlesbridge Publishing, 2009 Age Range: 2 and up You probably haven’t read Grumbly Bunnies, by Willie Welch…
This week’s book is a classic Winnie-the-Pooh story and there is really very little I need to say about it. So instead of adding another five paragraphs of praise for A. A. Milne to the Webiverse, I will simply share what may be my favorite paragraph from any book The Four-Year-Old and I have read together thus far.
I come from a family of mathematicians. Although Vector Calculus pretty much ensured that I would never be a mathematician myself, my relationship with math is once more on a cordial footing. I’ve even caught myself accidentally looking forward to tinkering with math again as The Four-Year-Old goes through school. Naturally, when I found Joseph D’Agnese’s picture book on Fibonacci, I brought it home immediately.
I learned about Jill Barklem’s Brambly Hedge books through Snapdragons, a blog about the domestic adventures of a new mom. The author of the blog had grown up reading these stories and was very excited about the prospect of sharing them with her own child. I’d never heard of them, but as I’m always on the look out for new books to read with The Four-Year-Old, I spent a week or two hunting them down.
As Sara Swan Miller explains in her introduction to Three More Stories You Can Read to Your Cat, cats sleep a lot because they get bored a lot. Since you and I know that reading books is one of the best ways to counter an attack of boredom, she explains, one of the nicest things you can do for your feline friend when boredom has flattened him on the couch is to entice your cat onto your lap and with a soft voice and gentle petting read him a story. After all, “Cats always like to hear stories about themselves.”
Cat and Crow tells the story of the surprising bond between Moses and Cassie, from the perspective of Wally and Ann Collito, the couple who eventually gave Cassie a permanent home in North Attleboro, Massachusetts.
A modern hand-drawn Bible, inventor of ebooks dies, and an award Eric Carle hasn’t won yet.
CATERPICKLES 