Eric Carle

300 picture books wk 3. Or thereabouts

26th January 2015 by Jax Blunt 2 Comments

Continuing our 300 picture book trek – another good week, including our first library visit. Last week we got up to 23 books, this week we’re totalling 35.

Bubble trouble
UFO diary. Satoshi Kitamura
Books always everywhere @nosycrow
The littlest dinosaur @KidsBloomsbury
Rosie’s walk
Rex wrecks it
Grandad Pot
Goodnight Tiptoe Polly Dunbar
The Hueys in the new jumper
The disgusting sandwich.
Edward goes exploring
The whales’ song.

Lots of fabulous books in there. Meta book about books in Books always everywhere from nosycrow, while Goodnight Tiptoe from Polly Dunbar is rapidly becoming a new family favourite. Edward goes exploring will I suspect inspire some educational wildlife walks as the weather improves.

Bubble trouble isn’t one to read when you’re too tired – it’s tongue tying twisters that were challenging at bedtime. Pictures are gorgeous though, and it is a lovely story.

UFO Diary (Amazon link) is very gentle, perfectly illustrated by Satoshi Kitamura, who is one of my favourites I think. I did a feature on his work during 300 Picture books last year.

I’m thinking of doing features on different author/illustrators again this year. I have a couple of Eric Carle books from the library this week, so I might see if I can find a few others and focus on him. Bound to be a few art activities out there as well we can do, and make it a focus of our week.

Or, just discovered The Book People have 10 Julia Donaldson/Alex Scheffler books for £12. Very tempting. I could buy two sets and do a giveaway on the second one….maybe for another week!

I have to say that making sure that pretty much every day we read at least one new book is a really good habit. Alongside the picture books we’re also reading Songbirds phonic readers, and some longer excerpts – last night was a section from a Moomin book, featured in A Little, Aloud, for Children which is a great selection. I also picked up another read aloud longer book from a charity shop, but it’s disappeared. Never mind. Will show up at some point.

So, what have you been reading? Are you following along with #300PBs and if so, where? Do let me know.

The bad-tempered ladybird by Eric Carle #100books #FridayReadAlouds

29th April 2011 by Jax Blunt 1 Comment

This copy of The Bad Tempered Ladybird by Eric Carle was a charity shop bargain, think it came in a bundle for a pound with some other books. I’d have paid a pound for this, especially as it’s the hardback edition. Eric Carle’s illustrations are hugely distinctive – if you’ve read the hungry caterpillar, you’d recognise this as being by the same author. (And if you haven’t read it, how precisely? Some books are classic because they really are classics, not just because they’ve been hyped.)

Not wishing to disclose any spoilers on this one, but it’s about a bad tempered ladybird, looking for someone to pick a fight with. He starts with a good tempered ladybird, but he’s too small, so then we work our way through the day and up the animal sizes until we eventually get to a whale…

The pages start off small, with small writing, and there’s a little clock with the time on it at the top of the page too. So lots to engage the mind as the pages get larger, with steadily increased size of writing and larger and larger animals. The clocks stay the same size though the time changes. Smallest recognises them as clocks, and goes through the book naming the animals. Cat, cat, cat, bird, cat, cat, dog….I’m not quite sure how her naming convention works yet. I think there are cats, and there are furry animals who are not cats and therefore must be dogs, and then there are things which aren’t furry so are neither. Oh, and there are birds. She likes birds.

A bad tempered ladybird isn’t in the same league as A Hungry Caterpillar. I think if anything there’s too much to it. But it’s still a book that’s very easy to read over and over again – your toddler will love it, and you won’t hate it, which makes it about as good as it gets for a read aloud.

This was book 77

The Hungry Caterpillar #100books

9th January 2011 by Jax Blunt 3 Comments

This set, as linked to, was one of Smallest’s first presents. The soft caterpillar annoys me slightly, as it’s been changed from the illustrated one to make it more educationally interesting, and I really didn’t feel that was necessary. We carted it around for a few months, and Smallest didn’t squidge the interesting sounding bits, or play with the artificial tags or indeed really notice it at all, so it’s now in a toybox somewhere.

The book, however, has just come into its own. This is a board book version, which means it can stand up to some rough handling. Just as well, as it gets a fair bit of that. Smallest loves it, something about the simple pictures which nevertheless have complex colouring to them, and the fact that she can stick her fingers through the holes! It also contains many mentions of lots of her favourite foods – apples, pears, strawberries. The caterpillar never munches through a chocolate bar which is a bit of an oversight 😉

Oddly the one page she doesn’t seem bothered by is the beautiful butterfly, so I don’t always get to read that one. Shame, as I rather like it.

Book 11 of 100..