Mice and Beans - Pam Munoz Ryan

In doing research for my final paper on Esperanza Rising (which, in case you couldn't tell, was my favorite book I read this month), I started looking into other books that Pam Muñoz Ryan had written and realized she'd written many children's books. Those books range from Mice and Beans to When Marian Sang. Although I also read When Marian Sang, I chose to blog about Mice and Beans because it was much different than many of the picturebooks I had read throughout these 5 weeks of classes.

Mice and Beans tells the story of a grandmother named Rosa María who is preparing her tiny house and tiny yard for the seventh birthday of her youngest grandchild named Catalina. She is paranoid of mice and in order to keep them away, constantly sets mouse traps and cleans fervently. Because she is so busy in the days leading up to Catalina's birthday, she forgets if she has set mouse traps or not and ends up re-setting them every day. Suspicious things also begin to happen - like missing napkins, candywrappers on the floor, vanishing mousetraps, and vanishing spoons. She continues to re-set the traps, and finally, after Catalina's birthday, she realizes that her motto of "When there's room in the heart, there's room in the house...except for a mouse" has been memorized incorrectly. It's actually "When there's room in the heart, there's room in the house...even for a mouse." She realizes that there's nothing to worry over if a few mice are in her house, especially if they are helpful ones.

I didn't like Pam Muñoz Ryan's writing style in this book nearly as much as I did in Esperanza Rising, and I think it's because I thought that this book had substantially less substance to it. I liked the book, but didn't love it. I liked the integration of Mexican culture, the glossary of Spanish words at the back, and the silly illustrations, but I didn't feel as if I necessarily gained much out of reading the book. However, I could see how children might find the story silly and how it could even be helpful in teaching them how to predict future events or infer information from page to page. I almost felt a little as if because my inference skills and prediction skills are at an adult level that I couldn't appreciate this book as much as a child because I found it relatively pointless. I knew, the entire book, that there were mice in the house. I knew that they were the ones stealing the spoon and eating the candy and stealing the traps. Honestly, it frustrated me that it took her Rosa María so long to determine this on her own! I think that Pam Muñoz Ryan's style of writing is much more effective in a historical fiction setting, because it doesn't limit her to a specific amount of pages in which she has to cram all of her information.
Despite not being a big fan of this book, I don't think it would be a bad thing to have in a classroom library. The illustrations are sweet, the writing is solid, and there is cultural authenticity, particularly enhanced by the glossary at the end of the book. I just have to come realize that not all books are my cup of tea and that simply because I don't like a book doesn't mean I should keep it from my children in the classroom.

I enjoyed seeing these lesson application of the book which made me more open to integrating it into an actual lesson (see those here).

The Wild Christmas Reindeer - Jan Brett

When you type in the search "Children's Christmas Books" on Amazon.com, more than 31,000 results come up, ranging from books about Santa Claus to traditional religious stories about Baby Jesus. My favorite Christmas book was easily The Wild Christmas Reindeer by Jan Brett. The beautiful illustrations and intricacies of each and every page drew me in every Christmas and even during the year as well.

Jan Brett (well-known author and illustrator of books like The Mitten) takes us through a beautiful story of a girl named Teeka, who is one of Santa's elves. She is put in charge of getting all of the reindeer ready to fly on Christmas Eve, despite the fact that she's never worked with reindeer before. She ventures out into the tundra to go find them, and herds them together (not without making her work for it), and takes Bramble, Heather, Windswept, Lichen, Snowball, Crag, Twilight, and Tundra back to the barn, which she refers to as Winterfarm. The book chronicles her journey with the reindeer and the struggles that she goes through in trying to get them ready for Christmas Eve with Santa. She learns that she cannot yell at them and demand them, but rather, has to be calm and patient with them, which works much more effectively. In the end, Teeka watches the reindeer fly away with Santa and carry the sleigh into the dark night.

