TUAR Picture Book Challenge

When we got back from our holiday at the beginning of the month I found myself struggling to find books to read to Rose. She seems to have hit an in-between stage where we have read and re-read lots of the younger chapter books but she isn't ready to move on to the next level. Then I read about the TUAR Picture Book Challenge and Chari and Willa's blog Take Up and Read and bingo! I realised that picture books were the way to go.

Chari challenged Willa to join her in picking 10 picture books each month to read to their youngest children (who are, I think, 10 and 9 - picture books are not just for tinies!). Then she issued this invitation:

Willa and I are hoping to do this every month for this school year.......and we cordially invite all of you to join us. We challenge all of you to choose TEN Picture Books a month....to read to the little ones in your life........or the big ones.......or even to yourself. :) In the first week of each month, both of us will post our TEN Picture Book choices on Take Up and Read. Please feel free to grab the Picture Book Challenge button shown at the top of this post to place on your own blog and link back to us.....with your TEN Picture Book choices

I never got round to posting a list but we did start reading. I asked Rose if she would like books about anything in particular and she wanted animals and countries. Our local library has been closed for a couple of weeks while they replaced the service desk with self-service machines for checking books in and out (end result = chaos if today's library visit was anything to go by), so I dug around on our shelves and did a little Amazon shopping. So here, retrospectively, is our list of 10 picture books for September:

• The Pear Tree: an Animal Counting Book (Meredith Hooper and Bee Willey) - we loved this one, which takes the 12 Days of Christmas rhyme format and applies to the life of a pear tree and the animals that live in and around it over the 12 months of the year.
• Slowly, Slowly Said the Sloth (Eric Carle) - love this for the variety of animals and the sloth's wonderful monologue at the end
• The Story of the Creation (Jane Ray) - gorgeous illustrations with lots of animals!
• Noah's Ark (Jerry Pinkney)
• I Love Guinea Pigs (Dick King Smith and Anita Jeram) - one of an excellent series of Read and Wonder books published by Walker Books in the 1990s, good enough that a number of them have republished as "Nature Storybooks"
• All Pigs Are Beautiful (Dick King Smith) - another of the same series
• The Doll's House Fairy (Jane Ray) - an old favourite
• The Mushroom Hunt  (Simon Frazer and Penny Dale) - yet another Read and Wonder book
• J is for Jamaica (Benjamin Zephaniah) - this is one of a series of World Alphabet books published by Frances Lincoln (one of my favourite picture book publishers). 
• M is for Maple: a Canadian Alphabet (Mike Ulmer and Melanie Rose Popp) - Rose asked for a book about Canada, but this one rather went over her head

I have a pile ready for October and will try to post that list rather earlier in the month!

Advent Books: Week 4

Late, but posting this anyway for the record, our final batch of books for Advent. There were a couple of others I wanted that I ordered from the library, but they didn't arrive on time - if I could have got them I would have added in The Wild Christmas Reindeer by Jan Brett and Bethlehem by Fiona French.

Sunday: The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey by Susan Wojciechowski

Monday: The Nutcracker (Usborne Picture Book)

Tuesday: My First Hannukah board book (enough content for this not to be a baby book)

Wednesday: Winter Solstice by Ellen Jackson

Thursday: Light the Lights: A Story about Celebrating Hannukah and Christmas by Margaret Moorman

Friday: The Legend of Old Befana by Tomie de Paola (more of an Epiphany book, but the library let me down and I had to fill a gap!)

Saturday: Who's That Knocking on Christmas Eve? by Jan Brett

Her favourite from week three was Tomie de Paola's The Clown of God, and from week four Light the Lights ... but really we fizzled out rather towards the end (or life got busier in the evenings) and a number of the books from the last two weeks didn't get read at all. We did read all of The Story of Holly and Ivy, which she loved. I am still trying to nail down the different editions of this. Amazon UK has three: a picture book illustrated by Barbara Cooney, which at 31 pages long must be either heavily abridged or a retelling; a version illustrated by Christian Birmingham with 64 pages - this is the one I have in the Kindle edition, with the town name changed, which I am sure is abridged; and an old Young Puffin editon with 80 pages, which I think is a reprint of the 1958 original, although I am sure the copy I borrowed from the library for Star several years ago had a different cover. I am slightly frustrated that I don't know what is missing from the Kindle book, but I am sure something is.

