Your ancestors are reflected in your face!

Beautiful book in Spanish and English. It celebrates how the child is like their mother and then you flip the book to read about how the child is like their father. In both cases, the last similarity is that the child can see their parent reflected in their face. Lovely.

**This book might be considered exclusive, so I generalize to the fact that our ancestors' faces are reflected in our face.

A tribute to books!

Such a beautiful tribute to books and reading as a family. My favorite stanza: "Thanks to books, I find balance, I climb high, I follow new roads, I move forward."

A gorgeous tale about sharing!

This book is published by Island Heritage Publishing and I picked it up on the island of Maui! I love the soft colors of the book and the expressions of the characters. Two children are told by their grandfather to fill their wagon with excess mangoes (the plural of mango can be mangos or mangoes in English) and share them with their neighbors. Each neighbor sends a mahalo (thank you) gift back with the children to their grandfather. He sets a lovely meal together from what has been shared. I act this out with children.

TOO MANY MANGOS Written by Tammy Paikai; Illustrated by Don Robinson

Charlotte Zolotow Award winner

 

We just found out that this book is the winner of the Charlotte Zolotow award. Congratulations!
A Vietnamese son goes fishing in the early morning hours with his father. This is before his father has to go to work. The intimacy of fishing together allows the father to tell his son about his home country, Vietnam. This book, in a loving way, captures the refugee experience and the immigrant experience. And even if readers cannot relate to either of those, they will be able to relate to the struggles of getting through the day and getting food on the table. No matter the circumstances, the overreaching universal theme of survival is what we all know and understand. We all share this at differing levels. We can applaud the people who take care of their families and push through exhaustion especially after having escaped a war. We never know people's stories until we ask...and listen.

A fun alphabet book!

We did an author study (with adults) of James Patterson at our library and Jill discovered this picture book written by James & Susan Patterson. It is illustrated by Hsinping Pan. And we found out that Susan Patterson attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

BIG WORDS FOR LITTLE GENIUSES c) 2017

     The book teaches "big" words for each letter of the alphabet. Very fun! The illustrations carry the book beautifully!
For "q" I learned a new word, "quokka". A quokka is an animal who happens to smile a lot! I found this cutie pie online.

A favorite Christmas picture book!

Every year, this book is my gentle & thoughtful reminder to break down holiday activities into happy and manageable pieces. And, of course, be generous to nature and wildlife! (Picture book!)

Poor Pamela!

Charming! This book is about Pamela, a cow, who LOVES pears. The situation is out of control so Amy, her young owner, decides to solve the problem by offering Pamela as many pears as she could possibly want. (This is along the lines of the theory that if you overdose on something you will get over your craving for it.) Poor Pamela gets very sick. And, yes, she is done with pears but onto something else perhaps? Hilarious. (This book is written in both English and Spanish.)