It’s mid-August and I am ignoring all the back to school ads urging me to buy notebooks in bulk, and the social media photos of friends’ children decked out in first day smiles and shiny, oversized backpacks. School doesn’t start until after Labor Day here and I am still deep …
The apartment is quiet, the tea bag is steeping, and you’ve just opened the cover of a shiny new book, or maybe a tattered old favorite. Ahhhh. You curl up with your book and your tea and disappear into the pages. Or you don’t. The intercom buzzes, the phone rings, …
Tumble, written and illustrated by Adriana Hernández Bergstrom follows the journey of a tumbleweed as it rolls across a vast desert. The short rhyming lines explain the tumbleweed’s movements in simple terms, and are fun to read aloud. The sky, landscape, and weather shift with each page turn, suggesting the …
I put a copy of We Are Branches on hold at the library assuming it would be about trees. And while trees make an appearance right in the opening, there is much more to this poetic, nonfiction title. Created by Joyce Sidman and Beth Krommes, the same duo behind Swirl …
When my students saw The Courage of the Little Hummingbird: A Tale Told Around the World on display in the classroom, they demanded an immediate read aloud. I’m not surprised. When I came across the cover for the first time, I was immediately pulled in too, first by the lush …
Is anyone else, after four whole days of spring, already dreaming about the balmier months ahead? Well…”It’s the weekend, first in June; / speaker’s blasting out big tune!” So begins Big Tune: Rise of the Dance Hall Prince, out on March 28. Written by Alliah L. Agostini and illustrated by Shamar Knight-Justice, …
Once a day I experience forty minutes of absolute chaos and those forty minutes are called “cafeteria duty.” There are illegal snack trades to crack down on and treacherous linoleum to navigate. Cartoonists, take note: banana peels aren’t that slippery, but boiled green beans are the black ice of the …
Every Friday from March through November my daughter and I stop for a scoop of ice cream on our way home. I miss this weekly tradition now while our favorite spot is closed for the season. But Ice Cream Man: How Augustus Jackson Made a Sweet Treat Better by Glenda …
My two-year-old niece is obsessed with my fifteen-year-old copy of Lauren Stringer’s book, Winter is the Warmest Season. On her last visit, she rubbed the wintry illustrations whispering snow, snow, snow until her love wore the endpapers right out of the binding. So in preparation for her next visit, I searched the library …
What can you do to solve that problem? It’s what I say when kids tell me their pencil has no point, or that the LEGO brick they need most in the whole wide world is in someone else’s sticky fist. I say it when kids are squished too close together …