Preschool Read Aloud of the Week: The Circus Ship

God bless Tom Thumb for having the amazing skill of being able to pluck a gem from the shelves of our library every single week!  This week we bring you The Circus Ship by Chris Van Dusen.  Chris Van Dusen is the illustrator of the Mercy Watson books (which are delightful reads about an adventurous pig for the grade 1-3 set) and he wrote this book in rhyme about the circus ship that meets a rock in the sea and subsequently sinks.  The real fun begins when the animals come ashore to a village in Maine and save the day.  But will the villagers save them when the unkind circus owner returns to reclaim them?


My favorite pages are here:

All fifteen of the circus animals are hidden from the owner somewhere in the picture.  Tom Thumb and I had a ball as he easily identified the easy ones like the gorilla on the far left side of the page and I helped him find the more difficult ones like the alligator.  


I love books like that this that have delicious illustrations and an interesting story.  Can you believe the author loosely based the story on a real event?  There actually was a ship called The Royal Tar that sunk off the coast of Maine in 1836.  Van Dusen includes a page at the back of the book describing the event's influence on this fictional tale.  I can't wait to see what Tom Thumb uncovers next! :-)


Speaking of circuses, I visited Erin Morgenstern's blog today.  She's the author of one of my fave books, The Night Circus, and I wanted to check and see what she was up to.  I appreciated the refreshing blog post she posted the other day.  Being a novelist has always sounded very glamorous to me and I have romanticized it in my mind to the point of ridiculousness.  I have visions of the author sitting pensively at her laptop, looking out her window over some sumptuous mountain/ocean/forest view.  She takes a sip of her coffee and continues on writing her literary feast of brilliance.  Okay---maybe not that romanticized.  It must be the day I'm having, but it nice to hear that someone else was struggling to get it all done---even if I'm just a stay at home mom and she's a novelist with her first book optioned for a movie.  


I've also had an undue obsession with pot roast lately.  I've been eating 99% vegetarian for the last year, but over the last couple of days all I can think of is tender, cut with your fork beef pot roast and mashed potatoes completely covered in salty brown gravy.  And a side a salty canned green beans wouldn't be too bad either.  Somebody slap me...

Turkey Lurkey! It's time for Thanksgiving books!

Here are our family's picks for fave Thanksgiving books we've read this month---

When a town is reduced to considering shredded wheat as their Thanksgiving dinner, they hatch a plan to catch their "plump and perky turkey" by recruiting a turkey as a model for a turkey tribute art festival.  Hi jinx ensue!

The ugly pumpkin is devastated when he isn't picked to be a jack o' lantern for Halloween, but things start looking up around Thanksgiving when he realizes that he's a SQUASH!

Speaking of turkey, Thanksgiving dinner will be at my parents' house like every year.  And like every year, I must assume that we won't be offered any leftovers.  I know it's shocking, but they like to keep all the leftovers for themselves!  As a result (and by the Cobbler's request), Thanksgiving the Remix will be happening at our house on Friday.  If I was going to cook a turkey, it wasn't going to be one that's jacked up on hormones and antibiotics and raised in the equivalent of a dark room. Amazingly, I was able to find a fresh, free range, organic turkey in the city!  It was a little bit weird having Tom Thumb socialize along the fence with some turkeys that are going to be on someone's dining room table on Thursday, but we had a pretty awesome experience at Roperti's Turkey Farm.  One of the employees even carried our turkey to my car!  As my vegetarian alternative, I'm planning on making this yummy looking veggie streudel on Thursday.  Let the good times roll!

Preschool Read Aloud of the Week: Katie and the Sunflowers

I love books by James Mayhew!  I heard about them when Red was 3 or 4 and couldn't wait to check them out at the library.  At the time, I was really committed to the Charlotte Mason method and one of the things her philosophy advocates is picture study of great works of art.  Katie and the Sunflowers, along with Mayhew's other books, incorporates the works of famous artists into the book's plot.


I've been reading Katie and the Sunflowers to Tom Thumb this week and he loves it!  He wants to read "the sunflower book" before his nap everyday.  I don't mind because I love the story and the illustrations too.  In this book, Katie goes to the art museum with her grandmother.  She comes upon Vincent Van Gogh's Sunflowers, 

reaches out to touch it, and accidentally topples the vase of flowers out of the picture.  She enlists one of the dancing girls from Paul Gauguin's Breton Girls Dancing to help her put things back together.  