Advent Books: Week 3

I wrote this on the train during the week, but needed to tweak the pictures and only just remembered!

This week's books:

Christmas by Jan Piemkowski



A Flower Fairy Christmas



Saint Lucy by Silvia Vecchini


The Clown of God by Tomie de Paola



Tod and the Clock Angel by Andrew Matthews and Christian Birmingham



The Night the Stars Danced for Joy by Bob Hartman



The Legend of the Poinsettia by Tomie de Paola



Alongside those we are reading Chrissie the Wish Fairy (having made it to the end of Holly the Christmas Fairy. Oh joy!) and A Street Through Time by Anne Millard and Steve Noon, one of a series of gorgeous illustrated history books published some years ago by Dorling Kindersley, mostly out of print and getting hard to find at a reasonable price. Cherub adores this book. We look at one double page spread each night, and she tries to find the various small illustrations around the page in the main picture. Last night we added in The Story of Holly and Ivy by Rumer Godden, which also seems to out of print except in a Kindle version which I downloaded last night. I am slightly irritated as I think this many be an abridged version, and the town name has been changed form the original Aylesbury (real, local and name familiar to Cherub) to Appleton (fictional). Why?

As for last week's books, Cherub's favourites were Brian Wildsmith's A Christmas Story, the pop-up version of the Nutcracker, and Jan Brett's Christmas Trolls (an all time family favourite, this one).

Advent Books: Week 2

The books for advent have been a huge hit so far (with the exception of Saint Andrew which she took against). This weeks selection is:

Sunday: A Christmas Story by Brian Wildsmith



Monday: Nutcracker (very pretty pop-up / lift the flap version)

   

Tuesday: Saint Nicholas by Mary Joslin



Wednesday: Country Angel Christmas by Tomie de Paola



Thursday: Mary by Brian Wildsmith



Friday: Christmas Trolls by Jan Brett



Saturday: The New Star by Taffy Davis



Highlights for Cherub from last week were The Story of Christmas by Jane Ray, which Cherub has wanted read every day. Apparently it was also their storybook at school one day, which delighted her. I love Jane Ray's style of illustration, the text is traditional and flows well, and I noticed for the first time that in a couple of the pictures Mary is discreetly nursing baby Jesus (a nice touch, I thought). Mog's Christmas by Judith Kerr is an old favourite, but Cherub now gets the humorous touches that went over her head last year. Another one we are both loving is Jan Brett's The Twelve Days of Christmas, which I am expected to sing in its entirety. We both love the little vignettes at the side of each page showing a family finding, cutting and decorating their Christmas tree. Jan Brett's pictures within pictures are always a delight.

Picture Books for Advent

Last year I wrapped a book a day for Cherub during Advent. Some she loved, others she refused to have anything to do with. This year I think she is more likely to be prepared to give unfamiliar books a go, so I'm going to do the same again. I am only going to wrap one week at a time though. Wrapping 28 books in one go is a marathon I'd sooner avoid, and this way I can tweak as I go and can pick up extra books from the library as I need them.

I am using books with a mix of religious and secular themes, with some saints' stories thrown in on their feast days and a couple of Hannukah books. For the first week I have wrapped:

Sunday: The Story of Christmas (Jane Ray)
Monday: Mog's Christmas (Judith Kerr)
Tuesday: Christmas in Grandma's Day (Faye Gardner)
Wednesday: Saint Andrew (Lois Rock)
Thursday: The Twelve Days of Christmas (Jan Brett)
Friday: An African Christmas (Ifeoma Onyefulu)
Saturday: Angelina's Christmas (Katherine Holabird)

Cherub has been perusing the pile of wrapped books and is excited, not to mention a bit peeved that we couldn't start today. We also have some longer books lined up to start tomorrow - Holly the Christmas Fairy (yet another of the Rainbow Magic series, which she adores despite every book appearing to have the same plot), Tolkien's Letters from Father Christmas (which I love and am hoping she is ready for), and I think I will give Grraldine McCaughrean's Jesse Tree book ago. We also have to carry on with H.E.Marshall's Kings and Things, which I thought would be over Cherub's head, but she is insisting on having read every night.

