Welcome back!

Hi all!

When you have young children, you are often fighting a battle between entertaining them and educating them. The younger they are, the less attention span they typically have, which means that entertainment often occupies the lion’s share of the job. As they get older, they are more able to entertain themselves. So what, you may ask, does this have to do with a book about Picasso’s art?

Touch and feel books have been around since the 1940s. Pat the Bunny by Dorothy Kunhardt has been a perennial favorite for parents since first being published in 1940. It includes actual materials for readers to experience themselves, such as a bit of fake rabbit fur and a piece of sandpaper. Since then, I know we’ve seen many different variations on this theme, including Tails by Matthew Van Fleet, which includes not only physical “tails” of various furry or bumpy types, but also a “scratch-n-sniff” stinky skunk tail, which has been a favorite for both of my girls.

Catch Picasso’s Rooster and the rest of the “Touch the Art” series merges the tactile appeal of other “touch and feel” books, but also introduces works of art – in this case those of Picasso, Rousseau, van Gogh, and others – to a young audience. This combination of entertainment and education works on a couple of different levels.

First, by integrating colorful works of art and a simple, rhyming story, youngsters who are having the book read to them are engaged by visual and auditory cues as well as tactile ones as they touch the various materials on a given page. For example, on the page featuring Albrecht Durer’s “Hare” painted in 1502, the authors reinforce that it’s a bunny in the picture through the text (“Rooster, rooster! Stop running away! I hid near a bunny sleeping in hay.), the picture, and a scrap of fake rabbit fur integrated into the picture. We enjoyed working through the book with my youngest who’s not reading yet, but loves interactive books such as this one.

Second, the books have lasting value for more independent readers, since they include facts about the painting and the artist in a section titled “Artifacts” at the end of the book. My eldest daughter loves art and is fascinated learning about classical painters such as Rousseau. And we learned that Rousseau didn’t start painting seriously until he was 40 and he taught himself how to paint by copying paintings at the Louvre Museum in Paris.

If you’re looking for holiday presents for youngsters, I can’t recommend this series enough. As children grow, they can get more and more out of these books as their skills develop. Catch Picasso’s Rooster will sit proudly on my kids’ bookshelves for a few years as they grow and learn. And now I want to check out the other books in the “Touch the Art” series! Look for these books at your favorite bookseller.

–Fitz

p.s. Pick up these great books below!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Famous paintings of Louvre Museum are brought back in Paris, France. (criticalpast.com)
• How 20th-century art shed its inhibitions (guardian.co.uk)
• View of Eiffel Tower and an old artist paints in Tuileries gardens in Paris, France. (criticalpast.com)

→ 2 Comments (What is YOUR opinion?)

Heart. If you’re like me, the word evokes images of Ann and Nancy Wilson on stage, rocking guitars, and vocals in such classic songs as “Barracuda,” “Love Alive,” “Little Queen,” “Alone,” and on and on… For 30 years they’ve been entertaining us with their music, so we know they’re talented.

Now I know they have other talents, such as writing and illustrating childrens’ books! Dog & Butterfly expands on the classic song from Heart and shares the story of a puppy learning the secret of going after a dream. Perseverance. Now if only more books could tell the heart of a story quite as simply as the Wilson sisters.

The story begins with a puppy playing in outside among the trees, the flowers, and the butterflies. But no matter what the puppy does, it can’t quite seem to reach the fluttering beauties flying above their heads. Mama dog and Old Man cat watch from the sidelines, waiting to see which of the puppies finds the secret first.

When the puppy finally tires itself out and falls asleep in the grass, it awakes to find a butterfly resting on its nose. It stays very still until a sneeze scares it off, but that isn’t enough to dampen the excitement that it caught one! Perseverance, patience, and a little luck paid off!

This short book is beautifully illustrated with water colors to further add texture to this wonderful story. I think it’s impossible to go wrong with pictures of puppies, cats, and butterflies when creating art for children. My two daughters, both aspiring artists, loved the detail that made each picture unique to complement the story.

If you’re looking for a good “bedtime” book, Dog & Butterfly should be right up your alley. It’s a wonderful book filled with sunshine, optimism, puppies, and butterflies… what more could you ask for? Check it out at Amazon.com and support the Wilson sisters so they can create more inspired works for the next generation!

–Fitz

p.s. Pick up the book and other CDs below!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Rockers Nancy and Ann Wilson of Heart Are Now Entertaining Kids! (susanheim.blogspot.com)
• Music Review: Baby Guitars – Nancy Wilson (writer.fitzhome.com)

→ No Comments So Far (Leave One!)

Do you have kids?

Thanks to my daughters, I’m always on the lookout for creative childrens’ books. Sometimes I find books that are light on art, but strong on story. And other times the books are long on lessons and light in fun. No, Never! has about the perfect balance of art, lessons, and story.