Things go from bad to worse when the dancing girl's dog runs off into the museum.  Fun and mayhem ensue with them stepping into more paintings to recover her dog before putting everything right again.  What a great book!  While our library has two of Mayhew's other Katie books (Katie Meets the Impressionists and Katie and the Mona Lisa.  Red especially liked the one with Mona Lisa!), I've been perusing his other Katie titles on Amazon and like what I see.  I think I may have found a Christmas gift or two for Red and Tom Thumb.  Yay!

Preschool Read Aloud of the Week: Sneaky Sheep

I can't tell you how many times I had to read this book to Tom Thumb over the last month.  He loves those Sneaky Sheep!  The plot is Rocky and Blossom (AKA The Sneaky Sheep) are intent on finding there way to a remote, yet luscious, looking meadow located on the side of a mountain above the valley in which they live.  They try many times to get there, but are each time foiled by Murphy the sheepdog.  On their final attempt (in this story at least), they are cornered by a sly fox on a precipice when Murphy saves the day once again.  At the end of the book, however, Rocky and Blossom are back to their sneaky ways and are plotting to escape to the other meadow once again.


The overall story in this book is pretty straight forward, but the illustrations are hilarious!  On one page the caption reads "Murphy knew a few things about Rocky and Blossom.  They had been known to make some bad decisions over the years."  The accompanying illustrations are of Rocky and Blossom cliff diving, skateboarding without helmets, launching a rocket, running with the bulls, juggling fire, lying on a railroad track sunbathing, and playing poker with a pack of dogs.  Other pages have similar smile inducing drawings.


We'll be looking for more Chris Monroe books next time we hit the library!

Preschool Read Aloud of the Week: The Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog

Tom Thumb is in love with the Pigeon!  A while back we read Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! and it started a phenomenon.  Thereafter, every time we went to the library we had to "find the Pigeon books!" (imagine that said in a crazy commanding baby man voice).  I can't tell you how many times we've now checked out Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, The Pigeon Wants a Puppy, and The Pigeon Finds A Hot Dog, but there's something about the hot dog one that resonates with Tom Thumb.  Maybe it's because he likes hot dogs.  Maybe he likes the squeaky voice I use for the duckling.  All I know is he loves that Pigeon!  


And here's why I love that Pigeon---

No matter how many ways he asks to drive that bus, I still stand firm. It doesn't work out quite the same way with real children, but I can always practice saying no to the Pigeon. :-)

Preschool Read Aloud of the Week: Whopper Cake

"Today is Grandma's birthday,

and Granddad has an itchin'

to bake a whopper chocolate cake

and traumatize the kitchen."

With these words, the story of the whopper cake begins in Karma Wilson and Will Hillenbrand's Whopper Cake.  You might know Karma Wilson as the author of the Bear Snores On, The Bear Wants More, and other books about Bear.  The librarian introduced me to Whopper Cake a few years ago when Red was a toddler, and I came across it at the library again a couple weeks ago.  I thought, what a great book to read to Tom Thumb leading up to his birthday!

I love Wilson's fun, off beat rhyming style.  The rhyming paired with the story makes kid magic!  Tom Thumb loves it!  That crazy Granddad just keep adding more and more ingredients than the recipe calls for.  At one point, the recipe calls for 4 eggs and he adds 86!  As the amount of batter grows, it winds up in a pickup truck bed being stirred with an oar from their rowboat.  In the end, the cake gets baked by the hot July sun in the truck bed and the whole town comes over to surprise Grandma and celebrate.  The cherry on the cake is when Grandma says she has but one birthday wish --- I'll enjoy this whopper cake and you clean up the mess (the whopper mess that is).  Love it!  Not to mention, there is literally a recipe for whopper cake in the back of the book.

With Red, I was really deliberate about what read alouds I picked for her as a preschooler.  I often drew from the lists of others, like the Ambleside Year 0 list and The Simply Charlotte Mason Early Years list.  While I still think these lists are valuable, I'm going to get a little more adventurous in the kids' section with Tom Thumb and really try to find some new gems to share over the coming months.  I hope you'll join in and comment if you've read the book or if you've found any good reads for your little ones lately.

So who else wants to bake a whopper cake?