A good book to have on hand to help students who may be watching their parents go through something similar.  As seen from a young boy’s point of view, it simply tells what it’s like to watch as his father who used to like to go for walks in the big wide colorful world starts to lose interest and says he’s lost his color and spends all day in bed, and throughout the boy keeps worrying that he’s done something wrong, but Dad keeps telling him he didn’t.  Eventually Dad visits people at the hospital who give him medicine for his brain and has someone he can talk to, until gradually the color starts coming back and when the boy fixes him a cup of tea he enjoys it and they return for a walk and a hug and his dad is back.  The book doesn’t pretend it all happened suddenly, but it does provide hope and a sense of empathy for others who might need reassurance.

A sweet story about the benefits of patience and dedication:  a young mouse is disappointed (at first) with his grandfather’s birthday gift of some seeds, but his grandfather assures him that if they plant one and water it every day and wait patiently, soon it will grow into something that will provide both food and a play place.  After planting the seed together, the young mouse rushes out the next day to see what he’s got, only to learn he must be patient. Eventually he is rewarded with a small sprout, which still seems a little disappointing.  One day he runs off with his friends to play, only to return to find his neglected sprout wilting.  He apologizes, and returns to his efforts, and calls upon others for help when he is ill and cannot tend it himself, and in the end he has a beautiful tomato plant that he and his friends all play in while enjoying its fruits.

Ahhhh… There’s something sort of Velveteen Rabbittish about it, in its softness and gentle lesson about what it really means to be alive.  It tells the story of a stone lion outside a library who longs to be real and alive so that he could run in the park and swish his tail.  The wise gargoyle nearby tells him that sometimes stone animals are granted the opportunity to become real for a short time, “if they desire it greatly, with a generous heart.”  As it turns out, when the lion does get his chance to come to life, it is so that he can rescue the homeless girl and her baby brother, who have come to visit him so often, from a terrible snow-storm, by dragging them into the warmth of the library.  Though he never gets the chance to run and frolic, he builds relationships and shared memories that give him a better understanding for those who visit with him, making him feel alive even when he’s stone.

A good book for units on insects, or on habitats, or on animal adaptations/camouflage.  Or just a fun book for kids who like to hunt for the hidden things in a picture, and who like bugs. One two-page spread showing and telling briefly about a particular habitat, with all the bugs kind of hidden, is followed by another two-page spread showing those bugs on a plain back-ground and giving more detailed information about each.  This set-up allows the reader to test their eyesight hunting for what they think they see, and then checking their finds when they turn the page, going back when necessary to find something they may have missed the first time through.

It’s a cute story, with a good message, and one many children can relate to, even if they don’t have a pet elephant.  It tells of a young boy who has a tiny elephant for a pet, and while he shares the joy he takes in his friend, he admits that it means he never fits in because nobody else has a pet elephant.  One day he sets out for Pet Club day, only to find a sign declaring no elephants allowed, and though sad at first, he befriends another sad girl, who was not welcome with her pet skunk, either.  Together they decide to start their own club, and find themselves joined by children with pets like a hedgehog, a swordfish, an armadillo, a penguin, a bat… And at their club, all are welcome.

The illustrations in this book are amazing!  Strong enough to earn a recommendation all on their own.  To be honest, I found the story that accompanies them to be a bit convoluted and hard to follow, but there’s something so magical about the illustrations that I’m left feeling like my failure to follow the tale is somehow a lacking of imagination on my part.  It tells of a boy (at first called Nightlight, and later Jack Frost), who is best friends with the Man in the Moon and has sword an oath to the parents of the Man in the Moon to watch over and protect him, but after a battle with a nightmare, he falls to earth and seems to lose his way for a while, but the Man in the Moon remembers their friendship and keeps watch and eventually brings him out of his loneliness, by helping him to remember his oath, which he ends up turning toward the children of earth, and gives him purpose.  Interestingly, the book jacket recommends it for kids ages 4-8, but I thought it was more for older children, a picture book suitable for ages 8-12.  I think it takes the older kids to be able to follow the story, but maybe it takes the littler kids to lose themselves in it?

Wow!  I love this book! Completely cool and fabulous and amazing.  Gives me the shivers.  Must get the rest in this series.  The illustrations are incredible, drawing on imagination and shifts in perspective to gradually guide the eye to two completely different pictures at once, depending on what part of the art you are looking at, but not like those cheesy black and white optical illusion things; more like an attention to detail and focus exercise.  While the artwork is the main draw, the text which accompanies it is poetical and draws one in even more to ponder the world of imagination.  The poems and the artwork each add to the other.  With young children, they’ll be drawn into the beauty and fun and the magic of it, but I think for older audiences there’s also things to be gained from this to be shared in art classes and poetry classes, too.

I recommend this one with reservations.  Consider your audience.  It tells the true story of a boy and woman in New York who struck up a friendship after young Alex asked for spare change on a street corner, and Laura shared a meal with him instead.  They began having weekly meals together and Laura invites Alex to spend Christmas with her and her family.  It’s written from Alex’s point of view, but the focus seems to be on how kind and generous and wonderful Laura is.  As a story to share with middle-class kids to encourage them to reach out to those less fortunate, showing that even small acts can build strong relationships and make big differences, I think it’s great.  But I wonder how students who are living in poverty will feel reading it, wondering why they haven’t had someone swoop down and offer them all these things?  For that matter, the story tells us that Alex has two sisters and a grandmother and mom, but there’s no mention of any of them being invited to participate in Laura’s generosity? One wonders how they felt about that.

A nearly wordless book, the story is mostly told through the pictures, but the connecting thread running through the whole book is a single word accompanying each picture, and as the reader proceeds through the story, that single word changes by just a single letter each time (plan, plane, planet, plant…until it circles all the way back to plan again).  The chain of words provides a wonderful way for young students to consider word structure, and how that single letter changes the word, and the illustrations turn this chain of words, that would otherwise be connected by nothing else, into a story of a young girl and her dog on a farm, who find a photo album telling the story of the old bi-plane in the yard, and cook up a plan to resurrect it with her father to bring it back to new adventures.  It even manages poignancy within the simple tale, as the word pain is accompanied by the illustration showing the family laying flowers at mom’s grave in remembrance.

The illustrations are classic De Paola, and the environmentalist message is certainly as relevant now as it was when it was originally published in 1975, but it’s an odd little story.  Never once is any reference made to explain why Michael is a Bird-Boy, who wakes up every morning and puts on a bird suit.  And when he complains to the boss-lady about all the smoke her factory is producing, she had simply never considered where she could get real bees, and presto-chango everything is better.  I don’t think DePaola’s illustrations are enough to carry it.  I think there’s a reason why this one hadn’t surfaced with all his other classics in the last forty years.