Little Green Peas: A Big Book of Colors by Keith Baker

Little Green Peas: A Big Book of Colors by Keith Baker

Rating: 5 stars

I think that Keith Baker's (wonderful) mission is to increase our children's attention span, one book at a time.  Or one book-sitting at a time.  I've been a fan of his peas book since LMNO Peas came out over four years ago. In that book, huge illustrations with a million peas doing a million different, funny things completely won me and my kids over.

This book is different only because there is one more kid around me to win over, and…well, Kiefer loves Little Green Peas: A Big Book of Colors just as much as the first one, which we check out every other month, easily.  Only Kiefer wishes that the whole book would be in orange.  (I am trying to explain to him how that would defeat the purpose of having a book on colors…)

Much to Kiefer's chagrin, each color gets two giant double-page spreads dedicated to it.  On the first page is the color, spelled out in enormous letters, with peas all around it, doing neat things.  Turn the page and you get a scene with that color as the main focus, with even more peas doing even more neat things.  There is so much to absorb…that's where the increased attention span comes in.

Wait until you see what Green grows into...

If you're familiar with his two previous books involving a whole lot of peas, you won't be surprised that the text is perfectly sparse, rhymes nicely, and is really just the lead-in to his bright, colorful, and incredibly detailed illustrations of peas doing…well, a little bit of everything.   Kiefer is learning the alphabet, so the huge letters that spell out each color are wonderful additions for his age group (he's three).  My kids could spend five minutes on each page, sitting together to point out the obvious (they're good at that), what each pea is doing, but also to choose which pea they'd be if they could jump into the book.

(I'll be the sun-bathing pea, please…)

This is a wonderful, wonderful book.  My only question that I have: is there a ladybug on each scene, hidden, for kids to find?  We looked at this book at a bookstore, and I am annoyed I didn't remember to look.  And, I'm curious… I'm hoping the answer is yes, because that little addition of a ladybug hunt was such a delightful addition to the last two books…!

Alice in Wonderland: A Colors Primer by Jennifer Adams

Alice in Wonderland: A Colors Primer by Jennifer Adams, illustrated by Alison Oliver

Rating: 5 stars

Have you heard about this BabyLit series?  They are board books--or, as their website explains, "fashionable ways to introduce your toddler to classic literature."  The first books in the series, Moby Dick came out over a year ago…I read a review of it in the New York Times and definitely shook my head at these literature-for-babies series.

I thought: Pretentious.  Obnoxious.  Is this what parents read to their babies while driving them from preschool to their Mandarin lessons?

Yup, that's what I thought.  Until I got them in my hot little hands (thanks to our librarian who, intrigued by the books and frustrated that they aren't yet part of the collection, ordered them on her own dime and loaned them out to me…it's nice to have friends in literary places!).

red hearts

I now think: They aren't so pretentious.  They aren't so obnoxious.  They are pretty genius.  They are very cute.  They are great for parent book-lovers to read to their baby bookworms.

Let it be known: I was wrong.  These are creative, cool, cute board books.  I REALLY love them!

Each book in the series is a different genre (I think there's a better word but it's escaping me right now…forgive me, I'm out of coffee…): colors, opposites, weather, even fashion (again, sounds obnoxious but I think it's done well and I'm not super girly-girly).

Take Alice in Wonderland: A Colors Primer.  The text reads:

white rabbit
black shoes
purple bottle
orange cat
blue caterpillar
brown hat
red hearts

If you're familiar with the story, the images probably jump to your mind.  And those images, produced by Alison Oliver, are fantastic--bright and clean, simple and interesting.  This book was one of the kids' favorites among the stack we've borrowed from Miss Daniella because they have read the picture book version of the story and watched the old Disney movie.  So they had fun remembering the characters and stories, and they liked how Jennifer Adams boiled down the huge story to such a simple text for little guys and girls.

Check 'em out!  I'm curious what you think.

But you can't check them out at Fairfax County Library, at least not yet…unless you want to request that they are added to the collection!  Click HERE and then scroll down to the bottom of the page to request this book, or any other.

White is for Blueberry by George Shannon, illustrated by Laura Dronzek

White is for Blueberry by George Shannon, illustrated by Laura Dronzek

Rating: 5 stars

We all thought this book title was a little silly when we saw it.  WHITE is for BLUEberry?!  How could that be?!  my kids asked their uber-incredulous-silly voices.  So we had to check it out (of course).

Turns out it is a total gem!  And well timed, too.

This book is a tale of perspective, or perhaps of before and after, of seeing things not for what they are but what they were and what they could be...  On the first page is what something likes like in the beginning, and then you turn the page and you see what that something looks like at the end.  For example, there's a bird that starts off pink as a baby and then grows up to be black.  And the sweet potato looks brown when the skin is on, but then orange when you look into it and dig in.

Our tomatoes are yellow, green, then red.

