With June around the corner, I'm over on hello, Wonderful sharing some of our favorite chapter books for the summer. Summer is such the perfect time to re-read old stories that you know and love AND discover soon-to-be favorites. What is everyone looking forward to reading this summer? We're still adding to our summer stack!
Oh, little playmate,
Come out and play with me.
And bring your dollies three.
Climb up my apple tree.
Slide down my rainbow,
Into my cellar door.
And we’ll be jolly friends
Forevermore, more, more.
A little Alan Tiegreen for your Monday morning. And does that hand-clapping rhyme bring back any memories for anyone? A little while ago, Avery started coming home and singing parts of rhymes that she had learned from friends at school. I decided to buy her this collection of playground rhymes by Joanna Cole and Stephanie Calmenson so that she could memorize a few more to chant with her friends at recess. It was definitely a perk that Alan Tiegreen illustrated this book—seeing his work conjures up heaps of nostalgia since his pictures graced the pages of some of my favorite Beverly Cleary books. Miss Mary Mack and Other Children's Street Rhymes is by Joanna Cole, Stephanie Calmenson and Alan Tiegreen.
In love with Britta Teckentrup’s latest. Before I Wake Up… is about a dream that a little girl has while asleep. In her dream, she flies through a nocturnal sky, her bed carried by a moon balloon. She goes down to the ocean and then to a jungle, all the while with her stuffed lion by her side (who has of course, come to life). She befriends animals on her slumberous adventure and when it’s time to return home, the moon balloon drifts her back to bed. Britta Treckentrup’s melange of illustration and collage is exquisite and ethereal and the scenes of the story are rendered in dusky and muted tones, with a quietly luminescent and hopeful quality about them. I'm guessing this'll be our bedtime story for this week. What is everyone reading?
Another book by one of our new favorite illustrators Yasmeen Ismail—Inside, Outside, Upside Down. It's filled with drawing activities that reinforce opposites, spatial concepts and quantity concepts (e.g., above/below, front/ back, left/right, behind/ahead, right side up/upside down, full/empty, short/long, one/many). The word pairs are presented with drawing prompts from a variety of perspectives, in Ismail's characteristic bold and playful lines.
Hannah Viano’s S Is for Salmon: A Pacific Northwest Alphabet, an alphabet book that shows off the majestic beauty and small wonders of the Pacific Northwest. If you love her work like I do, check out my previous post about one of her other books, Arrow to Alaska.
Hannah shares about the story behind the book on her website. “The book is the offspring of a grant project funded by the Seattle office of Arts and Cultural Affairs. For that project I made a set of 26 papercut images depicting Northwest flora,fauna, and elements and used hand silkscreening to make large format display cards sets. These sets were then donated to childrens programs around the city such as libraries, schools, and community centers. I also had the pleasure of joining a few of these groups to do in-class presentations that mixed natural history, art, and active storytelling. Now those images (with some revisions and the addition of wonderful colors) have been made into a lovely little hardbound book that everyone old and young can have and hold.”