Book Review--Bo and Eddie

Bo and Eddie, by Olivier Dunrea, are two board books we picked up at the library a couple weeks ago. I found out later that they're Dutch translations of the English books BooBoo and Peedie from the Gossie and Friends series. I love the illustrations. So simple, so bright, and so much charming character!

As far as the text goes, I'm a bit torn. They're very simple and repetitious, which is great for preschoolers. My son loves them, and I think I love them too...but only in Dutch. I was able to see the English text of one of them on Amazon and I wasn't very impressed. There's a rhythm in the Dutch version that makes it almost poetic, and I didn't sense that in the English. Also, "Bo" is cuter than "BooBoo", "gansje" is cuter than "gossling", and there's just something about "Bo is een gansje. Een klein bluaw gaansje..." that makes me smile :-) I wish I could find a way for you to hear how it sounds.

As for the story lines...

Eddie forgets things. He forgets to come in when it rains and he forgets to eat sometimes (too busy balancing grain on his bill, apparently :-) He loves his red cap, but one day he forgets where he put it and goes searching for it.

Bo loves to eat. He goes around eating things and saying they were yummy. Then he eats a bubble and...well, you can read it for yourself :-)

And here's testament to the fact that they're popular around here! They're so easy to draw and my son was so into them that we now have our fridge covered with Bo and Eddie. Final verdict: we'll be looking for more when we go to the library next week.

Big, Painted Rainbow

Big, painted rainbows have been one of our favorite projects recently. It started as an impromptu way to dive into our brand new bottles of tempera paint. We had so much fun with it that we've done it 3 or 4 more times in the past few weeks!

We started by taping four sheets of regular paper together to make a nice big canvas. Since rainbows have been popular around here for a while (thanks to the book, What Makes a Rainbow?) I decided to make a simple outline with black marker and let him paint it in. I gave him one color at a time and washed the brush in between colors. Mixing the orange and purple was one of his favorite parts (green never comes out right, so we bought a bottle of green.)

I've heard a lot about art projects at this age being more about the process than the product, but we had fun working on this together and having it come out with clean, bright colors. He wanted me to do some of the painting, and I was impressed with how he carefully copied how he saw me use the brush.

After the rainbow was done, we mixed some white and blue to make the sky and started learning about tints (i.e. pastels). After this one we made one with a "mint sky" as he calls it :-)

Book Review -- Henry the Explorer

I found Henry the Explorer, by Mark Taylor, while browsing around at Amazon. It only had 6 reviews but they were all 5-star and the illustrations and story line seemed right up our alley. It's one of a series that was written in the 1960's and then went out of print. They're in the process of being released again (in a very nice hard cover format) and two of the four are now available.

So it came in the mail a couple weeks ago (via my mom--thanks, Mom :-) and after the first couple readings my son and I were both hooked. It's a simple story of a boy who reads a book about explorers one night while in bed during a blizzard. He gets inspired to go out the next day with his dog, Laird Angus McAngus (we love saying that name) and go exploring. Basically, reading + outdoors + (mild) adventure = a great book!

Oh, and the flags...

He, of course, has to begin by making flags to claim all the things he discovers. This sparked some book inspired exploring of our own! We decided to go with green for our flags, and my little guy did a great job of following the pencil lines to make his E's. The next day we taped them to wooden skewers, packed them in a bag and...

He spent the whole morning going around the house claiming things (the heater was a particularly worthy find as you can see.)

We also spent time looking for a mountain to sit on and eat lunch, just like Henry. We even ate our real lunch on the top of the mountain (i.e. a blanket in the middle of the living room.) I love the view in the picture above as he sits on his mountain with Laird Angus McAngus and his sack of flags.

After going into the woods and discovering a cave (with bears, no less), he comes out to find that it's night. The colors and composition in this picture are so simple, yet it's done so skillfully that you feel like your standing right there about to walk out into that big, wintry world...it's breathtaking!

And here they are finding they're way back home. Isn't the night sky beautiful?

Here's another review I just found that conveys even more. We're definitely looking forward to getting the other three books in the this series!

Tubby and the Lantern

My favorite book! I remember gazing at the pictures in this one so many times as a young child. It's so enjoyable reading it with my little one and seeing him love it too.

Tubby, the little pet elephant of Ah Mee, makes an enormous paper lantern for his birthday out of all the materials in the family's lantern business. They float over the land and sea all night with the star strewn sky as their backdrop.

In the morning their lantern goes out and begins to go down over the sea. They get rescued by a ship and then escape from pirates by using the steam from the ship to fly up and away and back home.

It's a simple story with just the right balance of excitement and calmness. Add to that the cute little elephant and dreamy blue and purple palette and you have the perfect bedtime story! (Oh, and at the end of the story Ah Mee makes a bunk bed for him and Tubby to share--a great idea in my son's opinion ;-)

Snipp, Snapp and Snurr

These were a library favorite of mine in first grade. I'm so happy that my son loves them as much as I did!

Who could resist identical Swedish triplets with names and pictures like these? Snipp, Snapp and Snurr and Flicka, Ricka and Dicka have all kinds of nice adventures playing outdoors, helping others, and learning to work hard. The series was written and illustrated in Sweden by Maj Lindman in the 1920s and then published in the U.S. in the 1940s and 50s. They get pulled out often for reading. This week they were chosen again at bed time.

Anatole - A Mouse Magnifique!

He lives in a mouse village just outside of Paris with his dear wife and six charming children. Every evening he bikes into Paris to find food for his family. One night he overhears a lady saying that to be a mouse is to be a villain! Shocked and deeply wounded, Anatole seeks a more honorable way to feed his family. He goes to the Duval cheese factory at night and puts little signs on all the cheese in the cheese tasting room offering suggestions on how to make them better. His advice turns the factory's fate around and he becomes a "respectable business-mouse".

This became one our favorites a couple months ago when we were in vacation in French speaking Belgium, and we recently received three more in the series in a package from my mom. "A mouse magnifique!" is now a catch phrase in our house. The book was written by Eve Titus in the 1950's. There are ten in the series, with the first two winning Caldecott honors. The illustrations are done in grayscale with vibrant blue and red accents on many pages. A very fun set of books!

Our very favorite lines (which contain about 50% of the French I know):

"VIVE ANATOLE! Was he content to sit back and do nothing about our way of life? NON! NON! He is a mouse of action--a mouse of honor--A MOUSE MAGNIFIQUE!"

Frog and Toad - Cookies

While we were taking our first taste of our star cookies earlier this week, my son suddenly says, "We must stop eating these cookies!" Instead of having my conscience pricked (it was only our first bite!) I realized he must be quoting one of our favorite books. Arnold Lobel has written a number of our favorite books, but  Frog and Toad tops the list. I've heard so many people mention that they grew up loving these two friends.

The cookies story is in the second book, "Frog and Toad Together". Toad bakes some cookies and brings them over to Frog so he can see how delicious they are. In order to stop themselves from eating too many they try putting the cookies away in more and more complicated ways, realizing each time that they can always go get them and eat more. Frog finally solves the problem by feeding them to the birds. But, in a classic exposé of human nature, Toad goes off huffily to do some more baking. So much for will power and our own solutions!

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