No, Never! tells the story of Daisy, the dalmation. Daisy doesn’t like to do anything she’s asked to do. Most parents have dealt with this situation at one time or another. Daisy’s Mom doesn’t lose her patience with her daughter – instead she simply asks what Daisy would do. And, armed with that information, Daisy’s Mom explains that you don’t get to write great books or climb mountains without taking care of the goals that are important “now” to learn how to take care of the goals that are important “later.”

This is an important message for kids of all ages. It’s even a good thing to remember as an adult!

Lee wrote the story and did all of the illustrations herself, as she’s done for her other books such as: The Tutu Ballet, which won 2nd place in the Readers Views Literary Awards (2008); The Cake Thief, which won Best 2008-Children’s Picture Book at Books and Authors.net; and The Rabbit and the Snowman, which won Best 2008 – Children’s Fiction from Books and Authors.net. She’s written 20 different childrens’ books and I hope she doesn’t stop any time soon.

The art is done with watercolors in a very warm and kid-friendly style. The colors are bright, character expressions are easy to read, and the art just pops off the page. Combine that with her straightforward, easy to read writing style, and I think Lee has another book that’s bound to win an award.

I hope my kids got the message, but I know I did. Be sure to find a copy of No, Never by Sally O. Lee at your local library or bookstore or by shopping online. If you’re interested in learning more about Sally Lee’s works, check out her website at LeePublishing.net.

–Fitz

p.s. Click below to pick up some of Sally O. Lee’s great children’s books from Amazon!

[amazon-product align="left"]1594576157[/amazon-product] → No Comments So Far (Leave One!)

Hi there!

As a parent and a lover of books, I have to say it was quite difficult to face the fact that one of my children might want to… chew… on my books. Though I love food (as is evidenced by my waistline), I was never one to eat books. From an early age I learned to revere books and treat them with the care that such things required. So when I heard about this board book that actually encouraged a child to chomp on it, I had to check it out!

Books Are for Eating Reading follows the design pattern of other board books to a point. The art is warm and friendly, with a picture of a baby eating the very book you are reading about. The text is easy to read and colorful. There’s a big hole in the book in the upper left corner. And on the two right-hand corners you have a red rubber corner at the top with a bumpy texture and a blue rubber corner at the bottom with a texture of wavy lines. OK, so maybe this isn’t your normal board book.

Suzy Becker is the beloved author and illustrator of All I Need to Know I Learned from My Cat where you learn all the simple life lessons your cat can teach you but you may have overlooked. Things like “Know all the sunny places” and “Make your own hours”, both of which are very valuable lessons whatever age you might be.

Books Are for Eating Reading takes the same general formula and applies it to a younger set of readers. For example, who can argue with “Crayons are for writing, not biting” or “Feet are for stomping, not chomping”? If you have children of your own or nieces or nephews, these are pretty common sense things that you really do have to teach your kids if you want to have any hair left to pull out when they become teenagers.

This book is one I will put on my list of those I typically purchase for new parents, alongside Goodnight Moon, Guess How Much I Love You, and any of Sandra Boynton’s board books (The Going to Bed Book, Opposites, Doggies and Horns to Toes are among our favorites). Board books are meant to be used and abused by the little ones and I think that Books Are for Eating Reading will survive that trial just fine.

So if you have kids or are looking for good books for toddlers, I highly recommend Books Are for Eating Reading. Give it a bite try!

–Fitz

p.s. Pick up any of these books at Amazon:

Related articles by Zemanta

• Baby-Durable Books (prathambooks.org)

→ No Comments So Far (Leave One!)

Hi all!

In 2008, we read The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo with our daughters as a bedtime story. In this fairy tale, Despereaux is a small mouse with big ears and a bigger heart who finds himself in the midst of an adventure involving a princess, a rat, and a kitchen girl. It was recommended to us after we read The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, also from DiCamillo.

The story wove a compelling tale of love and loss, family, honor, and betrayal. So when we heard that they were turning it into a movie, we were all very excited and wanted to see what they’d do with it. And when we saw The Tale of Despereaux at the theater, we loved it.

Rating:

But here’s the thing about the movie. It’s not the book. Or rather, it’s the book with a more streamlined plot and changes here and there to make it more fitting for the screen. So if you’re expecting a page for page faithful adaptation of the book, you’ll be disappointed.

That said, it’s still a powerful movie about a small mouse with big ears and a bigger heart who finds adventure in the Castle of the Kingdom of Dor. And the DVD presents it beautifully. We were able to fall in love with Despereaux, Roscuro, and Miggery Sow all over again.

