Educating Risa

Full Disclosure: The book links below are through the Amazon Affiliates Program. The first link (Canada) is to amazon.ca, the second (US) to amazon.com.  If you buy a book through a link, I get more books from Amazon to sate our bibliophilic tendencies. For more book recommendations, see the “Books We Love” tab at the top of my blog. 

Here’s the best of what we read recently:

 

White Owl Barn Owl (Canada) (US) is the sort of book my boys tend to like: a sweet simple fiction story with non-fiction facts mixed in as sidebars and captions. It is the story about a boy and his grandfather putting up a nesting box for a family of barn owls, and gives details in the back of the book about the decline of the barn owl and how to help by putting up nest boxes. The Three Pigs (Canada) (US) is a very funny and mixed-up—dare I say “postmodern”—version of the three little pigs fairy tale. In this version, the pigs literally come off the page! They ride pages made into paper airplanes, land in the Hey Diddle Diddle nursery rhyme, as well as a story about knights and dragons…and the dragon, who also escapes the confines of his pages, helps them with their wolf problem. Imaginative illustrations, winner of a Caldecott medal. The Ice-Cream Cone Coot and Other Rare Birds (Canada) (US), sadly out of print, is a wonderful book of rhyming absurdist poetry about various bird species, such as the Milkbottle Midge (“…a bird highly prized. He is friendly and round and homogenized.”), the  Garbage Canary, who (“…lives in conditions quite unsanitary.") and the Sharpsaw Macaw (“…ever so gentle. Those teeth that you see are just ornamental.”) The superb illustrations are so playful, and add another layer to the humour. 

A Bear Called Paddington (Canada) (US) is one of those childhood classics I somehow missed in my own childhood, which added to my enjoyment in reading it for the first time with the boys. A delightful, gentle story about a bear who gets himself into situations without quite meaning to—something all of us can relate to! One thing I was struck by when reading it, in addition to the gentle humour, was the rich sentence structure and vocabulary. More on this here. Stone Girl Bone Girl (Canada) (US) is the story of Mary Anning, who as a child was one of the first people in England to find fossils. She found many “curiosities” in the cliffs near Lyme Regis, England, and after her father’s death sold them to tourists to help her mother pay the bills. I was delighted to find out that I—and no doubt you—have been reciting a tongue twister about Mary for years: “She sells seashells by the seashore…”   Born in 1799, the story explores her relationship with her family, her independent spirit, her special dog, her mentorship from other scientifically educated women in her community, and her find of the first ichthyosaur.  The Spooky Tail of Prewitt Peacock (Canada) (US) is a story from my childhood by the delightful Bill Peet, about a modest peacock with a most unusual—and frightening—tail. The other members of his flock give him a choice: either your tail goes, or you do. Prewitt stands his ground, refusing both options, and a chase ensues—leading the whole flock into trouble when they encounter a tiger out in the open grassland with no trees to flutter into for safety. Prewitt unintentionally saves the day, becomes the flock leader, and indeed is now "proud as a peacock.”

Happy reading!