little lit book series culinary edition

November's theme for #littlelitbookseries is food.  Lemonade in Winter, written by Emily Jenkins and illustrated by G. Brian Karas, is about a pair of entrepreneurial siblings who decide to set up a lemonade stand on a cold wintry day.   Do they learn about math and counting money?  Yes.  Do they learn a little about ingenuity and perseverance?  Yes.  Do they sell any lemonade?  Read this delightfully frigid tale to find out. 😉

Pancakes for Breakfast by Tomie dePaola is one of my all-time favorite wordless picture books.  Its subtle humor draws you in and invites you to narrate the story of a hapless (but not hopeless) woman in her plight for a plate of warm, toothsome pancakes.  The story is also a nod to an older, agrarian way of life, making it a wonderful teaching experience for its audience.  And if reading it doesn't make you crave a tall pile of crispy-edged pancakes doused in maple syrup, I don't know what will! 🍁

Also, as a side note, wordless story books are invaluable tools.  Telling and retelling a story multiple times with a wordless story book helps children learn a variety of vocabulary words, synonyms and sentence structures.  It helps teach children the elements of a story--characters, setting, problem, resolution, etc.  When you revisit stories and retell them, you talk about different little aspects of a story that you didn't talk about the last time you read it because you might pick up on other details in the pictures or nuances in the story.  When different people tell a child the story, the child hears and is exposed to different narratives, points of view and different sets of vocabulary.  Happy storytelling!

Check out our collection of delicious food books in this month's installment of #littlelitbookseries on Instagram.

mini marche

My pal @mini.marche sent us the sweetest and most thoughtful surprise—a set of her handmade clips. I thought they were super cute in photographs, but they are absolutely beautiful in person! Thank you so much for your thoughtfulness, @mini.marche!  Avery was over the moon about them and is already planning the days that she’ll wear them. ☺️ Please check out Jeanette's shop on Etsy!

nate the great and the monster mess (and why our children need to read)

Avery’s love for the “World’s Greatest Detective” is still going strong and this is one is a regular in her Nate the Great rotation.  In Nate the Great and the Monster Mess, Nate’s mother loses her beloved recipe for monster cookies and Nate must wade through a myriad of clues to retrieve it.

There’s something so magical about finding a book or book series that you click with as a child.  It makes reading enjoyable, which is so integral to contributing to a lifelong love of reading and learning.  When they can’t wait to find out what happens next in a book, children are motivated to learn how to decode or pronounce words that are new them (even if they’re difficult), and understand their meanings.  As adults, we can bring to light the nuanced meanings of those new words, help interpret story structure/plot and really teach children to think beyond the story, and relate it with their own life experiences.  This is a huge part of the learning process: connecting new experiences with old.  This is what happens when we’re there reading aloud books to our kids or are even just present while they’re reading aloud on their own.

According to so many books (The Read-Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease comes to mind) and education articles, as our kids get older, they lose interest in reading.  Compared to other countries, our kids read less and less on their own as they become teenagers.   And time devoted to reading decreases with each new generation.  Yet, lifelong reading is so essential to a well-rounded education, understanding the world, making learning connections and ultimately, helping our children discover who they’re going to be in life and what their mission will be.  So, this is why it is so, so important from a very young age and all throughout childhood to build a library of books that children will enjoy and treasure.  Kudos to all parents, teachers and librarians who work tirelessly to do so!

I know all too well how tired we all are at the end of the day and sometimes how hard it is to decide to read a book instead of watch TV and relax or whatever, but reading every day is one of the best things we can do with our kids, to invest in them and their future.