Homeschool Discoveries

I thought so long on my “V” post for “Blogging through the Alphabet” that I once again missed the appropriate link up.  But luckily since my “V” has to do with books, it still makes a great “Read Aloud Thursday” post.  😉

I have a soft spot for vintage picture books.  The older styles of illustrations from the ’50s through the ’70s really appeal to me, and while many classic books from that time and earlier are still in print and published in neat, shiny paperbacks or hardcovers…there is something even more charming to me about an old-smelling, well-loved copy.

We don’t have a large number of true “vintage” books in our collection, but finally thinking of “vintage” as a good “v” word for the Alphabet blogging link-up, I was inspired to pull two off of our shelves to read them to the boys:

How High Is Up by Bernice Kohn, Illustrated by Jan Pyk is a book a received as a gift when I was a toddler.   It makes me feel slightly old to classify a book from my own childhood as “vintage” — it really is.  It was published in 1971 (I’m not quite that old…but it’s the right decade!), and the illustrations are classic ’60s/’70s style.

I only own three books from my childhood, and this is the only one that I really remember.  It seemed so familiar! When I found this book among my possessions after I had children, it brought to mind tastes and smell and warm fuzzy feelings of childhood.

I would describe this story as peaceful and thoughtful — a great bedtime story.  Questions like “how big is big?” and “how high is up” are answered not with precision but with vivid comparisons.  So how big is big? Big is as big as a banana split (remember how huge those seemed as a child?), A hippopotamus, a skyscraper.

All Around You: A First Look at the World written and illustrated by Jeanne Bendick is a book I got when Miss M was very small in a free box of books.  I don’t recall that I kept very many books from that box, but I think I kept it because of the beautiful pencil/colored pencil  illustrations:

While some “sciency” books from 1951 might be hopelessly out of date, this one luckily sticks to timeless topics like weather, seasons, plants and animals.  It’s a nice preschool or Kindergarten level introduction to these topics.  I could definitely see myself pulling this book out again when the boys are asking about topics of this nature.  I didn’t read the whole book to them this (just the first couple sections), so we have more “saved for later.”

Linking Up to…Read-Aloud Thursday @ Hope is the Word!

I went to yet another book sale yesterday — this time it was the annual Half Price Books Tent Sale in St. Paul.  Most kids books are $1 at this sale — not quite as good as the quarter-a-book sale I went to last week, but there were tons, and tons and tons of books to choose from.  I came home with a number of titles from our general literature list and history read-aloud list for the upcoming school year, as well as some science titles for subjects our home library is lacking in.  And of course a few random books.  I just couldn’t resist delighting the boys with books about mummies, how things work, wars, and some Mr. Men/Little Miss books (those were only 25 cents each!).  Miss M brought her own money and came home with a handful of Boxcar Children books, American Girl books and “A to Z mysteries”.  I think I should be done with books sales for the rest of the summer though.  Our books shelves are pretty overflowing at this point!

Despite all the books I buy, I still end up having many, many books checked out from the library as well.  🙂  One interesting book we brought home from the library a couple weeks ago is “The Little Island” by Margret Wise Brown and Leonard Weisgard.   I read about this Caldecott-Award-Winner on someone’s blog…but once again I don’t remember whose blog it was.  I think it was, again, probably someone who participates in Read Aloud Thursday!

Brown is well known for her classic books Runaway Bunny and Goodnight Moon — tales that are probably on the bookshelves of most homes with toddlers.  We also own Red light, Green light, but I’ve never seen any of her other books before this one.

The premise of the book is fairly simple — a little island sees the seasons come and go along with the changes they bring in animals, plants and other aspects of island life.  Weisgard’s illustrations are truly stunning, and I can easily see why this book won a Caldecott.