Madness

... is buying not just one Rainbow Fairy book for Cherub, not just one set of seven, but forty two of the things.

The Book People are selling the entire collection for £20, and given Cherub's prediliction for fairies and fairy books I succumbed. Now I am stuck reading them to her - hopefully she will be reading them to herself well before book forty two! Not that they are terrible books, just easy readers with rather limited vocabulary and plot. I remember Star loving them at around six, but at that time there was just the original Rainbow Fairies set of seven books.
Since then they have multiplied, with Jewel Fairies, Weather Fairies, and all sorts of other fairies. Can I stand the suspense of having to wait until tomorrow to find out how the rainbow fairies get colour back to fairyland after being banished by Jack Frost? Somehow I think I just might!

Another fairy book new to our collection is The Dolls House Fairy by Jane Ray, one of my favourite picture book illustrators. I love her chirpy, crisp eating fairy Thistle, and a Dad who is prepared to believe in fairies. Very high up on Cherub's favourite books list, this one.

Birthday Books

I am enjoying buying picture books while Cherub is still at an age to enjoy them, so a few found their way into her birthday presents:

Dogger (Shirley Hughes) - one of my favourite picture books, but with Angel and Star we borrowed from the library so never had our own copy. Dave's favourite toy, Dogger, gets accidentally mixed up with toys left for sale at the school fair. A little girl buys it and refuses to sell it back to Dave, but thanks to a generous big sister it all works out in the end. As it turned out, Cherub had come across Dogger at story time at school and was able to narrate the plot before we even opened the book, so this had the pull of the familiar. 

 

Library Lion (Michelle Knudsen) - I browsed through this in the bookshop of the British Library and it went onto my "must buy" list. What to do when there is a lion in the library? Let him stay, so long as he doesn't break the rules. But what happens when there is an accident and the lion roars, and roaring is against the rules? One of the nicest new(ish) picture books I've seen recently.

Diary of a Princess (Heather Maisner) - I bought this because Cherub loves princesses and I thought she might enjoy something a bit different. So far, it looks a bit too different to her, so it went to the bottom of the pile and we haven't read it yet.

Stone Girl, Bone Girl (Laurence Anholt) - Cherub likes fossils and I though she would enjoy this story of Mary Anning, the girl who discovered dinosaur fossils in the Dorset cliffs. So far the jury is out - we read some of the book last night, but she was in distractable mood and a bit reluctant. We ended up looking at the periodic table on the Book Depository bookmark we were using instead. Apparently hunting for the letters representing various elements was far more interesting.

The Hard to Swallow Tale of Jonah and the Whale (Joyce Denham) - a retelling of the story of Jonah (duh!) using quite complex language, with an emphasis on God's loves for everyone, even our enemies.

A Wildsmith Lent and Easter

Cherub and books are an unpredictable combination. Being Miss Stubborn and Contrary she wants to choose her own books, not let me choose them for her, and over-enthusiasm on my part is likely to persuade her that she does not want to read that particular book! Also, timing is everything - sometimes she just isn't ready for a book and it has to be put away, then a bit later she will latch on to it. 

This Lent I decided I would like to read Bible stories to her, but she is not in the mood for the Lion First Bible that she liked a couple of years ago (and, darn it, I lost our second copy and was reduced to borrowing it from the library). I was thinking of trying the Lion Storyteller Bible, but before I got round to getting that out she was diverted by Brian Wildsmith's Jesus, drawn in by the gorgeous illustrations and the familiarity of the Nativity story. As a picture book, it is quite substantial, and we are working through it three or four pages at a time, which seems about right to allow a bit of discussion and a close look at the pictures.

