I’m filing this under Rillabooks but it could easily be tagged Huckbooks as well. They are equally attached to it—the five-year-old and the two-year-old, if you’ve lost track of their ages.
It’s an appealingly simple concept book: a page full of animals, illustrated in a clean and colorful style, as you can see from the cover. On the first spread, the animals are labeled: dog, tiger, hippopotamus, zebra. On the next spread, the animals are the same, but the background color has changed from white to blue. “Who’s hiding?” asks the text. The blue animal has disappeared against the background and the child has to figure out who is missing (helped along by the bunny’s eyes, ears, and nose showing up against the blue).
As the book progresses, more and more animals are hiding on each page. My littles absolutely love this game of hide and seek.
The “Who’s hiding?” spreads are interspersed with emotion and action spreads. Who’s angry? Who’s sleeping? Who’s crying? (My little goddaughter was distressed by the crying page, so watch out.)
Rilla seems to enjoy the hiding pages the most—the book turns into a game for her, a game involving my looking very intently at the book as I ask who’s hiding, so intently that I, ahem, don’t notice a certain someone has gone missing beside me. “Who’s hiding?” “I AM!” cries a triumphant voice from under the bed.
Huck likes the emotion pages best, or just plain naming the animals. I’m a big fan of Satoru Onishi’s art. I’d love a poster of these animals for the kids’ bedroom wall.
It seems I’ve had this master-list-of-recommendations idea before: two years ago. I remember creating this Booknotes page in an attempt to link to my reviews more easily than scrolling through the “books” or “picture books” categories in my archives. I remember not getting very far very fast. I don’t remember forgetting to keep going, and then forgetting all about the page entirely.
Well, anyway, it means I already have a handy-dandy page for pasting titles into as I do my archive clean-up. I’m sure I’ll be finished in another five or six years. 🙂
One thing I’m enjoying about the clean-up is seeing what were the first things I wrote about: which books, games, websites, CDs.
First-ever recommendation, in my third-ever post, on January 21, 2005: Signing Time DVDs. Are we still fans? YOU BET. We’ve used ASL with every single one of our babies, even before we had a hard-of-hearing wonderboy in the family. Huck is currently a huge Signing Time fan-slash-addict. As has been the case with every one of our toddlers, many a meltdown has been averted by his ability to express his very specific and fervent wishes in sign language when the tall people around him fail to understand the nuances of a consonantless syllable.
(Side note: my little goddaughter got to meet Rachel recently. !!! Who, me jealous?)
First game recommendation:iSketch, like online Pictionary. Wow. We were HOOKED on that for a long time. Haven’t played it in years. Haven’t even thought about it. Gosh, I miss it all of a sudden! For a while there, a group of my girlfriends were iSketching once a week. Remember, y’all? Is it even still there? Oh my, it is! Same music and everything!
First-ever unschooling reference: Blog Day 4, a link to Sandra Dodd’s website in a post about strewing. This post is also the first to mention a book: The Lord of the Rings. Highly appropriate, considering Scott and I pretty much fell for each other during a spirited discussion of our mutual passion for the trilogy.
Second book mentioned (though not by name): All About Weeds, a Jane favorite for years. Seriously.
Other books mentioned (mostly in passing) in the first month or so:
Crowded with Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment A Case of Red Herrings The Bears of Hemlock Mountain
By the Great Horn Spoon
Peter Rabbit
The Maggie B.
Tikki Tikki Tembo
There’s a Wocket in my Pocket
The Read-Aloud Handbook
Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
The Secret Garden
Redwall
Ginger Pye
Moccasin Trail
Seven Alone
By the Great Horn Spoon!
Old Yeller
(Most of the above came from two posts—a transcript of a talk I gave on Mealtime Read-Alouds, and an article I wrote for the Virginia Homeschoolers newsletter.)
Second-ever game:Oregon Trail, which still gets played in occasional week-long bouts, maybe once a year, I’d say? The younger kids haven’t discovered it yet.
First Jim Weiss rave; also first Ancient Greece reference: this post. Fun for me to revisit it just now, because Rilla has suddenly catapulted into the same kind of Greek myths obsession that Rose enjoyed at about her age. Must remember to pull out that Jim Weiss CD, if Rose (Rilla’s self-appointed tutor) hasn’t already beat me to it.