The only thing that kind of threw me “off” in this book was a cat that shows up in the middle of the story, having arrived on a sailboat with its owners.  The cat proceeds to have a conversation with the island and makes extreme demands of a fish to have the fish explain how the island is part of the land.  Then the story returns to being a nice, quiet nature story about how the island changes through the seasons.  Yep, a bit jarring to throw that talking cat in the middle of the story.
All in all this is still a great book, and the boys said they enjoyed it.  It’s the type of book in which you can savor every page, looking a the details in the drawings and talking about nature and geography.

Visit Read-Aloud Thursday @ Hope is the Word to see what books other bloggers discovered this week!

I’ve been trying lately to jot down the titles of picture books the boys and I enjoy before we return them to the library, to help me remember to share them in a Book Discoveries/Read-Aloud-Thursday post every now and then.

One book we read quite a few times before its return to the library was The Grumpy Dump Truck by Brie Spangler.   Bertrand the Dump Truck has a bad attitude.  Nothing seems to go right for him and it’s hard to haul heavy dirt around all day.  He meets Tilly the Porcupine, who takes just peek under Bertrand and is able to help Bertrand find out exactly why he has been feeling so grumpy.  This book is really sweet, and kids and adults can all relate to Bertrand’s grumpy feelings.  It’s a good conversation starter to help younger kids look beyond the feelings of the moment into why they might be feeling grumpy too.

We recently had Wink, the Ninja Who Wanted to Nap by J.C. Philipps for the second time in a few months from the library, but I don’t think I have shared about it here before.  This is actually the second book about Wink, but we still haven’t read the previous title, Wink the Ninja who Wanted to be Noticed (I finally did request that from the library, and it’s on it’s way to our branch).  Wink is not your average Ninja who sneaks around and doesn’t let anyone see him — he’s a star with many adoring fans.  That turns out to be a problem, however, when he is just plain tired out and needs to take a nap.  With the help of Ninja Master Zutsu, however, Wink comes up with a clever solution.  My boys love to “sneak around like ninjas,” so they really enjoyed this story.

Here are a few other titles we’ve enjoyed recently (a few of which we found from other bloggers’ Read-Aloud-Thursday posts!):

The Boy Who Cried Alien – A funny twist on the classic “boy who cried wolf” scenario.  Be ready to read “alien talk” in your best alien voice.  🙂

Interrupting Chicken – The Little Red Chicken can’t help but add her own twists and comments to her bedtime stories! (Sound familiar? I have at least one child who does this…)

Z is for Moose – Moose got left out for the letter M…now Moose will try and get in anywhere he possibly can.  🙂 Very funny!

Ice Cream for Breakfast – While not a literary classic by any means, my kids loved this Busytown book.  It inspired them to ask for their own “backwards day” — a bucket list idea I’m still working up the courage (energy?) to pull off!

Smash, Mash, Crash – Lots of great sound/action words in this garbage truck book.

Don’t Forget the Bacon – A boy’s list for the store gets humorously, but not hopelessly confused.  It’s the kind of book that will get stuck in your head, but not necessarily in a bad way — kind of in a fun “language play” sort of way!

We had a little bit of time to kill last night between dinner and bedtime, and as we often do, we decided to take a short walk around the neighborhood.   Neighborhood walks these days almost always involve a stop at the Little Free Library down the street.   Since we helped get the ball rolling with our Little Free Library by putting about a dozen kids books in since it opened up a couple weeks ago,  I don’t feel too badly grabbing a book to take home even on days that we don’t take a book with us to “exchange.”

Last night was one of those nights — we didn’t bring a book with us, but Vasa Saga: The Story of a Ship by Bertil Almqvist definitely caught my eye.  We all agreed we wanted to take it home.

Vasa was a glorious ship built in Sweden in the early 17th century.  It was the pride and joy of Sweden’s king Gustavus II Aldolphus.   The Vasa Saga beautifully illustrates how the ship was built — from the search for wood for the ship and its ornaments, to creating the curved pieces of the ships body uses the technology available at the time.   Unfortunately, the Vasa was a flawed ship and she sank on her maiden voyage out of the harbor.