Once Cherub takes to a book, she usually likes to work her way through as many books in the series or by the same author as I can find for her, so I think we are heading into a Wildsmith Lent and Easter. I already have The Easter Story, a simpler book than Jesus and like his A Christmas Story told from the perspective of a donkey. To round things out I am planning to add Moses for Passover and Mary for May. I also have Saint Francis, which Angel loved but Cherub hasn't wanted to read yet, and may dig that out if the Wildsmith kick lasts. I'm happy to keep going with it as long as possible, as I love the colour and detail of Wildsmith's illustrations. Perhaps I should also throw in Joseph to go with Moses. 

Korky Paul Picture Books

Cherub was given The Fish Who Could Wish by John Bush and Korky Paul as one of her Bookstart books. I didn't realise until a trip to the library yesterday that this is just one of a series of picture books illustrated by Korky Paul. I brought home The Dog Who Could Dig, and like The Fish Who Could Wish, it was a hit with Cherub.

Both books have lively text and a slightly quirky story, brought to life by Paul's illustrations. The Fish Who Could Wish has an almost Doctor Seuss-ish feel:

"In the deep blue sea
In the deep of the blue,
Swam a fish who could wish,
And each wish would come true ..."

Unfortunately for the fish, his stream of extravagant wishes ends when he wishes he could be like other fish.


The Dog Who Could Dig is written in rhyme:

"Digger the dog was a bit of a clot
He'd buried his bone and forgotten the spot ..."

Digger digs deeper and deeper for his bone, unearthing unexpected items as he digs, until he finds a mouthwateringly bony dinosaur skeleton.

I think we are going to have to check out some more of the series. I particularly like the sound of Professor Puffendorf's Secret Potions.

Advent Books

I have had the idea of wrapping up a book for each day of Advent filed away in my head for a while now, and I have finally taken the plunge and decided that this year I would put it into action for Cherub. I now have a neat pile of books wrapped and waiting (apart from two still to come from the library). Some are religious, some secular and there are three Hannukah books thrown in for good measure. Whether Cherub will let me read them all to her, I don't know. She is more open to new books than she was last year - then she knew what she liked and liked what she knew - but she is still likely to take against things for reasons I can't fathom, so we will go with the flow. Some of the books are short and sweet toddler board books, getting what I guess will be their last run out before Cherub outgrows them.

This is what I have lined up for her:

• Nov 28th - The Christmas Story (Brian Wildsmith)
• Nov 29th - Merry Christmas, Blue Kangaroo
• Nov 30th - Jesus is Born (pop-up book)
• Dec 1st - My First Hannukah (DK board book)
• Dec 2nd - Light the Lights: Celebrating Hannukah and Christmas
• Dec 3rd- Hannukah (board book)
• Dec 4th - The First Christmas (Lois Rock)
• Dec 5th - The Innkeeper (board book)
• Dec 6th - Saint Nicholas (Mary Joslin)
• Dec 7th - Christmas Trolls (Jan Brett)
• Dec 8th - Mog's Christmas (Judith Kerr)
• Dec 9th - Angelina's Christmas (Katherine Holabird)
• Dec 10th - The Story of Old Befana (Tomie de Paola)
• Dec 11th - The Nutcracker (Usborne Books)
• Dec 12th - The Shepherds (board book)
• Dec 13th - Lucia, Saint of Light
• Dec 14th - The Twelve Days of Christmas (Jan Brett)
• Dec 15th - Country Angel Christmas (Tomie de Paola)
• Dec 16th - Little Grey Rabbit's Christmas (Alison Uttley)
• Dec 17th - The Nutcracker (pop-up book)
• Dec 18th - Jesus is Born (Little Fish book)
• Dec 19th - The Wise Men (board book)
• Dec 20th - Jesus is Born (Treasure Chest book)
• Dec 21st - The Wild Christmas Reindeer (Jan Brett)
• Dec 22nd - Jingle the Christmas Clown ( Tomie de Paola)
• Dec 23rd - The Legend of the Poinsettia (Tomie de Paola)
  
• Dec 24th - The Story of Christmas (Jane Ray)

Story Sack: Bears

Cherub brought her first story sack home from school last week. I just love these! They have a very homeschool-ish feel to me, reminding me a bit of Five in a Row but with props (probably somewhere between FIAR and Before FIAR, as they are aimed at four year olds).

