Guinea Dog by Patrick Jennings was a Cybils Middle Grade fiction nominee, but I never got to it. The theme of pets was fairly common in our cache of nominees, because it’s a pretty common theme among middle grade students. They all want a pet, and they often don’t get what they want. In Guinea…
Category Archives: ages 6 – 9
The Ugly Duckling Dinosaur
The classic tale of one egg that’s not quite like the others goes prehistoric in Cheryl Bardoe’s The Ugly Duckling Dinosaur, with illustrations by Doug Kennedy. As in the story universally known, when that egg hatches, the creature who emerges doesn’t look, sound or act like the other ducks in the nest, but the good-natured…
Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer: Books on Screen
In most cases, movies are based on books. Usually the books are re-released as a movie tie-in, but the book itself isn’t changed or re-written. In the case of Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer, the movie came first, and the book was based on the movie. So listening to the audio version felt…
Next Door Bear
Maybe it’s because we recently moved, but Mary Kuryla and Eugene Yelchin’s story about a girl, Emma, who has just moved into a new apartment and a new city, touched my heart. The truth was Emma didn’t feel welcome. One day the kids were running through the sprinklers. That’s not new. Any minute now they’ll…
Diary of an American Kid
An American flag blowing in the breeze, an apple pie cooling on the windowsill and July fireworks lighting up the night sky. These images all scream summertime, as does the cover of the new interactive journal, Diary of an American Kid, released by Sleeping Bear Press with artwork by Cyd Moore. This is just the…
My Cat Isis
My Cat Isis, written by Catherine Austen is an interesting fiction/non-fiction picture book. It seems to me that a lot of picture books use the vehicle of a story to convey informative facts to children. In this case, a child shares facts about the goddess Isis and compares them to his cat Isis. For example,…
Activity Books for On-the-Go Fun
Kyle saw me write my first title of this post, “Activity Books to Keep Brains On and Mouths Quiet,” and he said, “No. Don’t save. I don’t like that title!” I think he knew that his mouth was the one in question that I hoped would be kept quiet in the hours we spend in…
Picture Books for Dreamers
Mark Ludy is an author and illustrator who lives here in Northern Colorado, not far from where I’ve lived for the last 2 years. While I had heard of him thanks to other parents, I didn’t really know much about him until he visited my son’s school. He spoke to the kids and did some…
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Jennifer Donovan
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