Much of the book takes place while Vasa is under the water.  She watches on while divers cleverly salvage many of her canons.  Then she sits lonely and forgotten for centuries under the sea near Stockholm.  Her fortunes change in the 1950s when she is once again discovered — and now technology has improved to the point where she can be rescued from the water!

We all really enjoyed reading this story–though Mr. K had waaaay to many questions for us while we tried to read it the first time through!  Miss M grabbed the book this morning for another read without interruptions.  🙂  Of course the kids wanted to know if it was a true story (it is — except for the personification of the ship, of course!).  They also wanted to know if we could go see the ship someday (yes, if we ever make it to Sweden, it is still on display as a museum so we could go see it).

We are thrilled to have found this treasure in our Little Free Library!

I’m linking up with Read Aloud Thursday @ Hope is the Word!

Robots are a perennial favorite topic for both Mr. K and Mr. E.  They often brainstorm and day dream about ways they could make a robot of their own, whether it be from Legos or random household objects.  So it’s no surprise they both greatly enjoyed Boy + Bot and Robot Zombie Frankenstein!

We found Boy + Bot by Ame Dykman via another Read-Aloud-Thursday post (though I can’t remember which one…sorry!).   It’s a really cute story about a boy, his robot friend, and the well-meaning ways they try and take care of one another.  It’s a simple book, but one that we have read numerous times since we brought it home from the library.

It looks like this is Dykman’s first book, and I hope she writes more books about this loveable pair or other equally cute stories for kids.

Robot Zombie Frankenstein! by Annette Simon was a random sitting-abandoned-on-the-floor library find.  Seeing that no child claimed it, I threw it in our library bag. 😉  This is a clever picture book that builds from page to page.  It’s also about friendship — but this time, it’s a friendship between two robots.  These geometric robots “dress up” with extra geometric shapes, and the result is quite entertaining. It’s a bit hard to explain — you really have to see the illustrations to “get” what is going on.  The creative permutations of geometric shapes in the illustrations are really what “make” this book.

Do you have any favorite robot books?

In a happy convergence of topics, I am linking this post up with

Read-Aloud Thursday @ Hope is the Word AND Blogging Through the Alphabet @ Ben and Me!

Today Miss M and I did something we haven’t done in a long time – we actually had extensive read-aloud time during the day instead of just at bedtime! With the slower pace of summer (and the boys otherwise occupied playing), we hung out on the couch and read.  Then we moved our reading outside to a blanket under a tree while baby J enjoyed playing with his toys on the blanket with us.  When Mr. K was a baby (and Miss M was not yet reading chapter books on her own), Miss M and I would spend what seemed like hours reading almost every afternoon.  Maybe I should get a “patience” award for the fact that I read her dozens of the “Rainbow Magic” fairy books that she just loved during that year.  😉

Luckily Miss M’s taste for read-alouds has improved drastically in the past two or three years.  Today we were finishing up “The Cricket in Times Square” by George Selden.  This was a relatively straight-forward read that Miss M could have accomplished on her own, but since I had never read it, I decided to select it as a read aloud.  The chapters are short and had our schedule been typical over the past two weeks, I think we would have finished it quickly.  But our life has been consumed by busy weekends and evening swimming lessons the past two weeks, very much disrupting our usual bedtime schedules.

In The Cricket in Times Square, Chester Cricket accidentally makes his way from Connecticut to New York City trapped in a picnic basket.  He finds himself in the Times Square subway station, and becomes the pet of a young boy named Mario, and a friend of a mouse and a cat.  Chester turns out to be no ordinary cricket — he has musical talent and uses it to bring joy to those around him.   This was a pretty straightforward story of friendship and finding out what truly makes one happy.

Miss M asked if this book was one of a series, and I replied that no, I didn’t think it was.  However a quick search on Amazon just informed me otherwise! Selden wrote a few other books about Chester and his friends! I think I’ll be reserving those for Miss M at our library.