Her first sack has a bear theme and contains:

• Can't You Sleep, Little Bear? by Martin Waddell - a lovely picture book, and one we own already, in a Little Bear treasury edition bound with three more stories. Until now, Cherub has turned her nose up at the book every time I suggested it to her, but thanks to the story sack has fallen in love with it. I can see we will be on a Little Bear kick for a while.
• Grizzly Bears by Patricia Kendell (In The Wild series) - a non-fiction book about bears.
• Big and small teddy bears.
• Three red cloth lanterns, for acting out the story with the bears - Big Bear brings Little Bear a bigger lantern each time he complains it is dark and he can't sleep, before taking him outside to see the moon and stars lighting the night sky.
• A puzzle-game for pairing up opposites, each illustrated with a bear picture.
• An activity card based on Can't You Sleep, Little Bear? - activities include picture study, vocabulary words, looking at words (rhymes with big and bear, words beginning with B), talking about size, and suggestions of things to do with lights (vary from going out at night to look at the moon and stars, to lighting a candle and talking about candle safety).

Book Review: Annie and the Wild Animals

Title: Annie and the Wild Animals
Author: Jan Brett
Age Suitability: 3 to 6+

I read a number of Jan Brett's books with Angel and Star when they were younger, and love her detailed style of illustration. I bought Annie and the Wild Animals - a new Jan Brett to me - for Cherub last year, but she wasn't interested at the time. Recently she picked it up and has wanted it read several times since. Coincidentally it ties in with the "pets" theme that is running at Cherub's school. Annie's cat disappears, and she tries to find a new pet by leaving out corn cakes for the wild animals. She is visited by a moose, a wild cat, a wolf, deer, and various other animals that are definitely not good pets. With the coming of spring, they disappear back to the wild, and Annie's cat returns ... with her new kittens.

As ever, the illustrations are gorgeous - both the main pictures and the borders, which themselves tell part of the story. The book also gave us lots to talk about ... seasons, animals, living in cold places, and a friend who had a moose in her backyard. Time for more Jan Brett for Cherub, I think.

Book Review: Brown and Furry (Who Am I?)

Brown and Furry
by Moira Butterfield

(Note: The book in the picture has the title What Am I?, but the one I have is called Who Am I? - not sure if these are different editions, or variations in the title between the US and the UK)

Rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a lovely non-fiction book about bears for pre-schoolers. The pictures are clean and clear, standing out from the white background, and focus on different parts of the bear - fur, paws, teeth, eye, nose and so on. The accompanying text describes what the bear sees, eats, smells and so on. Once the whole bear is revealed, the child is asked to point to the different parts she has seen. The book ends with a map showing where bears can be found, some questions to answer and some words to learn. One of an extensive series, unfortunately now out of print. Other titles are:

• Strong and Stripy (tiger)
• Bouncy and Big (kangaroo)
• Big and Bulky (elephant)
• Furry and Fluffy-Tailed (rabbit)
• Graceful and Galloping (horse)
• Long-Necked and Leggy (giraffe)
• Scaly and Snappy (alligator)
• Swift and Silent (owl)
• Green and Croaky (frog)
• Loud and Crowing (cockerel)
• Black and White (panda)
• Winged and Wild (eagle)
• Colourful and Bright (parrot)
  

Story Sacks: Testing the Water

After thinking about story sacks at the weekend, I decided to dip a toe in with Cherub yesterday. We had a clear morning and I wanted to do some activities with her, but I am not good at getting myself organised in advance so it needed to be something I could pull together easily. I am gradually building up a list of simple ideas for celebrating different feasts and seasons. Checking that, I found sun-related ideas for June 21st I could use for the beginning of summer and threw together a story sack and a craft activity tray.

