A celebration of ART and READING!

This gorgeous book contains 23 paintings from global art galleries that show people reading. The small text tells us about the title of the painting, the artist, the year it was painted, and the art gallery (& city where it is featured). The large text is in rhyme and talks about the enjoyment of reading in many different places. Today, with 6th grade, we discussed that the Cezanne painting about reading the news is not seen much anymore. People are reading the news on their devices. But surely, we will see images of people reading on devices more prevalently in our society shortly. We also discussed the page where a person has received and is reading a letter. We talked about how it may be a dying art, but receiving a letter is a pretty special event! Some other artists that were included and familiar to the students: Van Gogh, Degas, Hopper, Rembrandt, and Picasso. A true "find" in this book: The Bookworm by Carl Spitzweg from 1850 and is @ the Milwaukee Public Library!

Sing your song and you will find a friend

A girl sings her tune and thus strikes up a friendship. Lovely. (Mostly wordless.)       

   

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.