My favorite part of this entire book is the side illustrations. If you notice, each page counts from December 1st all the way until December 24th. The illustration for December 24th is pictured to the right. Jan Brett really shows her strengths here as an illustrator, which I definitely think is her ability to pay attention to minute details. In each picture to the side of a page (and in the frames of the pages themselves), there are extremely detailed and ornate dolls, stained glass, toys, elves, blocks, and so much more. We get to feel like we're peering in Santa's workshop and are seeing how work is progressing day by day. Certain Christmases I remember my parents only allowing us to read a page of this story a day, the page that correlated with the day that it currently was. That made us incredibly excited and nervous about the plot of the book.
Even though the illustrations are beautiful, I've always thought it interesting that Jan Brett didn't choose to use stereotypical Santa Christmas things, and seemed to be a little more inspired by Scandinavian sorts of traditions than the specific names of reindeer that we have popularized in America. The reindeer aren't named Dancer and Prancer and Vixen. They're named more earthy names, like Lichen and Twilight and Bramble. She is known in her work to have different cultures represented, ranging from Africa to Scandinavia. I loved that she was able to integrate this culture into a well-known tradition of Christmas that tends to be extremely "Americanized" in its exposure in the world.
I thought about ways to integrate this into a classroom and found this extremely interesting variety of lesson plans on how to integrate The Wild Christmas Reindeer in the classroom and to almost turn it into an entire unit for first and/or second graders. There are tons of great ideas in here that range from math to reading units, which is awesome! I will definitely consider adding this to my classroom in Holiday time, but also making sure I include various holiday traditions and not simply Christmas to expose students to a variety of cultural knowledge.

The Quilt Story - Tony Johnston and Tomie dePaola

So her mother rocked her as mothers do. 

Then tucked her in. 

And she felt at home again under the quilt.

I know I've said, time and time again, "I remember this book because it was so integral in my childhood" or "because my mom and dad read it to me before bed" or another reason. But this book really and truly defined my bedtime (and naptime, too!) during childhood. My mom would come, book in hand, to my room, wrap me up in my quilt (that was pink and red and embroidered with all of my birth information - weight, date, name, parents, etc. - a special gift from a family friend at birth), and read The Quilt Story to me. I desperately wanted my name to be Abigail, and although I didn't want to ever move from my house in Franklin, I wanted to find a magical quilt in my attic and wrap it around me. The book has an inscription on the front of it from our best family friends that reads -

To - Kylee

Happy Valentine's Day 1991!

Love - Russ, Sheila, Edward + Logan

This book clearly has many memories for me. 

Tony Johnston and Tomie dePaola tell readers the story of a little girl named Abigail, who receives a quilt from her mother with her named stitched in it. She plays with her quilt, cuddles in her quilt, wears her quilt as a gown, sleeps under her quilt when she's sick, and much more. Her family moves far across the country (in what seems to be a conestoga wagon) and she uses the quilt to wrap her up and remind her of her home. One day, she puts the quilt in her attic and left it there. Then, a new girl moves into the house (much later on - in modern times). She stumbles in the attic to chase her cat, sees the quilt, and wraps herself up in it. Johnston and dePaola show the parallels between Abigail and the little girl in modern times and then close this beautiful and beloved story with the line at the beginning of the blog, which I adore.
Although the text is beautiful in this book, like many other picturebooks, its real strength is the illustrations of Tomie dePaola. Tomie dePaola has written many infamous children's picturebooks (over 200 picturebooks in total), including the Caldecott book Streganona and the Newbery Honor book 26 Fairmount Avenue. His illustration style is easily recognizable, and often works well with his choice to write fairytales or folktales (see his list of books in his Wikipedia biography here). His illustrations work extremely well with The Quilt Story because it almost seems as if the illustrations are pieces of quilts themselves. The framing used makes the illustrations seem like individual quilt squares (or rectangles!).
My mother often came and did Terrific Tuesdays (enrichment afternoon days twice a year for the entire school) to my elementary school and talked about quilting. She often brought this book as well as The Patchwork Quilt by Valerie Flourny and read them to students, while bringing many of my family's quilts and collected quilts with her. We even sat together when I was home on Saturday night, thumbing through the book, and reminiscing about all of the memories that we had surrounding this book together. I tried to think of a more applicable way to integrate this into the classroom, and found a sample teaching plan with multiple lesson ideas for the book. Be sure to check that out here. I definitely think that the suggested ideas would be applicable to a variety of classroom ages, but best suited for early elementary grades.
This book will always hold a special place in my heart, and as cheesy as it sounds, I hope that I can sit with my daughter one day, wrap her in her special quilt, and share this story with her just as my mom shared it with me. 

time to SLEEP - Steve Jenkins and Robin Page

Sleep tight...

