Food For Thought by Saxton Freymann and Joost Elffers

Food For Thought: The Complete Book of Concepts for Growing Minds by Saxton Freymann and Joost Elffers

Rating: 5 stars

Before telling you how cool this book is, I just have to point out the name of the authors: Saxton and Joost.  Um, why were we not aware of those two cool names when naming our children?!  Joost.  Pretty fun.  Let me practice it:  "Joooooost!  Time for dinner!"  Ok, maybe it would raise an eyebrow or two in this non-Dutch neighborhood...

Now, about the book.

Here is a book that combines two of my favorite things: great books and great food.  These two author-artists cut out fruits and veggies to make all sorts of cute and hilarious images--mostly but not only animals.  The expressions on some of the "faces" are amazing!  Really laugh-out-loud funny.

There are five little chapters: shapes, colors, numbers, letters, and opposites.  But really, this is more about fun than learning.  Oh wait...the two can be combined!  Check it out.  And giggle a little with your little one.


I do apologize if your children want their next fruity snack to resemble the this creative, edible art.

Mouse Shapes by Ellen Stoll Walsh

Mouse Shapes by Ellen Stoll Walsh

Rating: 5 stars

And to wrap up our shape-a-thon, we'll be going to the Pentagon tomorrow morning.

Just kidding!  Maybe next year...

Of all the books that we've read this is definitely at the top.  Walsh of Mouse Paint fame provides a great little story about mice playing with shapes.  In this one the mice have names: Violet, Martin, and Fred.  They play with shapes, defining them (helpfully explaining that a lot of triangles are tricky, "but any shape with three sides is a triangle."  Then they start to make things with the shapes--first a simple house and tree, then the cat who is chasing them.  And then, to scare that cat away, they make three scary versions of themselves.  It's simple and cute and incredibly easy to do a fun and, for us, wonderfully time-consuming art project afterward.


In the picture is Lorelei with her art--it's New York City, which cracks me up because she's never been to New York City.  Another example of how sponge-like these little brains around me are...did I mention it to her weeks ago?  Yesterday?  Who knows!  But we had a fun conversation about skylines, what they are and how architects take them into account when they erect a new building in a city.  

I'm sure that they have these kits somewhere in our local art supply store... "these kits" meaning a bunch of shapes that kids can punch out themselves.  But around here we do it the old-fashioned way--I actually cut pieces of paper in random shapes and then hand it over to the kids.  The funny twist here at our house today was that we are out of glue.  Completely (thanks to SOMEBODY (BEN!) never putting the cap back on and therefore the glue dries up).  So for almost an hour we heard, "May I please have another piece of tape?" about 60 gazillion times.  Another opportunity to sharpen our manners, so...

Round Is A Mooncake: A Book of Shapes by Roseanne Thong, illustrated by Grace Lin

Round Is A Mooncake: A Book of Shapes by Roseanne Thong, illustrated by Grace Lin

Rating: 3 stars

I couldn't pass up a book that was not just about shapes but also about China.  As an always-student of Asia--especially Southeast Asia--I'm interested myself and eager to open up that part of the world to my kids.  Thankfully diversity exists where we live, and Lorelei had two Chinese students and one Indian student in her class this past year.  So she likes to read about their cultures and explore it.  We're not ready to jump on a plane and head into Asia, so...books it is.

"Rectangles are inking stones /
Paintbrush racks and mobile phones"

In staying with the shape theme, we picked this book up and I like it.  It's another to add to the mix of getting my kids to look around them and notice the shapes of things.  There are just basic shapes in here--no parallelograms or hexagons.  And the things that take shape on the pages are all interesting, question-provoking things: rice bowl, cups of jasmine tea, name chops, tofu, radish cakes, dim sum, inking stones, money envelopes to name a few.

The rhyme is just okay for me--it's not exactly the selling point of the book.  The caption under the picture is a good example of this.  It's fine, but the inclusion of modern cell phones right alongside traditional inking stones seems odd to me.  Grace Lin's pictures adequately illustrates the words and shapes (we have seen some of Grace Lin's artwork before and I like it elsewhere more than here).  The best part of the book for me is definitely the connection to China and therefore Asia. Now I'm in the mood for some noodles...

So Many Circles, So Many Squares by Tana Hoban

So Many Circles, So Many Squares by Tana Hoban

Rating: 4 stars

This old book got us in the mood to look for shapes.  It's a photo book, really, and Hoban has a bunch of them that are all great for a bit o' mind-expanding ideas.  This book and the others of Hoban's that we grabbed at the library last week (it's in Lorelei's room and she's asleep and I'm too comfortable to sneak in and get it right now...) really created a good start to all of the shapes we found around us this past week.

Here are a few photos in the book to give you an idea of what is between the covers:

Chuckle, chuckle...

We thought these were giant's glasses...

Just enough to get the juices flowing.  Juice that formed a line, was poured from a rectangular container, caught inside a cylinder glass, I'll have you know.

Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons by Eric Litwin, illustrated by James Dean

Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons by Eric Litwin, illustrated by James Dean

Rating: 5 stars

This one goes out to all the math people out there...who knew there could be a children's book on math--and a cool one at that?  And one with a foot-tappin' (if you're Kiefer, body-shakin') song?

So Pete the Cat, the resident Jamiroquai of children's books, is back.  And I'm pretty grateful for him.  Just when our house has reached another can-we-be-more-tired level, this book arrived.  We had already listened to it a few dozen times online (listen to it!  you'll smile for sure!), but the actual book did not disappoint.  This book ROCKS.

The story:  Pete the Cat puts on his favorite shirt, one with four, round, groovy buttons (what a joy to teach my kids the definition of "groovy!"  It's a new favorite word) and sings his song: "My buttons, my buttons, my four groovy buttons!"