But the blueberry example is by far my favorite, because on our own deck are garden is growing well.  Tomatoes are by far my favorite, and we have five different types of tomatoes growing at five different heights, some bursting through the tops of their cages already.

As I've said before (here), I garden for many reasons, but I love that my kids have to be patient as the vegetables grow.  They know we can pop over to the grocery store and buy tomatoes, but there is definitely something special about growing your own, taking care of the tomatoes, appreciating how the weather affects them, and how they are really pretty imperfect (but more delicious) than the ones we buy at the store.

Anyway, in the book Shannon has a picture of a white flower that soon grows to be a blueberry.  So white really is for blueberry.  Who knew?  I love how this book helps me to teach my kids to have a good perspective, to think out of the box, to look again--and then maybe once more!--and see something new and unique.

A Color of His Own by Leo Lionni

A Color of His Own by Leo Lionni

Rating: 5 stars

Lionni's sad and lonely chameleon is bummed about the fact that all animals have a color of their own, except for chameleons.  They change color wherever they go.  He wants a color of his own.  Just like everyone else has.

He wants it so much that he sticks himself to a leaf, thinking he'll be green forever.  But then fall comes and...oops, he turns orange.  Then red.  And then the leaf falls to the ground, with the chameleon in tow.  Drat.  (Hate it when that happens.)

Still frustrated, he meets an older and wiser chameleon and tells his sad story--he can't find his own true color.  The old chameleon explains that that's the beauty of being a chameleon, but perhaps they should stick together, and they'll be different together.

"Won't we ever have a color of our own?"

What a nice and comforting moral: rather than conform to what everyone else has or does or is, find someone with whom you can be different.

This is such a simple, little book and there are a zillion activities that you can do with your kid.  There are actually too many for me to list here, but google it and you'll find exactly one zillion.

But the best is to do what I just did, I think--have the book out, and when your little Ben asks about it, pull them up on your lap and read it to them.  And hope really hard that they find someone that can stick with them and be their color with them, forever.

Priscilla and the Pink Planet by Nathaniel Hobbie, illustrated by Jocelyn Hobbie

Priscilla and the Pink Planet by Nathaniel Hobbie, illustrated by Jocelyn Hobbie

Rating: 4 stars

Anyone with a daughter understands what I mean when I talk about an explosion of pink.  It started with the (very lovely) baby shower before she was born.  An eruption of pink!  As someone who was not a girly-girl growing up, it was a bit of a shock then.  I'm lucky to have two boys to balance out the pink.  Because of them, I appreciate the pink--and all of the other girly-girl stuff that that single color represents--a whole lot more.

That is exactly what this book is about--appreciating differences!  It definitely made me smile.

Here's the world o' pink...

Priscilla is an adventuresome girl who lives on the Pink Planet.  Everything on the planet is, you've guessed it, pink!  "Pink apples, pink bananas, pink oranges, too. / Pink bicycles, pink rubber on the sole of your shoe. / Pink rivers.  Pink fish.  Pink grass and pink sky. / Pink is all you can see, no matter how hard you try."  That's a whole lotta pink.  Lorelei (and 98.4 percent of all 5 year old girls) would be in heaven!

But Priscilla decides, a la Edna in A Penguin Story, that there must be more color in this world, and she sets off to find it.  She searches and searches, overcoming this obstacle and that, until she runs into a TRULY colorful butterfly.  She follows the butterfly until SNATCH! he is caught in a net by...the Great Queen of Pink!  She haughtily explains: " 'Now look, little girl, just what do you think?! / Don't you know who I am?!  I'm the Great Queen of Pink! / This whole planet is mine, ocean and land, / and unwelcome visitors are one thing I can't stand!' "

...and here's the world o' color.  Better, don't you think?

Priscilla really wants more colors, but she knows she can't just argue with the queen.  Instead, she sits down to tea and outwits the queen by explaining that if all of the colors were out for all to see, that "pink would look even pinker."  So true!  Contrast is everything!

The illustrations by Jocelyn Hobbie are outstanding.  They are fun and busy, jam-packed with little details that make my kids' eyes linger over them until each little detail is discovered.  The animals and people are friendly and cheerful, and Priscilla is quite the character--she seems fun but not snotty, adventurous but not bratty.   And the post-pink world pictures are so much more vibrant, because of the added colors, that I think Lorelei and Ben really DO see and appreciate the idea of contrasting colors, and, hopefully (maybe just maybe!) contrasting differences in things besides color.

The fact that these books are long poems are such a bonus.  They are so much more fun to read, and now I realize how rhymes help Lorelei practice her pronunciation without anyone else around.  Nice little bonus to books that are already getting rave reviews in my house.  We've read a few of the sequels--Priscilla Superstar! and Priscilla and the Splish-Splash Surprise--and will be ordering the rest from our library soon.