Where will you fall asleep tonight?

Who knew that gorillas like to snuggle? Or that long-horned bees hang on a twig throughout the night and it is unknown whether they're simply resting or actually sleeping? Or that bottlenose dolphins sleep with one-half of their brain at a time? The other half has to remember to breathe, remember? This precious and beautiful book tells the stories of various animals and how they go to sleep, whether it is at night or during the day. Readers can learn more about these animals in the very back of the book, where each one gets a small blurb and paragraph on one of the final pages. 

I loved the introductory paragraph to this book that took place on the inside of the book flap. It reads:

It's time to sleep! You can doze off standing on one leg, settle down for a nap on the sea floor, or crawl into a hole and snooze until spring. Or perhaps you'd rather slip into a slimy sleeping bag? In this bedtime book, Steve Jenkins and Robin Page take a look at some of the unusual ways animals get their rest. Try them yourself, or - just maybe - your own bed sounds more comfortable?

What a perfect way to introduce a book that does just what it describes. I can definitely imagine reading this to my own children before bedtime, before a kindergarten class and their naptime (if kindergarteners have that anymore - that was my favorite time of the day!), or even as an integrated portion of a science lesson. 

Students aren't simply learning about typical animals that they've heard of. They're learning about new animals, too. Before reading this book, I didn't know that there was actually an animal named a basilisk (that name only referred to this for me), that wood frogs existed, or that dolphins use one half of their brains at a time so they can sleep, but still swim and breathe! The cover (shown to the left) make students interested and want to read because of the sweet and gentle giraffe. I think that the book balances the sweet and adorable with the gross and slimy, appealing (albeit stereotypically) to both genders at the same time. We don't just learn about the cute and cuddly koala bear or the snuggling gorillas. We also learn that the parrotfish sleeps in a bubble of its own mucus. GROSS. We then learn that a hairy armadillo sleeps for nearly 20 hours a day. WEIRD. 

The only thing that frustrated me about this book was the lack of a clear bibliography. I think that often, we assume that because this is a children's picturebook, bibliographies aren't needed. However, that isn't true. I appreciated the individualized paragraphs at the end that went into more detail, but I wanted to know where that detail came from. Although that decreased the authenticity for me, I still would potentially read this to a class, but only after conducting research on my own and seeing if the facts were right! 

The Elephant Scientist - Caitlin O'Connell and Donna M. Jackson

Not many people know where Namibia is. Even less people have a personal connection to it. But Cailtin O'Connell has a personal connection to it - the elephants that she loves live in Etosha National Park. And I have a personal connection to it - my big sister spent a year there, in Swakopmund, teaching with Harvard's WorldTeach. You can see in the map below the purple line drawn between Swakopmund (my sister's homebase for a year) and Etosha National Park (Caitlin's research site). 

That's the reason I really connected with this book when I picked it up out of the pile of books that Dr. Johnson spread on the table in class for us today. And once I picked it up and opened the page, I was amazed at every piece of it - the insane quality of the photographs, the detail in the writing, the changes in page layouts that kept me interested, and personal touches and stories that Caitlin includes. Even though this story is told in the third person (assumedly by Donna M. Jackson), Caitlin's voice shines through in the love that is woven through the words, regardless of whether they include her dialogue or not. 

The biggest strength of The Elephant Scientist for me was the photography and how clear it was. All of the pictures made me as a reader (and I'm sure would make children reading it as well) feel as if I was in Etosha National Park with Caitlin, picking up dung samples, studying family networks and herds, and setting up camp with other researchers. The table of contents lays out for us as readers the type of information that will be covered in each section, whether it will be different descriptions of species of elephants ("Living Large"), breakdowns of families ("The Herds of Etosha"), or explaining the potential of what could happen to elephants if we aren't educated about them ("Elephants in Peril"). Each section/chapter has powerful photos, each described by a detailed caption that can be easily understood by children.  

