Children's Book Columns

The youngest people on your holiday giving list would appreciate a copy of Chris Gall’s “Dinotrux,” a proven hit with little boys (and girls, too, I’m sure).  According to Gall, many millions of years ago, dinotrux ruled the earth.  Part dinosaur and part truck, creatures like Semisaur and Garbageadon terrorized the cave men for millennia, until finally rusting away.  The trucks we see today are merely their tame descendants.

    Nine months before Rosa Parks made history, a fifteen-year-old girl was arrested for refusing to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.  Claudette Colvin was well aware of the convoluted rules about where blacks could sit on the city buses, but on this day she decided not to obey the bus driver’s command to give up her seat.  She was arrested and eventually convicted of assault and violating the segregation law. 

    Deemed too emotional to become the public face of the civil rights cause, Colvin has been a footnote to history for the last fifty years. But that has changed with the publication of Philip Hoose’s “Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice,” winner of this year’s National Book Award for Young People’s Literature.

    Thanksgiving disasters usually take the form of dried-out turkey or not enough mashed potatoes.  But for the Peterkin family, proper Victorians all, Thanksgiving disaster strikes when their dinner simply disappears.  In “The Peterkins’ Thanksgiving,” Elizabeth Spurr has adapted one of Lucretia Hale’s charming stories about this hapless family into a picture book edition illustrated with cheerful whimsy by Wendy Anderson Halperin.

    Oliver Olson’s problem is over-protective parents.  When his third grade teacher opens a space unit by asking, “How many of you would like to walk on the moon?”, Oliver doesn’t raise his hand.  “Oliver’s parents would never let him walk on the moon.  The moon was too far away.  It was too cold.  It didn’t have enough gravity. The rocket might explode.”  And when his teacher announces that the whole class is invited to a space sleepover at school, he knows he won’t be allowed to go.  Ever since Oliver was a sickly preschooler, his parents have worried about him too much.

 A recent New York Times article on school reading has been making the rounds among librarians, teachers and parents.  In “A New Assignment: Pick Books You Like,” Motoko Rich reports on the “reading workshop” model of engaging middle school students in reading.  Unlike the traditional assignments, where the whole class reads and analyzes a classic book together, this approach encourages kids to choose their own titles.  “If your goal is simply to get them to read more, choice is the way to go,” says one literacy professor.
 At local middle schools, even kids with assigned reading can participate in a voluntary reading program. Café Book, a collaboration between the public library and eight middle schools in Fredericksburg, Stafford and Spotsylvania, encourages seventh and eighth graders to read from a list of twenty new books, discuss them during lunch periods, and vote on their favorites.

    “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.”  This saying, attributed to Pascal, applies perfectly to books for beginning readers.  Writing a seven-hundred-page novel is quite an accomplishment, but some writers might argue that writing a thirty-two page reader with limited vocabulary is even more challenging.  Here are a few recent examples of the best.

 One of the most popular displays in our children’s rooms showcases children’s books that have been made into movies.  For every reader who complains, “the book was better!”, there’s another who delightedly discovers that a favorite movie was based on a good book.
 Currently in theaters is “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,” an animated movie based on the picture book of the same name by Judi Barrett.  Translating a 32-page picture book into a 90-minute film means adding more characters and plot twists, but the critics seem to be positive about the results.

 Lauren Thompson’s story begins, “This is the pie, warm and sweet, that Papa baked.”  But how did Papa make the pie?  Start with apples, “juicy and red,” then the tree, “crooked and strong,” and so on until we come to “the world, blooming with life, that spins with the sun, fiery and bright…” 
 Perfect for this time of year, “The Apple Pie That Papa Baked” is a rollicking picture book illustrated by Jonathan Bean in tones of cream, sepia, black and red, evoking classic illustrations by Virginia Lee Burton and Wanda Gag. 

 After more than twenty years of introducing children to great books, PBS’s Reading Rainbow television series has come to an end.   Over the course of 155 programs, host Levar Burton visited museums and pueblos, interviewed entrepreneurs and biologists, showed us how crayons are made and how oil spills are cleaned up, all the while linking the real world to the best in children’s literature.  Here’s a look at a few favorite books Levar introduced over the years.

While our children write their lessons with pencils and computers, Pakistani schoolchildren in the village of Korphe used to write on the ground with sticks.  Then one day a lost climber stumbled into their village, and everything changed.

Adults may recognize this as the story of Greg Mortensen, well-known for the bestselling book, “Three Cups of Tea,” about his work building schools in Pakistan.  Now young children can learn the story in his new picture book, “Listen to the Wind, The Story of Dr. Greg and Three Cups of Tea.”