Into the story sack (a cloth bag that once contained a set of bed linen) went:

• The Sun Egg by Elsa Beskow
• Skip Through the Seasons by Stella Blackstone
• Summer Story (Brambly Hedge) by Jill Barklem
• Flower Fairies of the Summer by Cicely Mary Barker
• This sun colouring page
• A sun rubber stamp

Onto the tray (a small wooden one I found when clearing out the kitchen) went:

• Coloured paper
• A paper plate
• Yellow paint and paintbrush
• Bottle of glue
• Scissors
• Pencil

... to make this handprint sun. In my experience doing any sort of structured craft with a toddler or preschooler goes much more smoothly if everything is ready to hand before getting the child involved - otherwise you can guarantee that things will take an interesting turn in your absence collecting missing items! Trays are a great way to get everything together and have endless possibilities. (Theresa at LaPaz Home Learning is the queen of activity trays ... check out some of her ideas here, and here, and here for inspiration.)

Cherub was very pleased to get a bag "like N's" and loved digging through it to see what was inside. We looked at the summer months in Skip Through The Seasons (a simple book with a double-page picture for each month, with items to spot), read The Sun Egg and looked at a couple of flower fairies before she wanted to move on to playing with the stamp. I have dangled Brambly Hedge books at her a couple of times but she hasn't been ready to bite yet, and obviously wasn't this time either. With hindsight I realised it would have been fun to put an orange and a small carton of orange juice in the bag to go with The Sun Egg.

After stamping we moved away from the bag and on to the craft tray. We drew round her hands, then I cut out hand shapes while she painted the paper plate yellow. When that was done she painted the colouring page and her stamped suns, then we turned to making "sunny" fairy cakes (yellow food colouring and yellow icing). Altogether we probably got about two hours of happy, focused activity out in return for a few minutes preparation, using books and other bits that I already had to hand.

I think for now I am going to put together other random bags as the fancy takes me, with the aim of having one ready to produce whenever she wants something to do and I don't have any other ideas. In the longer term I have - as Blackadder would say - a cunning plan. Letter bags. More on that later.

PS. I was a bad blogger and didn't remember to take any photos.

Story Sacks

I looked after a friend's little boy yesterday and thanks to him made a discovery ... story sacks. N is four and in his first term at school - afternoons only - so we did the school run with him, and it turned out that Friday was story sack changeover day.

Story sacks are a simple idea for sharing books with young children, and were originally conceived as a way of helping and encouraging adults who might not otherwise do so to read with their children. Since then the project has expanded and many schools now use story sacks, often supported by local community groups who put the bags together. They can also be bought prefilled like these, which I think are the ones used by N's school. This description comes from the Literacy Trust:

A story sack is a large cloth bag containing a children's book with supporting materials to stimulate reading activities and make shared reading a memorable and enjoyable experience. The sack contains soft toys of the book's main characters, and props and scenery that parents and other adults can use with children to bring a book to life, even if the adult's reading skills are limited. The sack might include a non-fiction book on the same theme, an audio-tape of the story, a language-based game and a short guide containing questions to ask, words to consider and other ways to extend the reading activity.

As N swapped his story sack, I got to see two with completely different themes - Jack and the Beanstalk, and Numbers (based on a book of the rhyme "This old man, he played one..."). The numbers bag contained the nursery rhyme book, Usborne's First Book of Numbers, a number matching puzzle, a CD with number based songs, and a glorious old man soft toy with ten numbered pockets in his coat, each holding one of the items from the song. Jack and the Beanstalk had the story, a non-fiction book about beans, a bag of beans, a board game and soft toys of Jack, the giant and the hen. Each bag had an activity card with suggestions for parents to use with the child.

Seeing these two bags sent my imagination into overdrive. While the swish, ready-made versions are prohibitively expensive for home use, story sacks would be very easy to put together at home and could be used in a number of different ways. Preschoolers are probably the ideal age, they but could work for a variety of ages, from board books for toddlers to chapter-book based sacks for older children. They could be based on an individual book or a theme.

