Silly Little Goose

Silly Little Goose by Nancy Tafuri. 2010. [February 2010]. Scholastic. 13 pages.

One windy morning, Goose sets out to make a nest.

Can this 'silly' goose find the perfect place to make a nest? Can she find the perfect place to hatch her eggs? This goose has a mission to find the perfect someplace. What does it take to be that perfect someplace? Read and see for yourself in Nancy Tafuri's Silly Little Goose.

I liked the repetitiveness of this one. As each time Goose tries (and fails) to find that perfect someplace, readers can join in with the refrain of "Silly Little Goose!"

I also liked the illustrations. The story they tell within the book. How the illustrations provide clues right from the start. If you catch them. If you know where to look. (For the record, I never catch onto these clues until the second or third reading. That's why I try to read every picture book a few times before I sit down to write up the review.)

© Becky Laney of Young Readers

Kitten's Spring

Kitten's Spring. By Eugenie Fernandes. 2010. [February 2010] Kids Can Press. 24 pages.

Morning hums,
Kitten listens.
Frog croaks,
Tadpole glistens.

I like this one. I liked both the text and artwork in this one.It's simple. But it works. With just two short lines on each spread, it's great for reading to little ones. As a young kitten explores her surroundings, little ones are exposed to all sorts of animals--pairs of animals really: cows have calves, frogs have tadpoles, ducks have ducklings, etc. I definitely like the wonder of it. Seeing kitten's wonder at the world around her, the natural environment. It captures the newness of it all. The text has a poetic flow to it.

Chicken clucks,
Chick scratches.

Duck quacks,
Duckling hatches.

Eugenie Fernandes is a popular author-illustrator in Canada.

© Becky Laney of Young Readers

Little Scholastic: Zoo

Little Scholastic: Zoo. Illustrated by Salina Yoon. 2010. [January 2010] Scholastic. 10 pages.

The lion is....orange.

Zoo is one of the latest titles in Scholastic's Little Scholastic series of board books for the very youngest of readers. (This one is for 1 to 3 year olds.) The book serves as an introduction (of sorts) to colors and animals. It's a simple concept book.

This one is flexible, in a way, because it has pull-out pieces parents which parents can then use as color flashcards or as puzzle pieces. (Combine all four flashcards and you'll create the colorful peacock.)

© Becky Laney of Young Readers

Nonfiction Monday: Open the Door To Liberty

Open The Door to Liberty! A Biography of Toussaint L'Ouverture by Anne Rockwell. Illustrated by R. Gregory Christie. 2009. [January 2009] Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 80 pages.

In about 1743 a skinny, puny baby boy was born on the island of St. Domingue in the Caribbean Sea. Both his parents were slaves who'd been born in West Africa. Before their baby was born they had consulted a wise woman, an African-born slave who knew how to communicate with the powerful spirit world. She predicted that their son would be very special. She said he would grow up to be more than a man. He would be a nation.

Are you familiar with Toussaint L'Ouverture? The preface says "we don't hear much about him today, but what he did changed his world and ours." That has certainly been true of my experience, of course, that could be my education (or lack thereof.) I have a feeling the history textbooks that were used by the school I attended left out plenty of important people, significant people.

What we have is a biography written for mid-to-upper elementary-aged readers. I found it reader-friendly. (Illustrations are just one of the ways to make biographies reader-friendly. And these by R. Gregory Christie are very nice.) I found it informative and well-written. I found the story to be fascinating actually.

© Becky Laney of Young Readers

Blog Improvement Project #1 for 2010

What do I want to accomplish this year with Young Readers? This first assignment is supposed to give us a chance to share by "writing a specific list of things you’d like to achieve in the design and content of your blog."

I'm mostly happy with the design (template, color scheme) of Young Readers. I'm still happy with my header too. So I'm not looking to make any changes there. At least not at this point! But I am considering making a few changes with my sidebar content.

I have been considering adding a 'labels' feature to the sidebar since I discovered that you can select which labels appear. I never knew that before. I thought if you had 'labels' in your content, you'd have each and every one. Which would just be chaotic nonsense in my case. So today (as part of this project) I went ahead and added the labels feature to the right sidebar.

I have been looking for a way to clearly share with publishers links to the reviews I've written. Why is this important? Well, almost all the books I review at Young Readers are review copies. (This isn't the case with Becky's Book Reviews.) So I've been *trying* to use publishers as labels in my posts. I haven't been doing this long, so the listing is NOT complete by any means. I hope to be diligent about doing this with each and every post from now on. [I also clearly mark each post with a 'review copy' or a 'library book' designation in the labels section.]

I'm *considering* going back through older posts to add this information. But it would be a big project. I'm not sure I'm ready to commit to such a big project. But maybe if I took baby steps, I could get through it by the end of the year?

Consistency. I was so HAPPY to get a good start to the new year. I was able to post 29 times in January. With 28 of those posts being review posts!!! Of course, one month does not a whole year make. And I'm not taking this "new" consistency for granted. Not at all. So my goal is still to work on making sure I get reviews posted on Young Readers.

Variety. What do I mean by variety. I don't mean variety of posts necessarily. I mean variety of reviews. I also mean diversity in titles, authors, subjects, etc.

I'm hoping to be reviewing for a variety of publishers. Of course there are some publishers whose books I just don't have access to, or the same access to as others, but I can try to represent a good variety of publishers. So that the blog doesn't just cover one or two publishers all the time.

I'm also hoping to review a variety of children's books. I want to cover board books, picture books, activity books (like touch-and-feel, lift-the-flap, pop-up books, etc), early readers, chapter books. I want to try to cover these somewhat equally. Though that won't always be possible. I seem to have more picture books at hand than early readers. But I can try to seek out books.

It's also important for me to review more nonfiction (and poetry perhaps?!) on the blog. So I'll definitely be on the look out for that. I was disappointed in how few nonfiction books I read last year. So my goal is to participate each Monday in Nonfiction Monday.



© Becky Laney of Young Readers