Grandma is coming over a play date!  And she always brings so many friends.  By simply hanging a bed sheet near a window, grandma uses body shadows to have her granddaughter guess as different animals in a parade, including an elephant, monkeys, an ostrich, kangaroo, rhinoceri, and for the finale, “Gramme and me”.  For a preschool aged audience, Hooray Parade will push kids to use their imaginations to figure out the creatures with the question “Can you guess what’s coming next?”. Repetition, alliteration and onomatopoeic language further it’s whimsical feel that are complimented with it’s pencil sketch and water color artwork.  This would be a great read aloud for public libraries and a gift for grandparents.

The Selfish Giant was originally published in 1888 and has been re-illustrated many times since then.  In this particular edition, the illustrator is Ritva Voutila, a Finnish artist.  The illustrations are mellow and muted and somewhat dark, pretty much reflecting the story.  Color stands out in parts where the children are featured.  However, the story can hold many meanings and can be used in various ways.  It could be a story of understanding and forgiveness, of life and joy, and also a story of Jesus and hope.  This book wouldn’t work for a classroom read aloud, but more of a one-on-one story time so that each page can be given the time it needs to understand.

Every elementary teacher knows his or her tricks to keep the glue in check.  For Matty, his art teacher says “Glue drops, not puddles!”.  But Matty loves glue.  At home, his parents help him produce all sorts of zany creations with different varieties of glue.  So when he is given the opportunity to have glue bottles in his hands, he has to squeeze hard…and jump belly first into the glue.  Sure, he gets stuck to the table, and as his buddies, teacher and father try to free him, a masterpiece is born.  Jason Lefebvre has captured such a wonderfully simple concept as “too much glue” that most children have heard or experienced first hand and let it spread into a fabulous story that parents, teachers and kids will love.  Zac Retz’s illustrations are clever and bright, whimsical and yet spot on.  Too Much Glue is a thoroughly enjoyable book that will stick with you like glue.

Stephanie Kwolek grew up during the Great Depression and, as any typical little girl, loved to make dresses for her dolls.  When she was in high school, her passion turned to chemistry.  She felt there was a relationship between the two in comparing the meticulousness of both.  Stephanie later went to an all-women’s college and majored in chemistry.  She thought perhaps she could later go into medicine.  However, with a college degree in hand, she landed a job with DuPont, a chemical engineering pioneer at the time, and stayed with them for over 40 years.  During that time, she was challenged with making a thread that was stronger than steel.  Not such an easy task.  After almost 20 years, she discovered a thread made from polymers that when woven together was strong enough to stop a bullet–kevlar was born.  Needless to say, kevlar has made a huge impact on the world, saving many lives of the military and law enforcement.  It is also used in spacecraft, radial tires, roads, brake pads, plus a multitude of other items.  At the end of the book is a section titled, ‘You Be the Inventor.’  It gives examples of kids who have had an idea, patented it, and built a company from it, all at a very young age.  This book is encouraging for kids to follow their dreams.

With very limited text (strictly dialogue), the story is told mostly through the illustrations, which juxtapose a scowling old man and an eager young boy as they face the prospect of heading out on a rainy day, the old man grumbling all the way, and the young boy playing make-believe in his froggy-themed rain gear.  Both their attitudes seem to be contagious to all they encounter, until they both end up at the “Rain or Shine Cafe.”  The old man growls at the young boy, too, both when he bumps his chair, and even when he offers to share his cookie, but when the grump leaves his hat behind, and the youngster chases him down to return it, they share a moment impersonating each other, and the old guy walks away happy.  It’s fine, but the ending seemed a bit pat, and I kept thinking the boy was a girl because the tassels on his froggy hat looked like pigtails.

Part sentimental look at a boy’s trip to the ball game with his father, part nod to “Goodnight Moon,” the rhyming text and sepia toned illustrations begin by describing all the things they see and do as spectators at the big game, and concludes by saying goodnight to everything and everyone as they leave, right up to, “Goodnight, Daddy. Goodnight, moon. Goodnight, baseball, safe in my room.”  The final illustrations shows just what a baseball fan this boy is, as we see his bedroom, fully decorated with baseball bed, baseball bedspread, baseball carpet, baseball lamp, baseball toys, and the full moon out the window perceived as a baseball as well.  Sure to be enjoyed by young baseball fans.

Intended for very young audiences, a repetitive format and simple text and illustrations  teach basic concepts, while also inviting young readers to delve more deeply into those concepts.  It begins by showing an apple opposite an armadillo, asking the simple (and seemly obvious) question, “Which is round?” When the reader turns the page, the same question repeats, accompanied with, “What do you think?”  Only this time the apple has been eaten down to the core, and the armadillo is curled up upon itself in a round ball.  Similar examples examine concepts of bigger, longer, faster, higher.  And the book concludes with asking whether an apple or a watermelon is red, whole green and red fruits on the first page are followed by fruits cut apart to show the white and red insides when the page is turned.  A great tool for developing observational skills and creating discussions around comparisons.

The child-like illustrations of characters are over-laid over more sophisticated backgrounds.  The story contains a simple message about reusing items rather than discarding them:  Mr. King (King of the jungle perhaps? A cat with a crown) begins as a consumer of the first order, who is quick to toss old items into his pond to be replaced with new ones, until he’s fishing one day and snares a “monster” made up of all his discards; the hubbub that arrises draws his neighbors who don’t see the monster, but are delighted with all the treasures lying on shore, and Mr. King comes to realize how his old things can be repurposed into new inventions that delight one and all.  A great story to bring out around Earth Day.

Though it may not be a popular title, it sure is a useful one.  I wish I’d had a copy handy when I was a first-year teacher, trying to teach prepositional phrases from a grammar text book that didn’t define what a preposition was — only gave a list of them.  This book begins by offering a clear definition of what a prepositions does (“It ties words together to show how they are related”), and then goes on to give several different examples, well-organized by the type of relationship they describe, and well-illustrated by large color photos.  Old-school grammarians may take objection to the blatant dismissal of the old rule against ending a sentence with a preposition, as this volume declares that a preposition “may be the first word, the last word, or somewhere in between.”