What caught me off guard the first time we saw the movie were the changes that made the various plots and characters fit seamlessly into a single thread. In the book, the story was segmented much more and you had to keep the three main plots straight. You were first introduced to the mouse Despereaux, and his family. Then you were introduced to Chiaroscuro (or simply Roscuro), the rat. And then you were introduced to Miggery Sow, the poor girl from the country of the Kingdom of Dor. Woven through these were the stories of the Princess and the King and Queen, and of how soup was outlawed in Dor after the Queen died of fright at the sight of the rat Roscuro.

I’m not knocking the book at all. We really enjoyed it. But it was meant to be read, not written directly for the screen. So when Gary Ross began to take the story and rework it for the film, it had to be streamlined a bit. And to make the transitions less clunky, we had the characters of Andre (the chef) and Boldo (the Spirit of the Soup) added, who were not in the book.

So the transition from novel to screen was interesting for me. As I said, we really enjoyed both techniques for telling the story as a book and as a film.

In addition, the voice cast for The Tale of Despereaux was fantastic. With Matthew Broderick as Despereaux, Dustin Hoffman as Princess Pea, and Tracey Ullman as Miggery Sow, they started with an amazing core of players. Then you add Emma Watson (Hermione Granger from the Harry Potter movies) as Princess Pea, Kevin Kline as Andre, and Stanley Tucci as Boldo as the next wave of voice actors. And then the list goes on… Robbie Coltrane as Gregory, Tony Hale as Furlough, Frank Langella as the Mayor, Christopher Lloyd, as Hovis, Bronson Pinchot as the Town Crier, and Sigourney Weaver as the Narrator… This was a dream cast.

Add to that the absolutely gorgeous artwork, both as backgrounds and set pieces as well as the gorgeous stylized 3D rendering of the characters and the world. And you have an animated feature that is almost as much art as the story. It was interesting to compare The Tale of Despereaux to some of the other features coming out last year. When you compared this movie to Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who! or Kung Fu Panda or WALL*E, it stands out because of the way the artists chose to design everything. Whereas those others were done to be photo-realistic, or styled in a Dr. Seussian manner, etc., the feel of Despereaux harkens back to the early years of Disney features like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves or Sleeping Beauty merged with modern technology.

All of these elements came together to create a magnificent animated feature that will be played again and again at my house for the indefinite future.

In addition to the movie on the DVD, you also get a number of extra features.

We were amazed to see the more than 10 minute clip from Curious George 2: Follow That Monkey! among the bonus features. This was the longest sneak peek I’ve ever seen on a DVD, and definitely made my family add it to the list of movies to watch for on DVD this Fall. Like the first Curious George feature back in 2006, this one captures the spirit of that loveable monkey.

“The Tale of the Tale of Despereaux” allowed DiCamillo, the writers, designers, animators, and so on, a chance to talk about many of the different design choices made for the film. The most interesting of these for me was where they got the idea for the stylized drawing style of the characters and backgrounds. They used paintings from Vermeer, Brueghel, and Hieronymus Bosch to bring this fairy tale, medieval world to life. Also, it was great to see the voice actors playing together, especially Kline and Tucci as Andre and Boldo. They looked like they were having a grand time as those characters! The care that the actors, designers, and everyone else associated with the film approached the project was easily seen in the final product.

The “Interactive Map of the Kingdom of Dor” allows you to explore Dor with your DVD remote a bit. But the “Top Ten Uses for Oversized Ears” was a bit disappointing. I was hoping for a more lively feature and instead was presented with a static list with a picture for each item.

In addition, there were two DVD games aimed mostly at children – “Despereaux’s Quest Game” is a pattern matching game where you are presented with different parts of Despereaux’ escape from the dungeon to save the Princess Pea and have to match things up to the selected choices; and the “Build-a-Boldo Game” enables you to formulate the correct recipe to make Boldo, the Spirit of the Soup, rise out of the pot to help Andre.

Overall, The Tale of Despereaux was one of my favorite stories and movies of 2008 and one I think we’ll be enjoying at my house for many years to come. We give it a solid 4 out of 4 stars. I would highly recommend it to anyone with children (or adults) who appreciate a good fairy tale. Be sure to read the book as well!

–Fitz

p.s. Pick up The Tale of Despereaux on DVD starting April 7, and be sure to look for the book as well!

p.p.s. If you’re looking for another great book from DiCamillo, be sure to check out The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane!

Related articles by Zemanta

• ‘Despereaux’: The Tale Of A Mighty Mouse Indeed (npr.org)
• The Tale of Despereaux (popsyndicate.com)
• The Tale of Despereaux Review (hollywood-animated-films.suite101.com)
• The Tale Of Despereaux – Movie Review – BluRay Details Included (areyouscreening.com)
• The Tale of Desperaux on DVD (momreviews.net)

→ 1 Comment (Leave YOUR opinion!)

Hi all!

