Children around the globe marvel at the simple, stunning beauty encountered in moments of everyday life.
Author/illustrator Loring-Fisher has created something truly special with this picture book. Each double-page spread includes one line of text and a stunning mixed-media illustration. The illustrations are deeply saturated with color and respectful in their inclusive representations of multicultural children and the cultures, landscapes, and living creatures that make up their sensory worlds. The text on adjacent spreads form couplets, creating a read-aloud experience that is pleasing for both reader and listeners: “Taking time to listen to a bird’s song on the breeze. / Taking time to gather up the blossom dancing free.” The final spread shows all of the children sharing their wonderings, playing peacefully together in a beautiful green space. This image and the closing line, “Taking time to cherish you, and also cherish me,” provide a hopeful close to the book’s celebration of the natural, spontaneous mindfulness of children. The endpapers extend the options for interactivity by encouraging readers to match small details from the illustrations with each child’s home, including Alaska, Ecuador, the U.K., Norway, Russia, Egypt, Tanzania, India, Nepal, China, and Japan. Adults will benefit every bit as much as young readers (if not more!) from these reminders to pause and notice.
A must-have for anyone sharing books with young children—simply exquisite. (Picture book. 3-9)Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-911373-08-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Lantana
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Categories: CHILDREN'S CONCEPTS | CHILDREN'S HEALTH & DAILY LIVING
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A comical, fresh look at crayons and color
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Duncan wants to draw, but instead of crayons, he finds a stack of letters listing the crayons’ demands in this humorous tale.
Red is overworked, laboring even on holidays. Gray is exhausted from coloring expansive spaces (elephants, rhinos and whales). Black wants to be considered a color-in color, and Peach? He’s naked without his wrapper! This anthropomorphized lot amicably requests workplace changes in hand-lettered writing, explaining their work stoppage to a surprised Duncan. Some are tired, others underutilized, while a few want official titles. With a little creativity and a lot of color, Duncan saves the day. Jeffers delivers energetic and playful illustrations, done in pencil, paint and crayon. The drawings are loose and lively, and with few lines, he makes his characters effectively emote. Clever spreads, such as Duncan’s “white cat in the snow” perfectly capture the crayons’ conundrum, and photographic representations of both the letters and coloring pages offer another layer of texture, lending to the tale’s overall believability.
A comical, fresh look at crayons and color . (Picture book. 3-7)Pub Date: June 27, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-399-25537-3
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
Categories: CHILDREN'S CONCEPTS
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SEEN & HEARD
Rabe follows a young girl through her first 12 days of kindergarten in this book based on the familiar Christmas carol.
The typical firsts of school are here: riding the bus, making friends, sliding on the playground slide, counting, sorting shapes, laughing at lunch, painting, singing, reading, running, jumping rope, and going on a field trip. While the days are given ordinal numbers, the song skips the cardinal numbers in the verses, and the rhythm is sometimes off: “On the second day of kindergarten / I thought it was so cool / making lots of friends / and riding the bus to my school!” The narrator is a white brunette who wears either a tunic or a dress each day, making her pretty easy to differentiate from her classmates, a nice mix in terms of race; two students even sport glasses. The children in the ink, paint, and collage digital spreads show a variety of emotions, but most are happy to be at school, and the surroundings will be familiar to those who have made an orientation visit to their own schools.
While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of Kindergarten (2003), it basically gets the job done. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: June 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234834-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
Categories: CHILDREN'S CONCEPTS | CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES
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