What's New

Mozart, the Wonder Child

Author(s): 
Diane Stanley

No need to introduce young Mozart or kids biographer extraordinaire Diane Stanley, but this brand new biography has a twist: she wrote the whole book as a marionette play! The pictures look as if his whole life is a show, with characters suspended on strings. Expect the usual detail-rich, high level writing that comes with her wonderful biographies.

What Bluebirds do

Author(s): 
Pamela F. Kirby

We picked a full bag of mostly new picture books from the library as we don't visit it as often as during the school year. Several new publications were examined by my review team – our children. Some were bold, creative, large and colorful. Fiction, informational, biographies: we read many different books over a number of days. In my mind as I hear their comments and listen or watch their reading enjoyment I run my own elimination process.

Insects

Book cover: Insects: Biggest! Littlest!
Author(s): 
Sandra Markle
Illustrator(s): 
Simon Pollard (photographer)

We have been spending hours in the garden where insects abound, and this new friendly title comes to entertain and inform my summer readers. The photos are very interesting and our 10 yr. old enjoyed reading about the reasons behind the dimensions of each of the unusually sized insects. The amount of information is juicy enough but also little enough to make this light and breezy summer reading!

Have fun learning about these insects: the most numerous animals on earth!

Faraway Island

Author(s): 
Dianne Hofmeyr

So, it just slightly based on the meager accounts of a tale that may have really happened... but still, it makes for a wonderful picture book! Perseverance, kindness, mystery... and true love bringing life to a lonely soul, all in the backdrop of the great navigations involving the Queen of Portugal herself: how can a reader resist it?

One

Author(s): 
Kathryn Otoshi

Our own Number Seven has read this new picture book aloud to me countless times since I picked it up at the library last week. She loves it! Perhaps it is because the numbers in the story stop at seven... or more likely it is because the book gives the colors personality and emotion, creating interesting twists to a fun story.

Product Description:

Ask Albert Einstein

Author(s): 
Lynne Barasch
Back flap of book

So maybe your elementary school age child will not learn much Math with this book--the one problem shown involves the Pythagorean theorem and it shows the external tangent line touching two circles--but she may learn a few related things: who is Albert Einstein, why he came to America, where he worked and study, ... and how he actually helped some kids with their Math homework!

Piece = Part = Portion

Author(s): 
Scott Gifford

There are lots of fraction books for kids out there with photos of every conceivable flavor of... Pizza. This book has the fractions, it has pizza, but thankfully it does not stop there! It provides a progression of various portions to a sliced—but intact—pizza representing the whole (1/1 = 1 = 100%). The connections it makes between the fractional part and its decimal and percentage representations is what makes it different, and useful. My kids have had a difficult time making this connection at home, perhaps because their own homeschool teacher suffers from the same ailment?

Math-terpieces

Author(s): 
Greg Tang

Perusing through the Math titles in Picture Books at the library last week I found lots of books. Alas, most of them were, well, boring. Uninteresting. I brought a handful home to investigate and of those I found a few nice volumes including this one!