Snobbles the Great: A Snooze Patch Story is about Snobbles, a fruit-eating snake who saves the other snakes of Snooze Patch from a terrible mongoose. Jason Dobkin and Erika Gragg combined a mix of art techniques with a rhyming narrative to create a unique product. The goal of the book is to inspire parents and teachers to incorporate creativity and art into daily activities.

Unfortunately, I have to say that it didn’t work for me. Though we really wanted to like Snobbles, it didn’t really work for me or my family when we read it together. Somehow the artwork ended up being underwhelming (or overwhelming, which I’ll talk about in a minute) and the story falls apart in the second half of the book.

I do respect Dobkin & Gragg’s approach to try and inspire artistic expression. The idea of combining multiple artistic disciplines of painting, sculpture, photography, stage design, lighting, and cinematography is a good one. But in this case, it often produced images that were far too busy to enhance the story and inspire creative expression.

For example, on the first page the opening image of Snooze Patch reveals very little to contribute to the text – “Sneaking and sliding around in their sleep, dreaming of sweet little morsels to eat, sensing the sun rise over them brightly, six snakes in the Snooze Patch slithered slightly.” I would expect to see one or more snakes waking up and see a sun breaking over the horizon. Instead, we see a strange building in the distance, a desert valley with some rocky peaks beyond it, and a few snake holes and cacti.

A couple of pages later we’re introduced to the main character of the story, Snobbles. The only thing in the picture hinting that Snobbles is the main character is that he’s not blurry in the background of the image like the other snakes and features.

And later in the book, Snobbles and his friend Scoot (a scorpion) go into an underground tunnel that appears to be inspired by an acid trip from the 1960s. Bright colors and weird mushrooms and stalagmites against a bizarre swirl of colors in the background. My children didn’t find it inspiring as much as confusing.

Beyond the art, we found the rhyming story to not always rhyme well or consistently. And the evil mongoose, the bad guy of the story, seemed to lose the ability to speak in complete sentences with phrases like “Me catch you and eat you, you can’t escape me.”

On the second to last page, the authors decided to not only include two stanzas of the rhyming story on a single page, which was confusing, but introduce new characters from the Snooze Patch. All of a sudden we were introduced to Snack Mamba, Snoo-Billy Doo, Snoliver, Snattle-Tale, and Snaggletooth. Where’d they come from?

Overall, I applaud the authors’ attempt to come up with something inspiring. Unfortunately, they ended up with an uneven art project and a story that could have been better arranged. Better luck next time.

–Fitz

p.s. Do check out this book at Amazon or your local bookstore if you’re interested. They do use some intriguing art techniques for the images!

→ 1 Comment (Leave YOUR opinion!)

Hey all…

As a father of two young girls, I’m always on the lookout for new childrens’ books. And that brought me to the wonderful book titled The One and Only Marigold by Florence Parry Heide. At age 89, Heide has written more books for kids than I can count. And helping her out on this book is illustrator Jill McElmurry, who has once again done some amazing work.

Marigold is a complicated little girl. (And as the father of two little girls, I can attest that most if not all little girls are complicated.) She has a few quirks. She has a unique way of expressing herself for her best friend – her purple coat – and her second best friend, Maxine. And she definitely has a few opinions about the way the world should work.

To say the least, there’s a lot about Marigold that made us all smile. My girls enjoyed the stories, and my wife and I had to chuckle a few times about similarities between Marigold and two other little girls we know.

The One and Only Marigold is a collection of four connected stories about Marigold.

“Marigold’s New Coat” explored the adventure Marigold and her mother had while searching for a new coat. This was not something Marigold wished to do, as she was very loyal to her old purple coat. and in the end, there was a compromise when she finally found a coat she could live with… once she accessorized properly of course.

Then in “Marigold’s New Hobby” we learned about a few of Marigold’s hobbies, including making lists of things. We really liked her lists of Favorite Foods (Popcorn sandwiches, chocolate-covered chocolate, and candy soup!) and her lists of things she would never eat (Jellyfish Soup, Worm Juice, and Fried Pimples – yuck!). But when it came to a list of her friends, her second best friend Maxine was not happy she was a notch below Marigold’s old purple coat.

In “Marigold’s Special Surprise Treasure Stand”, Marigold gets industrious to compete with her friend Maxine when Maxine opens a lemonade stand – and the “Every Package a Surprise” stand was born. For 5 cents, she’d give her customers a prettily wrapped box with a special surprise. Maxine was definitely surprised when she bought a few packages!

And finally, in “Marigold’s New Dress”, we learned that Marigold had quite a unique fashion sense and that Maxine was a very good friend. Of all the stories, this one was our favorite.

Heide and McElmurry have come up with a fun, unique character for The One and Only Marigold and I know everyone at my house hopes there are more adventures for the spunky little Marigold!

–Fitz

p.s. Be sure to check this out at your local bookseller or at Amazon!

→ No Comments So Far (Leave One!)