"OH NO!  Another button popped off and rolled away."

And then...

"POP!  OH NO!  One of the buttons popped off and rolled away.
Did Pete cry?  Goodness, no!
Buttons come and buttons go.
How many buttons are left?  THREE!
Pete went on singing his song..."

(Not much math...no square root...maybe that's in the next one...but just enough for a preschooler.)

The song goes on, going from three to two to one, something easy and fun enough for little ones to work on their prediction skills, which is a huge chunk of why we're supposed to be reading to these tykes to begin with.  And then...they get to zero.  He looks down at his open shirt and...finds his belly button!  I love how he finds a way to smile after all those groovy buttons are gone.  Making lemonade out of lemons.  Finding the good in the not-so-good.  What a lesson.

But my favorite lesson that Mr. Eric sneaks in is "buttons come and buttons go."  I'm always telling the kids: "No big deal, right?" when they argue about whose turn it is to do something or if they didn't get something they wanted.  Sometimes it IS a big deal when something comes, and especially when it goes, but...hopefully they won't learn this lesson anytime soon.

I think I might have a crush.  On a cat.  This Pete guy.

Field Trip Report: Shape Hunt at the Zoo

Oval eyes, triangular head and noes.  Such a cute baby goat.

 Field Trip number two...and a shape hunt, too!

We are fortunate to live very close to a small, local zoo.  It's nothing extraordinary and a lot of people pooh-pooh it because it's sorta dusty and sorta poopy and sorta small, but...we really like it.  It's small enough for the kids to run wherever they want, and familiar enough that they have their favorite animals but still see new things every other time we go.  I'd like to pass along my "easily amused" gene to them; my fingers are crossed that they'll keep that in tact for the rest of their life.

This first half-week of summer was "Shape Week" at our house.  I doubt that every week will have a theme along with a field trip, but I needed a framework in which to work in a bunch of books, activities, and just general fun.  I'm not a math whiz but because we are so book-focused at our house I'm especially eager to provide math and science twists on anything I can so as not to brand our kids, especially Lorelei, as ONLY good at language arts.

How cool is this?!
Triangular neck, lines out, triangles at the end of the feathers.

Circles for eyes, triangular webbed feet.

Shapes are just a foundation piece for geometry, and as my kids are 5, 3 1/2, and...um...1 (he got a shape puzzle that he threw around...), they are just learning the basics.  There are so many activities when teaching shapes that it's pointless to list them here, especially because I'm supposed to be writing about the books involved in this whole child-rearin' thing.  But google it if you're looking for something to do on a hot summer afternoon and you'll find a ton.  We had a great time playing with food, making shapes out of shapes, drawing with shapes, using shapes as the base of a piece of artwork.  I knew the kids really got into it when this afternoon at swim practice they actually SWAM in shapes--Lorelei, a triangle; Ben, a rectangle.  The lesson is clear: if you are enthusiastic about something, your kids will be as well.

Kiefer and I had mixed feelings about the llamas...we were
worried about spit and couldn't look for shapes.

But really, teaching them to look for shapes is, for me, about sharpening their sight.  Looking beyond what is simply in front of them.  Being observant.  I can't tell you how important I think this is--about learning from simply watching and looking and observing.  Hopefully I taught them the basics of this lesson.

So we went to the zoo--which was actually our fallback as the botanical garden didn't open until late morning and looked for shapes.  We looked at the animals' faces and found circles and triangles and ovals.  We saw feeding bins shaped like rectangles and lines, or stripes, on snakes and zebras.  Ben said that a snake was a line when slithering and a circle when wrapped up.  On the tractor we saw big circles and little circles as the wheels, and we even saw cylinder cages for some animals (gold star for Lorelei!).  The antelope had cones for horns.  See all the stuff you can find if you just look?

Field trip number two for the summer...already behind us.

Not a Box by Antoinette Portis

Not a Box by Antoinette Portis

Rating: 4 stars

It was shape week at our house this week.  I know.  Random.  But I'm a girl who likes a plan, and with the start of summer, I wanted a framework of some sort or else I feel like the days are too loosey-goosey (spell check didn't like that) for my liking.  God forbid we have a week without accomplishing something!

So we tried to eat lots of different shapes.  We ate quesadillas shaped like triangles, cucumbers cut up as half-moons, star cut-out cookies, pancakes with blueberries for circles (a double whammy!), bell pepper strips for rectangles to name a few.

We played with tangrams or tangram-like activities, and then for our field trip we went on a shape hunt at our local zoo.  I know that sounds incredibly dorky, but the kids were totally into it and we wondered if we even recruited a friend to go with us whose mom didn't roll her eyes at my excitement over finding a feeding bin shaped like a triangle.  That's a friend for you.  Click here for more details of our shape hunt at the zoo.

It's not a box.  It's a burning building!

During a playdate one afternoon we read Not A Box, which is probably a book everyone knows about already.  It's simple--aren't the best things simple?  Portis (whose book A Penguin Story we love love love) shows how a cute, simply drawn bunny can transport a simple box into anything he wants with his imagination.  My kids aren't box-crazy yet, but they did get into this story for the shape aspect of it.  After my friend read all the book while I cooked dinner for the kids, she handed out a piece of paper with a rectangle on it and each kid transformed their rectangle into a "not-a-box."


I was actually bummed not to participate--when was the last time YOU did an art project?  Probably too long ago.  I find it so enjoyable to stop cleaning, stop blogging, stop picking up the kitchen for the upteenth time to just...draw and paint with my kids.  Priceless stuff.  Anyway, I digress.

Good book and easy activity to provide an opportunity for a little creativity.  Not bad!