Prior to finishing The Cricket in Times Square, we read The Friendship Doll by Kirby Larson.  I was just too busy packing for a camping trip to write about it last week.  🙂 Another book in the “dolls that have a life of their own” sub-genre, this story features Miss Kanagawa,  a rather large handmade doll from Japan that is sent to America with a whole group of Japanese dolls to serve as ambassadors of goodwill in the late 1920s.  The Friendship Doll alternates from a 3rd person narrator’s point of view, telling the story of four different girls who come in contact with Miss Kanagawa over the years, and a first person point of view of Miss Kanagawa relating her experiences.  Miss Kanagawa doesn’t quite have the charm or grand historical scope of Hitty (a favorite of ours from this sub-genre this year), but it has a lot of depth.

Bunny, the first girl in the story to cross paths with Miss Kanagawa is a bit of a spoiled brat who learns a lesson about friendship and stepping into the shoes of others in the late 1920s.  The following three girls are in a bit more desperate situations.  These three girls all live during the Great Depression.  Themes of economic hardship, poverty, discrimination, sickness and death are all touched upon as Miss Kanagawa influences the lives of three girls in three very different situations.  For a while in the middle of The Friendship Doll, I was beginning to think that the subjects were getting too heavy for me to really enjoy this book.  I must admit that at this stage of life I am really preferring books that are a bit more “light and happy” in general.  But I pushed on through my doubts and was finding myself moved by Miss Kanagawa and the lives she touches.

Miss M didn’t seem bothered by the heavy themes in this book, though I am glad we didn’t read it any sooner in the school year than we did.  She was excited to hear about each of the girls in the story, though she wished that more of the story had been told from the doll’s vantage point (the sections written in the doll’s “voice” are really a pretty minor percentage of the book as a whole).

Finishing The Cricket in Times Square marked the completion of our 25th read-aloud for this school year!  We’ll be taking a bit of a different turn with our read-alouds this summer by working on a series together.  (I was going to make that change after Friendship Doll since we completed that at about the same time as our actual school year, but I just couldn’t resist making it 25!).  This summer Miss M and I are going to start the “Rose” series of Little House books that follows the life of the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder.  We’ll read those until we finish the series, the fall arrives or we get bored of it I guess…whichever comes first!

I’m linking up with Read-Aloud Thursday @ Hope is the Word!

I’m going to share about my two most recent bedtime read-alouds with Miss M for this week’s Read-Aloud Thursday, since only one of them was fully a read-aloud.   Miss M and I read part of Baby Island together (maybe about half), but I “caved” and let her take the book to read much of it on her own.

Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster is a language-lover’s delight.  Milo,  a rather bored-with-life boy, finds that a tollbooth has mysteriously appeared in his bedroom.  There’s nothing to do but get in his toy car and drive through the tollbooth’s gate and see what happens next.  Milo finds himself transported to a strange land with characters like Tock (a watchdog with a giant clock for a body), the whether man, the not-so-wicked-which, the Humbug, and police officer Short Shrift.  Milo’s quest is to complete the seemingly impossible task to rescue twin princesses Rhyme and Reason and return them to their kingdom (where their presence has been sorely missed, due to the lack of their namesake qualities while they have been missing).

I love puns and other types of word play. I would seriously consider putting up signs like this.   Phantom Tollboth is full of verbal humor. I was a little bit worried early on in the book that Miss M would miss a lot of the humor by not being able to see how various names in the book are spelled as I read aloud to her.  I showed her some of the names and explained a few jokes, but I found she was enjoying the book and finding it funny even without me doing this very often.

Quite often I heard Miss M repeating one of her favorite quotes from the book.  At one point, officer Short Shrift throws Milo and Tock in jail with a sentence of six million years.  However, after a few hours hearing the sad story of their jail-cell-mate (the not-so-wicked-which), they discover they can press a button and leave any time they wish.  The which tells them, “Oh, he likes throwing people in jail but he doesn’t care about keeping them there.”

We both enjoyed this book quite a bit.  I guess the most hearty recommendation comes from Miss M who spontaneously exclaimed at the end of the book, “That was one of the best books I’ve ever read!”

