Tag: Children’s literature

If you are planning on homeschooling your young elementary child and aren’t sure where to start, Five in a Row can be a great curriculum to consider.

The curriculum uses classic children’s storybooks like The Story of Ping, Katie and the Big Snow, and Make Way for Ducklings and bases lessons in English, geography, history, science, art, and other subjects on the story.

Children easily remember things that they are interested in. Think about the last time your five year old explained, in great detail, the plot of the last Pokeman cartoon that he saw. Five in a Row uses the same idea – entertainment for almost effortless learning.

You get a teacher’s guide with all of the activities for each story in it. You don’t have to do all of the activities – there are many to choose from. You don’t even have to do the stories in any particular order.

Once you have chosen a book you will read it to your child every day for a week, thus the Five in a Row. Each day you and your child will explore a different subject related to the story. You may learn about Paris when reading the Madeline story or find out about maps and how they are made when reading Katy and the Big Snow. Since you can get many of the story books at the library, the actual investment is usually not too bad.

I enjoyed this curriculum. There are four volumes in the basic program – enough to take care of four years of learning. You can even get supplemental guides to help you use the program with preschoolers or older children for those parents that are teaching a variety of grades.

One of the best parts of it for me was the feeling of having quality time with my children while we were reading. Cuddled up on the couch, while a steady rain fell outside the windows, we traveled to Paris, experimented with lemons and taste buds, and created a variety of descriptions using a personification technique. It was more than school – it was a time of making memories.

You can find out more about this curriculum at the Five in a Row website.

photo credit: IowaPolitics

When kids get bitten by the reading bug, it’s like a freight train you can’t stop.

Happily, I have a child who’s currently afflicted! She’s five, and she is reading everything and anything that she can get her hands on. I’ll be in real trouble when she starts stealing my US Weekly.

Over the summer, I took her to the library and let her pick out some beginning readers. She immediately gravitated to Mo Willems’ Elephant and Piggie series.

She ate that series up like a Read more…

Here’s a novel idea – for those nap times that little Johnny just won’t go down for a nap, how about having Winnie the Pooh read him a story? Try the upcoming release called The House at Pooh Corner by AA Milne.

A friend was telling me that her three year old is not napping at preschool when every one else sleeps. The poor guy has to sit/lay there for 2 whole hours while everyone else snores away…what torture! The teacher suggested my friend send her son off to school with an iPod so he can at least lay down and listen to something interesting…and it got me to thinking, are there children’s books on tape for such a thing? And, if so, can a three year old manage to listen to it?

I simply don’t know – do you? If you have any insight in to this, I’d be all ears, as they say. In the meantime, I did find this Winnie the Pooh book on CD that looks quite promising, to be released on September 22. Seems like Pooh is up to his old antics.

You can pick it up at Amazon:

Two books on the new releases wall caught my eye: Art for Baby and Night, Night Little Pookie.

Art For Baby is a collection if black and white images by top modern artists like Keith Haring, Damien Hirst and Takashi Murakami. The drawings have been selected to enhance baby’s awareness of the world around them. If you are a contemporary art fan and have a new baby, then check out this book! I plan on getting it for my new little one once she pops out.

However, my 22 month old just LOVES Sandra Boynton. We have almost all of her books and I’m really stoked to see that she’s come out with yet another book, Night, Night Little Pookie. Pookie, I’m sure, has something in store for mom and daughter at bedtime – can’t wait to find out what it is.

This is me driving to the bookstore…or ordering from Amazon:

Now this is a book I can really get behind. Mo Willems has such a way with children’s literature and his latest book is no different. Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed is a delight to read for both parents and kids.

Wilbur, a Naked Mole Rat, is unlike the rest of his colony in that he likes to wear clothes. See, being naked mole rats they typically don’t wear clothes and Wilbur gets plenty of flak for being different. His friends consult Grand-pah, “the oldest, greatest, and most naked naked mole rat ever” to see what he has to say about Wilbur’s peculiar predilection.

When asked why Wilbur chooses clothes by Grand-pah, Wilbur simply asks, “why not?” This gives Grand-pah pause and he has to go away to think. Well, Grand-pah jumps on board with Wilbur and echoes the sentiment, why not indeed. A party ensues where moles rats in varying states of dress have a good ol’ time. Ahh, the wisdom of tolerance.

We have all the pigeons books in our house and this is a great addition – especially if you like quirky animals who do quirky things but seem to enjoy the hell out of it!

My daughter loves all things puppy. At a friend’s house tonight I saw Yoshitomo Nara’s children’s book, The Lonesome Puppy, and thought, “wow, gotta get that!” Then I opened it up and read it. It’s just plain weird.

I love Nara’s artwork, or at least I have in the past. Nara is one of the best known Japanese contemporary artists and his work is shown in top galleries and museums around the world.

The cover of the book is great: an adorable drawing of a puppy in Nara’s signature warped cartoonish style is wonderful. However, once you open the book and start reading the story, it’s just plain odd. Now, I’ve read a few children’s books in my 2 years of having a baby and some are boring, some fascinating. This one just seemed to take a bad idea and keep going and going and going.

Here’s the gist, not that you really need to know. A puppy, who is so big he straddles the world with one foot in one continent and one foot in another, is lonely because he has no friends. See, he’s so big, no one can see him. Until one day this little girl does see him. She climbs up him and befriends him. She’s scared at first but then she sings to him and they become fast friends. The moral of the story, it seems, is that there is always a friend out there for you – you just have to find them or they you.

Boiled down it doesn’t seem so bad, but when you’re reading the book, it is. It just is. However much I applaud the idea of teaching our children to see past another person’s physical “oddities” to who they are underneath, this story misses the mark for me.

Plus, the artwork in the rest of the book didn’t strike me as fanciful as the cover. The little girl looks, well, evil, and the puppy never manages to capture the whimsy of the one on the cover. Maybe I’m being too hard on it, but I can’t imagine reading this book over and over again when I can barely get through the first reading of it.

That being said, every single person who has reviewed the book on Amazon loves it, so maybe I’m missing something. My friend’s daughter also LOVES this book. She keeps asking for it, much to the chagrin of her mother…so, there you go, maybe Nara is actually on to something and I’m too adult to see it. But still, it won’t be on our bookshelf anytime soon.