This darling picture book is about Joanie, a young girl who learns that she needs glasses.  She goes into town with her mother, aunt and cousin, Barbara Louise to pick them out.  The girls are dazzled by all the glamorous eye wear choices and Barbara Louise becomes quite jealous that she doesn’t need glasses.  She tries everything to convince her mother that she needs them, but to no avail.  When Joanie becomes disenchanted with her glasses, the girls switch and Barbara Louise tries wearing them with silly consequences.  In the end, the girls decide to return the glasses to Joanie.  Walking home, they came upon a yard sale and Barbara Louise finds a treasure, her own pair of glamorous glasses without the lenses!  The style of this book reminds me of the Fancy Nancy series and the girls are accessorized to the hilt and very focuses on their appearance.  The illustrations are bright, colorful, and cartoonish.  The wonderful cover art is sure to draw in young readers.  This fun book is perfect for a girl who is new to wearing glasses.

Princess Viola is a spirited girl, more fond of diving into the moat, skateboarding up and down the drawbridge and karate-chopping, than doing all that princesses typically do.  She decides to go off to princess camp where she can learn to be a proper princess.  However, her true nature cannot be suppressed and in the end that saves the day!  This is a fun, free-spirited book about being true to yourself and being loved for it.  The illustrations are reminiscent of a graphic novel and the cover features glitter which is sure to draw young readers.

This is a beautiful nativity story about a little shepherd girl who followed her father into the night and toward the stable where she discovered the baby Jesus.  Joining Mary, Joseph, the three kings, shepherds and stable animals, the girl meets Jesus, who enters her heart.  The illustrations are gorgeous watercolors, rich and detailed.  I’m thrilled to have this treasure for our Catholic school library.

The Highway Rat is written by the creators of The Gruffalo and has the similar theme of a character who uses his/her clever wit to solve a problem.  In this case, Duck tricks the Highway Rat, stopping him from stealing everyone’s food.  The author and illustrator use rhyming, repeating text and engaging illustrations to create this folktale.  It would be fun to pair this book with The Gruffalo for story time.

In this Elmer book, a herd of pink elephants are having a birthday party for Old, who was turning 100 years old.  Elmer and his cousin, Wilbur, went to check out the commotion and ended up witnessing an earthquake disaster!  Old was stuck on a small rock that separated from the cliff during the earthquake.  Fortunately, Super El came to the rescue and lifted Old to safety before the rock crumbled into the valley.  Colorful and fun, this book will appeal to young students for story time.

Two Shy Pandas is a lovely children’s picture book with a friendship theme.  The two young pandas are lonely playing by themselves at the zoo and long to have a friend but are too shy to introduce themselves to each other.  One day it snows and one panda goes inside while the other plays outside.  Both worry when they don’t see each other and decide to venture out to check.  They bump into each other and decide to be friends.  It’s a nice lesson about reaching out to others to pursue friendship.  The illustrations are colorful and sweet.

This fun dinosaur book is written in a bit of a story style.  It is full of questions to make the reader think.  The pictures are inviting and interesting.  At the end of the book are a variety of fun activities, a puppet making project, a quiz about the information in the book, and a couple of poems.

I enjoyed the light humor and interesting facts.  It’s a wonderful book for young readers and listeners with a large variety of things.  A good addition to our library.

This book surprised me.  It looked like and started like a story book about a tiger family. The book ended up being a book about ecology.  It has a wide variety of information about our earth and how it has and is changing throughout it’s history.

It encourages us to be good to the earth and take care of what we have. throughout the book are learning circles filled with interesting facts that clarify or enhance the information on the pages.

The pictures are fun, colorful and interesting.  This is a good science book for children.

“There are 418 different kinds of parrots and related species.”  This small  7″ X 6″ page book shows only a few of them, but these usually highly colorful birds pictured will elicit ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’.  Brief, simple, general information is given about parrot claws, coloring, size, hooked beaks, good memory and habitat are given.

Includes 6 transparent pages among the highly glossy pages with metal comb binding.

The reader follows a chestnut tree through the changes of four seasons. Three of the six transparent pages reveal the inside and outside of a chestnut husk, above and below the ground of the tree, and before and after the tree bud opens. Then examples of five distinct deciduous tree shapes are illustrated, followed by five distinct deciduous tree leaf shapes and their corresponding seeds. Finally, five evergreen tree examples are pictured with five different evergreen tree cones.

This book has heavy board pages with sturdy metal comb binding.