After finishing Phantom Tollboth, we started in on Baby Island by Carol Ryrie Brink.  We read and enjoyed Caddie Woodlawn (also by Carol Ryrie Brink) earlier this year, and I was interested in giving another of her books a try.  I saw this title on one of the many book lists I have been browsing lately, and requested it from the library.

In Baby Island, Mary and Jean are traveling on a ocean liner alone, heading to meet up with their father in Australia.   They love babies and toddlers, so when the ship seems about to sink, their first thought is of the small children they have befriended.  Through a series of miscommunications and mishaps, they end up alone in a lifeboat with four small children, ages 4 months to 2 years.   They soon reach an island they dub “Baby Island” and begin the task of raising these four babies.

I found Baby Island to be a light read, and not one that seems to have faired well against the test of time.  There seemed to be a lot of dated expressions and concepts that were perhaps common at the time the book was written, or in the recent past.  But it seems puzzling today why anyone would think, for example, that “bananas before breakfast are bad for the digestion.”

This story was easily at Miss M’s reading level, and I wasn’t quite as enamored with the story as she was, so when she begged to continue reading the book on her own one night after our read-aloud time was done, I gave in and let her (usually I say “no” because I really want to share our read-aloud’s together!).   This is truly a story for children (probably girls in particular) — Especially those who are enamored with babies and delight in the fantasy of living on a desert island with some cute kids to take care of.

I, on the other hand, could sympathize more with how the parents must have felt being separated from their young children for so long (In the book, 12 year old Mary hopes the mom of three of the four kids is enjoying a nice vacation!), and kept pondering how the 4-month-old could possibly thrive on canned mild and goats milk.   Of course, no mention is made of having to wash out dirty cloth diapers!

This story doesn’t have the universal appeal to all ages that many of our read-alouds have, but it was a fun story for Miss M to enjoy much of on her own.

I’m linking up with Read Aloud Thursday at Hope is the Word!

We took a trip to the “big library” (aka the downtown Minneapolis Central Library) this past Saturday.  Despite being less than 15 minutes from our house, it still seems like a big undertaking to get there and parking is not free, so we end up going just a couple times per year.  Every trip there is a real treat because of the vast selection of books available to us!

I’ve had a hard time lately feeling inspired by the picture book selection at our regular neighborhood library branch.  I’m sure there are still plenty of gems to be discovered, but I feel like I keep seeing a lot of the same old books.   With a selection of many thousands of children’s books, it wasn’t hard to find something new at Minneapolis Central!

One of our favorite finds from this library trip is If Waffles Were Like Boys by Charise Mericle Harper and Scott Magoon.   The title caught my eye as I was browsing the stacks, and I brought it home without much of a glance at the contents.   It  turned out to be delightful! We read on the first pair of pages, “If Waffles were like boys…breakfast would be a battlefield.”   Mr. E started laughing in a nearly-uncontrollable way at the sight of the fighting waffles, and didn’t stop until the book was over.  Then we read the book again!   Any boy (or any mom of a boy!) will relate and probably enjoy the various scenes showing everyday-life objects coming alive in all the ways boys love to play.

We also really liked A Place for Zero by Angeline Sparagna LaPresti.  Mr. K picked this one off the shelf.  We told him the title, and he remembered it long enough to ask for it by name a couple days later!  Zero is a number living in a land of mostly digits 1 through 9 (and, it seems, a “plus”, a “multiplication” and an infinity.”   The other numbers can all play “add-em-up,” but poor Zero doesn’t add up to anything, so he’s left out.  He needs to go on a quest and find his life’s purpose! This was a cute and even heartwarming book, as zero learns all the things that make him special.  There’s even cute baby zeros (since that’s what you get when you multiply by zero, of course!).   The boys loved it too, asking for me to read it again right after I finished the first reading.  I spied them flipping through this book several times throughout the day.

Here a few more quick takes on some of the books we’ve been enjoying this week:

Pickles. Please by Andy Meyer.  Maybe you’ve heard of  “Pinkalicious”? Pickles, Please is for the “picklicious” crowd.   Alec loves pickles so much, but no one else understands — until he goes to the pickle factory!