After seeing Cherub's reaction to N's story sacks, I'm going to test a couple of home made ones out on her. I have a drawstring cloth bag that is just the right size, and a few ideas for contents.

Watch this space ...

The Story of the Creation

The Story of the Creation
by Jane Ray

This is a lovely book for introducing young children to the story of the creation. The text is an adapted from the King James Version of the Bible story, keeping the flow of the Biblical version but with some simplification and additions that make it easier to read aloud to preschoolers. Here is a sample:

Then God said, "Let there be birds on earth and to fly above the earth. And the earth was filled with the song of birds as they rose into the sky: peacocks and flamingoes, sunbirds and turtle doves, parrots, thrushes, owls, hummingbirds and nightjars. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day."

The illustrations are beautifully done, with lots of rich detail. Cherub loved the pages devoted to sea creatures, birds and other animals, and spent a long time spotting the various animals she knew.

The Pear Tree

I love Amazon marketplace, where I have been able to pick up some lovely picture books for the cost of postage and a nominal penny charge. The latest arrival was The Pear Tree by Meredith Hooper, illustrated by Bee Willey (who also illustrated The Jesse Tree). This is a beauty! It uses the Twelve Days of Christmas format, but begins with a pigeon in a pear tree in January and moves round the year adding extra animals for each month (two starlings, three bees, four squirrels and so on). On each page the animals are illustrated in and around the pear tree, which is seen moving from its bare winter branches, through spring buds, leaves, blossoms and fruit, and back to bare winter again. Some of the animals are quite tiny and need eagle-eyed spotting. The level of detail is still a bit much for Little Cherub who ran out of steam around June, but I can see us getting a lot of pleasure from this book over the next few years.

Honey Biscuits

Honey Biscuits by Meredith Hooper
rating: 5 of 5 stars

The perfect picture book for a toddler or young child who likes to cook. A little boy and his gran make honey biscuits. On one level the entire book is a recipe, but it goes further by explaining where the ingredients come from. What do we need? A cow! To turn grass into milk that is shaken to make butter ... and so on, through all the different items. Little Cherub adores this book, and the honey biscuits we made were yummy too.

Published in the US as A Cow, A Bee, A Cookie, And Me (out of print)

ETA: Also published in the US as Honey Cookies (in print)

Book Review: We Gather Together

Title: We Gather Together: Celebrating the Harvest Season
Author: Wendy Pfeffer
Illustrator: Linda Bleck
Age Suitability: 4 to 8

I wanted a book that would be suitable to mark the beginning of autumn and the harvest without being too new agey, and that is exactly what I got.

We Gather Together begins by talking about preparations for winter, followed by an explanation of the autumn equinox, and a brief history of the origins crop-growing. This is followed by a section on different harvest festivals around the world, ranging from the Jewish Sukkot to Thanksgiving. At the end is a section with equinox facts and a few activities. The illustrations are bright and clear, and the text a good length to read in one session. The scientific activities would work well for a school aged child.

All in all a nice book, and one I can see us using regularly in September once Little Cherub is a year or two older. The only slight downside from my perspective is that some of the content is a bit American oriented ... which is fair enough, as the book is American, but we have blackberries and hedgehogs rather than cranberries and chipmunks, for example, so can't identify with some of the text the way an American reader would.

Picture Book Lists

Here are those lists of picture books I promised earlier in the week, annotated as best I can to show the books that are published in the UK.

• Saints and Seasons - around the year in picture books, including books for Christian feasts and saints' days, a few books for Jewish festivals, and other annual landmarks
• Myths and Stories - some picture books, some collections of myths and traditional tales
  
• Travelling the World - picture books for learning about life in other countries
• Picturing the Natural World - picture books concerned with all aspects of nature, ranging from animals to geology
• Picturing Science - the very beginnings of a list of picture books that can be used to introduce science topics

All these lists are works in progress - in effect, my running book lists, to which I add titles as I find them.