In the back of the book, there are many different resources that confirm The Elephant Scientist's place as a quality information book - including an "Adopt an Elephant" section, information for more references for children (and adults, too!), pachyderm terms, selected source notes, and an index. I had to look up what the word "pachyderm" even meant, proving that even adults can learn from an information book like this. In case you were wondering, the word "pachyderm" refers to an order of animals that includes elephants, rhinoceroses, and hippopotami. The references available for this book were incredibly extensive, however, I wouldn't expect any less from someone like Caitlin O'Connell. She has been a lead researcher and even written for the New York Times, discussing the different "Rules of Engagement in the Elephant World" (check it out, here!). 

I'll end with a picture of my sister sandboarding in Namibia - kind of crazy to think that one country can have it all - grasslands, desert, ocean, and a jungle. 

Rebecca sand-boarding in 2006 in the Red Dunes

We are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball - Kadir Nelson

We are the Ship: The story of Negro League Baseball by Kadir Nelson (words and paintings) is a wonderful informational book diagramming the evolution of the Negro League of Baseball and including a powerful foreword by Hank Aaron (one of the greatest and most well-known baseball players of all time). Each "chapter" is written as an inning, so the book is divided into the first inning, second inning, and so on, up until the ninth inning and then "extra innings" added at the end of the book. Each inning (or chapter) begins with a quote from a well-known baseball player or owner of a team. Each of them is a powerful quote, and I wanted to include them - 

First Inning - "I ain't ever had a job. I just always played baseball." - Satchel Paige

Second Inning - "We played tricky baseball." - Cool Papa Bell

Third Inning - "It was a rough life - ride, ride, ride, and ride." - HIlton Smith

Fourth Inning - "Baseball really is an expensive thing to operate." - Ella Manley

Fifth Inning - "The greatest untapped reservoir of raw material in the history of our game is the black race." - Branch Rickey

Sixth Inning - "The crowds were big and the fans red-hot." - "Schoolboy" Johnny Taylor

Seventh Inning - "When we played head-to-head it was nip-and-tuck. They won some and we won some." - Gene Benson

Eighth Inning - "If you were anybody, you were at the East-West Game." - Buck O'Neil

Ninth Inning - "There was never a man in the game who could put mind and muscle together quicker and with better judgment than [Jackie Robinson]." - Branch Rickey 

Extra Innings - "If we get you boys, we're going to get the best ones. It's going to break up your league." - Clark Griffith

The most beautiful part of this book is the paintings that dot nearly every page. I was incredibly impressed by Kadir Nelson and his illustration skills. His painting are all beautifully realistic while not being photographs. I had to do multiple doubletakes throughout reading to fully examine each and every picture to make sure that it wasn't an actual detailed photograph, just like the picture to the left. From far away, it looks like an actual photograph of the Pittsburgh Crawfords. 

The detail in the bibliography and research done for this book was also extensive and impressive, but I guess with a foreword from Hank Aaron, what can you expect? There is not only an author's note, but a bibliography with 13 sources, a filmography with 2 sources, and extensive endnotes broken down inning-by-inning. This book made me realize that I may have improperly categorized You Forgot Your Skirt, Amelia Bloomer! as an informational book because of a lack of citations. Books like this deserve to win the awards they win, to be highly recommended, and to serve as both sources of reference and enjoyment for our students. 

A Light in the Attic - Shel Silverstein

That scoundrel you see

Is not really me - 

He's the coo-coo

Who's wearing my skin.

- Skin Stealer, page 147

I remember sitting with my mom and reading this collection of poems, giggling at how silly they were, and also confused at the subjects of the poems. They weren't happy-go-lucky fairytales. They weren't cutesy or about princesses. They were strange poems - some rhymed, some didn't, some had silly pictures to the side, some had strange pictures to the side, some had happy endings, and some didn't. I was always confused also by the picture on the cover of the book (seen to the left), but now, as an adult, I realize that the light in the attic refers to the light in your mind. How clever are you, Shel Silverstein...