The Day Roy Riegels Ran the Wrong Way by Dan Gutman is a football tale based on a true story with a great lesson — It’s okay to make mistakes — even big ones!

My Chincoteague Pony by Susan Jeffers is one I picked out for Miss M because I thought she would enjoy this sweet story of a girl who wants a pony of her own.  If you have a horse-lover who is too young for Misty of Chincoteague or a bit older reader who still appreciates a good picture book, this story might be a good fit.

Welcome to Monster Town by Ryan Heshka.  We found this title at our neighborhood library branch a few weeks ago.  We have “visited” Monster Town many times in this clever story where “Frank N. Stein, master electrician, appears shockingly good at his work,” and monster children ride the “ghoul bus.”  A great story for kids that like monsters (and puns).

{Photo Credit}

Visit Read-Aloud Thursday @ Hope is the Word for more great read-aloud suggestions!

After finishing A Little Princess, I decided that Miss M and I would try another older classic for our next bedtime read-aloud — The Railway Children by Edith Nesibt.   The Railway Children is a turn-of-the-20th-century story of three English children who leave their city home after their father is mysteriously sent away from the family.   Roberta, Peter and Phyllis find themselves in a country home near a railway, which proves to be a source for interesting adventures.

Nesbit is an author whose work I’ve been wanting to like, if that makes any sense.   Last year we tried listening to an audio book of The Enchanted Castle.  It just wasn’t what I expected, and Miss M and I lost interest after about 2/3 of the book.  Maybe someday we’ll try that one again.  I originally had Five Children and It on our book list for this year, but we committed the cardinal sin of book-to-movie adaptations by watching the movie without having read the book first.  The kids didn’t particularly enjoy the movie, and although I read that that book has a somewhat different story line, I wasn’t very motivated to try reading the book after our movie experience.

I wish I could say that the “third time was a charm” for me with Nesbit’s books, but that wasn’t entirely true.   While I don’t think Miss M liked this story as much as some we’ve read this year, she told me she enjoyed the book.  And she did beg for additional chapters most nights, a sure sign that she was “into” the story.  (The chapters are long, so I had to say “no” most nights!).

I found the narrator’s voice in the story to be somewhat distracting and off-putting.  While the story is mostly written in third-person language, a first person “author/observer” voice comes in on a regular basis:

“I hope you don’t mind my telling you a good deal about Roberta. The fact is I am growing very fond of her. The more I observe, her the more I love her. And I notice all sorts of things about her that I like.”

The narrator even asks the reader a few questions:

“Washing is fun. I wonder whether you ever done it? This particular washing took place in the back kitchen, which had a stone floor and a very big stone sink under its window.”

Besides the unusual narrative voice, I also found the children’s many adventures to be a bit over-the-top for one story.  Even those well-loved Alden kids usually only save the day or solve the mystery once per book.   The Railway Children manage to save a train from crashing, help a lost political prisoner and save a boy stuck in a tunnel with a broken leg all in the same book.  While this put it in the “yeah, right” category for me, I think Miss M loved it all the more because of all these exciting (in a quaint, turn-of-the-century style) exploits. All in all I didn’t hate this book, but I probably wouldn’t enjoy reading it out loud again.  My favorite part might have been the happy ending.  🙂

And speaking of the Aldens, a new fan (or maybe even two) have joined the ranks.  After listening to Miss M joyfully recount the plot of yet another Boxcar Children book, Mr. E asked me to read the first one in the series to him.  Miss M had to grab it one afternoon while we were in between chapters and spend an hour re-reading it for herself.  🙂  This seems to be the first chapter book that Mr. E has truly loved — he has sat for as many as three chapters at a time! Definitely a first for him.  Even Mr. K has grabbed his special pillow and cuddled up for a chapter or so at a time. I’m hoping this will be the beginning of more patience from the boys for longer stories.

I’m linking up with Read-Aloud Thursday @ Hope is the Word!