where the wild things are

“Oh, please don't go—we'll eat you up—we love you so!” 

It’s Maurice Sendak’s birthday today! Coincidentally, I unearthed an old copy of Where the Wild Things Are in the garage last week, and it was Nate’s first time reading it.  Does anyone have any Scholastic DVDs?  This Maurice Sendak one features animated films of Where The Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, Alligators All Around, Pierre, One Was Johnny and Chicken Soup with Rice. The songs are brilliant and really well done, and I especially like the way In the Night Kitchen and Pierre are arranged and sung.  The DVD is great because it has a read-along feature and words are highlighted on the screen as they’re being narrated.

And one more note—does anyone ever turn on the closed captioning on their TV?  It’s a stealthy way to provide more reading practice and exposure to text. It’s one thing that helped solidified Avery’s fluency over this past year (and she loved it).  It’s also great to dialogue with your kids about what they’re watching—opportunities abound for learning new words, asking/answering questions and honing those burgeoning inferential skills.  Asking "why" questions is just one example of the many inferential questions that can be asked and discussed.

Happy birthday to one of the greats in children’s literature, and we’re off to sing “Chicken Soup With Rice!”

the 50 states activity book

It’s here—The 50 States Activity Book—and am looking forward to going through it with Avery and Nate.  They recently heard The Animaniacs’ 50 States and Capitals song for the first time and they went wild over it.  Clever songs like those are great for making facts stick with kids (and the rest of us).

the wild robot

Getting lost in The Wild Robot this afternoon.

cooking with henry and elliebelly

I thought Cooking with Henry and Elliebelly would be a perfect book for Nate since he is so into cooking and baking at the moment. Plus he loves to do culinary and product demos as if he's in front of a camera. That's SO his generation.

Henry and his little sister Elliebelly make raspberry-marshmallow-peanut butter waffles with barbecued banana bacon on their cooking show. Elliebelly’s irrepressible toddler ways make for unpredictable and boisterous fun. Henry, by the way, is an exceptionally patient older brother. 😉 There's something about Dan Yaccarino's retro illustrations that I love and just keep coming back to (we have some of his other works as well). His Elliebelly is a pretty masterful depiction of a toddler. Those red curls are out of control.

last stop on market

I'm trying to catch up on all the incredible children's lit published in 2015 and am finally, finally getting around to reading Last Stop on Market Street by Matt De La Peña and Christian Robinson.  It’s beautiful on so many levels.

And it reminds me of when I lived in San Francisco and used to take the F or J line up Market Street with my flatmate on the weekends to wherever it was that we were going.  An idea struck us one day.  We would ride a bus or Muni car from the beginning of the line all the way to the end, and with a tape recorder in hand, would ask people where they were going and why.  We would find some revelatory common thread that would weave everyone’s narrative together.  Then we would send it in to This American Life and hopefully, in our wildest dreams, they would air it on one of their shows and we’d get to hear Ira Glass introduce our segment in his endearing cadences.  Well, we never got around to our audio story.  Perhaps too much of our time went to studying, eating our way through the city (when we had the money), and listening to The Shins and Iron and Wine.  Am I dating myself? lol  Anyway, that was a big tangent, and didn't have too much to do with the beautiful story and message of Last Stop on Market Street, but I love how books evoke memories, like this one.