With each poem in A Light in the Attic, there's an interesting illustration, and it is clear that illustrations play a large role in the work of Shel Silverstein. He has a very noticeable style of illustration, just as distinct (if not more) than Ludwig Bemelmans (who I wrote about with Madeline). His illustrations are black and white, done in thin (almost pen-like) ink and strange. It was hard for me to come up with a word to describe his illustrations, other than quirky. I still don't think that that captures the essence of the illustrations of Shel Silverstein and how wonderfully different they are. 

There have been controversies over the content of Shel Silverstein's poems, mainly because some think that they don't advocate proper behavior for children all of the time. For example, the poem "How not to have to dry the dishes" (on page 12) includes suggestions for children so that they won't have to dry the dishes again. These suggestions include dropping dishes on the floor. "Maybe they won't let you dry the dishes anymore," Silverstein suggests. However, Shel also has poems like "Hug o War," which is in his poetry anthology Where the Sidewalk Ends. That poem is shown below - 

How sweet is that poem? Then, there are also of course other poems that have been controversial, like "Little Abigail and the Beautiful Pony" on pages 120-121 of A Light in the Attic, in which Abigail wants a pony that her parents won't buy her. Because her parents won't buy her the pony, Abigail dies. And Shel Silverstein includes a tagline of sorts that reads, "This is a good story to read your folks when they won't buy you something you want." Oh, Shel. 

When looking into Shel Silverstein a little bit more, I found out that he wrote "A Boy Named Sue," the infamous Johnny Cash song. How fantastic is he in this clip? 

Hattie Big Sky - Kirby Larson

Why all this fuss about where someone was born? 

Wasn't it where he lived - rather, how he lived - that counted? 

- page 61

Continuing with my love of historical fiction, I chose Hattie Big Sky by Kirby Larson as my third historical fiction required read. Although I didn't love this book quite as much as I loved Esperanza Rising, it's definitely a close second. Hattie Big Sky tells readers the story of Hattie Brooks, an orphan living with her ornery (yes, ornery is the proper word for this woman) Aunt Ivy and her sweet Uncle Holt. Despite Hattie's age of 16 and the fact that she hasn't completed school, her Aunt Ivy wants to send her to live in a boarding house to serve as a maid. Magically, Hattie receives her own version of a Hogwarts letter - a letter from her deceased uncle (Uncle Chester) in Vida, Montana, leaving a 320-acre claim of his homestead. Hattie jumps at the chance to move out of her relatives' house and sets off to move to the homestead. What follows is her brief journey from Iowa to Montana and the struggles and heartwarming stories of her life 3 miles outside of Vida. 

Hattie meets a variety of people who impact her life in Vida: Mr. Ebgard - the lawyer in charge of carrying out her uncle's estate; Perilee and Karl Mueller and their children Chase, Mattie, Fern (and later on Lottie) - her neighbors; Traft Martin - the 20-year old son of the richest family in town; Rooster Jim - her chess-playing, bicycle-riding, chicken-raising neighbor; and Leafie - a hardcore woman who can hang with the best of them. All of these people have an impact on Hattie, whether it is one that will last long after she leaves Vida (like Perilee) or someone who terrorizes her existence in his place in the community (like Traft's mother - Mrs. Martin, and often sometimes Traft himself). This book reminded me a little bit of the TV show (that was a family favorite) called Christy (for a clip of it, see here!). Hattie has the same spunk and perseverance that Christy had in the tv show and they're set in the same time period in rural areas. 

Hattie Big Sky was named a Newbery Honor Book in 2007 and I completely understand why. Both Kirby Larson's writing and the characters that she creates throughout the novel had me on the edge of my seat throughout all of the pages. I even cried, which I rarely do while reading books (although the fact that the last two I've read I've cried during doesn't help me - at least they were Hattie Big Sky and Esperanza Rising). This book would be a fantastic read-aloud book or a book club book. I think it would also be a fantastic opportunity to children to journal in a book journal about their reactions, because many of the chapters leave you hanging on the edge of activity. I would definitely recommend Hattie Big Sky for an elementary school classroom!