Surprise package of Japanese candy from one of my favorite people in the world. Candy sushi. Gummy pigs. Cheese-flavored KitKats.
That’s right. I repeat: cheese-flavored KitKats. I’m only sorry my kids can read, because I’d have loved to see their expressions if they took a bite unawares.
I’m doing a bit of clean-up in my archives, correcting broken links and such, a little at a time. As I’m working my way through, I thought I’d post a few highlights now and then. Some of these posts are over six years old and may be new to many of my current readers.
It’s funny how nostalgic some of the old comment threads make me. There are voices there I haven’t heard from in a long while, and others I now know very well indeed and consider real-true-friends. It’s kind of wonderful to have this record of the very first moments we met. What a strange and quirky world we’ve built here in the blogosphere, eh? It’s like that planet on Firefly with all the floating sky-estates.
A handful of picture-book recommendations from early on:
I’d forgotten about this amusing moment with a very young Beanie pondering aloud the themes of the play she called “The Temper of the Shrew.” That post is a kind of ode to Jim Weiss, who has brought Shakespeare and many another tale to life for my children since their earliest days.
This post collects some of my favorite funny kid moments ever. Oh, those obstreperous bunnies…
Ooh, an idea! It has just occurred to me it would be fun to compile a list of ALL the books, CDs, games, and other resources I’ve ever mentioned on this blog. I was doing it with just the picture books above, but it might be fun to see a master list, and to look at whether we’re still reading/listening to/playing with/enjoying them now.
So, well. I guess I should start a new post for that.
Rose is deep in Ancient Egypt again, a favorite realm of hers. Mara, Daughter of the Nile. Sphinx’s Princess. A book on Egyptian gods and goddesses, and another of stories. Some Dover coloring books, largely used for costume ideas.
I received some review copies of No Starch Press’s wonderful Manga Guides today (to Calculus, to Physics, to Relativity), and Jane was pretty psyched. She loved their Manga Guide to Electricity. I’ll post more on these after I’ve had a look at the new arrivals.
Rilla’s requests today were Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse, Hide and Seek in the Yellow House, and Dinosaur vs. Bedtime.
Huck has discovered the wonders of Thomas the Tank Engine. Oh my. Every morning, it’s “Tain! Tain! Peeeez?” Someone has taught the kid to clasp his hands under his chin with an irresistible little head-tilt as he pleads. I suspect Big Sister Interference. It’s ridiculously cute and dangerously effective.
Wonderboy has taken to typing out snatches of Thomas dialogue on the iPod Touch while Huck is watching.
A sight I loved today was Rose and Beanie side by side on Beanie’s bed, the lower bunk, with a Calvin and Hobbes book before them on the pillow. Peals of laughter down the hall.
Via my friend Ellen Weiss, via Dangerous Minds: Kurt Vonnegut gives a 4 1/2 minute talk on the line-graph shapes of stories. (I’d like to hear the rest of his lecture.)
What appears to be part of a spring wedding bouquet is actually a nest for a rare species of solitary bee, a new study says.
Called a “flower sandwich,” the three-tiered arrangement consists of a thin layer of petals on the outside, then a layer of mud, and finally another layer of petals lining the inside of the chamber…
Although O. avosetta was known to science, no one had ever had a chance to study its behaviors. Bees don’t advertise their nests, Rozen said, and this species is only active for about two months out of the year.
But in a lucky coincidence, two teams in two different countries discovered the nest-building habits on the same day. Rozen was working with a team of entomologists in Turkey last May, while another team was studying the bees in Iran. The groups collaborated on a recent paper published in American Museum Novitates.
“It was absolute synchronicity that we all discovered this uncommon behavior on the same day,” says Jerome Rozen, curator in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History. Rozen and colleagues were working near Antalya, Turkey while another group of researchers were in the field in Fars Province, Iran.
This site has a photo of a bee carrying a petal to the nest, but it’s too small to make out much. I would love to see video of how the bees manage this feat.
Who’s Hiding by Satoru Onishi. Published by Kane/Miller.
