Classic Literature Board Books

We don’t often wander into pre-school territory on this blog but the new Baby-Lit books by Jennifer Adams, illustrated by Alison Oliver, are too good to ignore. Since my favorite book of all time is Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice, I’ll start with Pride and Prejudice: A Baby-Lit Counting Primer.

The books stay true to the original story. Here are the “4” pages:

So far there are 12 Baby-Lit classics including Moby Dick (an ocean primer), Alice in Wonderland (a colors primer) and Dracula ( another counting primer). What a great way to learn concepts every pre-schooler needs to know while planting a seed for the future discovery of classic literature.

The Sonoma County Library has a few copies of Moby Dick and Alice in Wonderland. I have found some of these books at Whole Foods and Copperfield's and all of them on Amazon.

E.B. White Explains Why He Wrote Charlotte’s Web

A few weeks before Charlotte’s Web was published, E. B. White’s editor asked him about his inspiration for the book. You can read what he wrote here. It is exactly what I hoped he might have said as I listened to Mrs. Graham, my third grade teacher, read the book to our class.

 

Hat tip: Read Across America

Snow Treasure

It is early spring in 1940. The Nazis have just taken Poland and are headed towards the Norwegian Arctic Circle community of Riswyk. The citizens have a plan to get their gold bullion out of Norway to keep it from the Germans. They hide the gold in a well camouflaged snow cave just as the Nazis arrive in April, 1940. The task is  how to get it from the snow cave  in the mountains to a fishing boat that is waiting to take the bullion to the United States without the German’s knowing what they were doing. And get is done before the spring thaw. The older children of the community will carry the gold on their sleds down the mountain, a few bars at a time until the nearly 2000 pounds of gold are safely on their way to the US.

Twelve year old Peter Lundstrom’s father is the town banker. His uncle, Victor, is a fisherman who knows all the streams and fjords along the Norwegian coast. Peter, his sister Lovisa and his friends Michael and Helga are to be captains of teams of students who will carry the gold on their sleds to a place near a hidden fjord; then bury their gold bars in the snow. To mark the burial spots, they  will build snowmen. Uncle Victor and his first mate will dig up the gold bars each night and stash them in Victor’s camouflaged boat. It is a race to beat the spring thaw and avoid the German sentries. There are some close calls, but every bar makes it onto the ship. As the book ends, the ship is at sea on it’s way to America.

When I first read Snow Treasure in 1957 (that is not a typo) and my son read it in 1980, it was believed that this was a true story. The  Norwegian freighter Bomma landed in Baltimore on June 28, 1940 with 9 million dollars worth of gold bullion. The rest of the story has never been verified. Marie McSwigan wrote a piece in 1944 saying that she had read a newspaper article about the arrival of the bullion in New York and that children had helped ferry it out of Norway. She liked   their  resourcefulness and decided to write a children’s book about it. The article she wrote was easy for me to find in 2013 using Google, but probably much harder to find in an earlier era.

The Sonoma County Library has several copies.

The AR level is 5.3.

Happy Birthday Charlotte’s Web

Sixty years ago today, E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web was published. It quickly became a children’s favorite. Four years later, in a third grade class in Minneapolis, my teacher, Mrs.. Graham, started to read Charlotte’s Web to our class. At the end of the day, she read a chapter until she finished the book.  All forty (no small class sizes in those days) of us looked forward to the next chapter in Charlotte and Wilbur’s saga. We cried when Charlotte died. In the spring, Mrs.. Graham told us that since we were the best class she had ever taught, she would reward us by reading Charlotte’s Web to us again. Decades later, I had a chance to talk to her and found out that all her classes were the “best” and all her classes got two readings of E. B. White’s classic.

I read this book to my children a couple of decades later. They loved it too. In 1970,  E. B. White,  recorded an audio book. It took 17 takes for the author to read the passage about Charlotte’s death with out crying. This is a book that is as fresh today as it was in 1952. It is a story of love and friendship, life and death.

Today on NPR Morning Edition, there was a tribute to the book which includes a clip of E. B. White  reading Charlotte’s Web.

The Yulupa Library has two copies of this book and the Sonoma County Library has many copies. The county library also has Charlotte’s Web picture books.

Dogs at the Book Fair

We love dogs around here, so the first bo0ks I checked out at the Book Fair were about dogs. The picture book I picked was Charlie The Ranch Dog by Ree Drummond and illustrated by Diane DeGroat.

Charlie and his pal Suzie are ranch dogs. Charlie likes to think he works hard on the ranch but the pictures tell a different story. But in the end, Charlie saves Mama’s garden from the marauding cows. This is a light hearted story that is true to  real dogs’ natures. The book is AR level 2.2. For more about this book check here. Oh, and it comes with a Lasagna recipe!

The next book, Travel-Size Pups Around the World by Ed Masessa , looks at small dogs and the countries they came from.

You visit countries on four continents and learn about the dogs from those places. Cute puppies and lots of dog facts. This is a Level 2 book. For more information check here.

 The Puppy Place books by Ellen Miles are about the Peterson family, especially Lizzie and Charles, who foster dogs from the animal shelter until they get their “forever” home. The book I chose was Muttley.

This book is fiction, but the author bases her dog portraits on dogs she knows, so at the end of the book you learn about the real dog, Barley. She also includes ‘Puppy Tips’ to help kids understand their dog friends. There are more than two dozen Puppy Place books including a gratuitous pug appearance, Pugsley.

You can find out more about this series here. The AR level for these books is 4.0-4.2.

2002 Newberry Award winner, Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, is about an eleven year old boy, Marty, and the dog he grows to love and tries to save from an abusive owner.

Marty faces and resolves a moral dilemma is his quest to  rescue Shiloh. The book  does have a happy ending.

The final book, The Trouble With Chickens by Doreen Cronin and illustrated by Kevin Cornell, is not about a real dog or a dog who could be real like the previous books. This one is about J.J. Tully a recently retired search and rescue dog who has retired to a farm. 

Doreen Cronin (Click, Clack, Moo Cows That Type) uses her deadpan humor and a film noir style to tell the story of J.J. and his search for some missing chicks.  Their mother, Moosh, asks J.J. to help locate Poppy and Sweetie. A ransom note complicates things as does the presence of the mysterious Vince the Funnel who lives in the farm house. The AR level is 3.8. To see a video preview, click here.

Cronin’s second J.J. Tully Mystery, The Legend of Diamond Lil, is also at the book fair.