Category Archives: Children’s Books

Dragons Galore

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It’s Edith Nesbit all the way this week. Well, for the purposes of this post, that is — I’m writing about Edith Nesbit. In our reading we’ve zipped about among some other writers too, but I’m focusing on just Nesbit because The Book of Dragons is the first time I’ve been won over. My previous forays into Edith Nesbit have been so-so, but she is definitely growing on me.

It started last week when Amy recommended this picture book version of The Book of Beasts. Our library had a copy, but I saw that The Book of Dragons, of which this is the first story, was a free (and instantaneous) download on the Kindle. I wasn’t going to be able to get to the library for a few days, so I read the story to the girls on the Kindle. Big success. My youngest (7) emitted quiet exclamations next to me several times, responding to the story’s humor and absurdity and suspense.

Since then we’ve read the next two stories (there are eight in all). All of them feature dragons. All of them are stand-alones. Here are the things I notice about Edith Nesbit:

  • Breeziness — sentences that pile up clauses until you’re out of breath. At first glance it seems careless, but it’s intentional and creates the effect that she’s improvising — making up a story out loud.
  • Comedy that comes from her mixing of the extremely practical and ordinary with the utterly fantastic.
  • Absurdity.
  • Children with problems to solve. They are ordinary, and though they end up doing heroic things they never lose their ordinary trappings.
  • Dated — yet the language and references to things specific to her place and time haven’t been a hurdle to my daughters at all.
  • She doesn’t talk down to children. I’ve heard it said that she writes for adults, really, but judging from the girls’ response I’d say she knows children quite well.

Nearly a week later, we were able to get to the library, and we picked up both The Book of Beasts and the physical Book of Dragons. The Kindle gives books an abstract quality, and with this story it includes no illustrations. But what interests me is that the stories have been enough in themselves, even in this form. There is apparently something very magical and appealing about Nesbit’s tales.

Hummingbird Art

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We’re fond of hummingbirds around here. As I mentioned in this post, the sight of them is not uncommon, but it invariably makes us blurt in sudden stage whispers, “Sh! Hummer!” Then we watch, wide-eyed, as these flying, buzzing needles hover, flit, fight, and sip from the feeder.

My daughters have produced some fabulous hummingbird art this week.

Here’s Younger Daughter’s picture:

Here’s Older Daughter’s:

We’ve been enjoying bird poems from Jane Yolen’s Bird Watch. There, she highlights the hummingbird’s fleeting quality in the poem “Time Piece.” But today I think of these lines from Mary Oliver’s “Summer Story.” Watching a hummer, she muses,

I am scorched
to realize once again
how many small, available things
are in this world

that aren’t
pieces of gold
or power——-
that nobody owns…

That right there is the pleasure of birdwatching. Nobody owns them. They are everywhere, and often they are exceedingly beautiful. They are works of art themselves, and the art of pictures or words seems fitting to acknowledge it. I’m glad my daughters seem instinctively to know this.

Read Aloud Thursday: Burgess Bird Book

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It’s no secret around these parts that we’ve been bird watching all summer. Thornton Burgess’s books have been a nice fit as read-alouds, and recent titles have included The Adventures of Mr Mocker and Longlegs the Heron (linked to my reviews). I read a few of the Burgess stories when I was a child, but they weren’t really stand-outs to me. My daughters seem to enjoy them very much, and as sometimes happens, their enthusiasm has kindled a greater appreciation in me. (The same thing happened with Beatrix Potter. Something about talking animals going on here…)

The Burgess Bird Book for Children is one of the titles that has kept showing up as a recommended read on my Kindle. Finally I checked it out, downloaded it for free, and have been reading it together with the girls this week. Originally published in 1919, the book sets out to educate children about birds. In the preface, Burgess explains:

This book was written to supply a definite need. Its preparation was undertaken at the urgent request of booksellers and others who have felt the lack of a satisfactory medium of introduction to bird life for little children. As such, and in no sense whatever as a competitor with the many excellent books on this subject, but rather to supplement these, this volume has been written.

Its primary purpose is to interest the little child in, and to make him acquainted with, those feathered friends he is most likely to see. Because there is no method of approach to the child mind equal to the story, this method of conveying information has been adopted. So far as I am aware the book is unique in this respect. In its preparation an earnest effort has been made to present as far as possible the important facts regarding the appearance, habits and characteristics of our feathered neighbors. It is intended to be at once a story book and an authoritative handbook. While it is intended for little children, it is hoped that children of larger growth may find in it much of both interest and helpfulness.

I would have to say that the children both large and small in our home would give Burgess a thumbs up on his endeavor. This dovetails nicely with Comstock’s Handbook of Nature Study, packing lots of the same information into a story form and setting me up to supplement a bit from the Handbook. I’m especially enjoying the material about the different nesting habits of each respective bird, because we’d like to hunt for some nests in the fall after the leaves come down. This will help us with the identification.

Another nice perk of The Burgess Bird Book is the volume of free study material available online. The Kindle version I downloaded isn’t illustrated, but this site has Montessori cards of all the bird illustrations. (They’re done not by Burgess’ usual illustrator, Harrison Cady, but by Louis Agassiz Fuertes, and they’re quite lovely. They’re also more compact for taking with you on a walk.)  The site includes additional materials too — coloring pages, mini-book-making supplies for narrations of each respective chapter, a bird watching checklist, maps, copywork, and other things. The entire text is there as well — one of several online options, for those interested. Finally, my daughters enjoy visiting All About Birds and Peterson’s Field Guide to listen to bird songs and pick up additional tidbits.

If you’re interested in developing your child’s (and your own) knowledge about birds, this book is a valuable resource. I won’t say it’s action-packed; it consists largely of conversations between Peter Rabbit and various birds about their appearance and behavior. But the information is detailed, quite a range of birds is covered, and it’s presented with gentleness and charm.

Last but not least, here’s little bird we saw on an outing yesterday. I think it’s a female yellow throat, a tiny warbler we spotted first when she was perched on a blade of grass. I think she’ll make an appearance in chapter 25.

Be sure to click over to Read Aloud Thursday at Hope Is the Word for more read-aloud ideas (and, today, for some good words on The Voyage of the Dawn Treader)!

Longlegs the Heron

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We’ve been reading and enjoying Thornton Burgess’s Longlegs the Heron. A friend loaned us a copy of this difficult-to-find book after reading this post, and as food for our ongoing heron interest it has been timely and fun.

This book has a feel slightly different than other Burgess Bedtime Books I’ve read — more purposefully educational about the habits of Great Blue Herons. We learn a lot about Longlegs’ fishing practices and his striking patience. We learn that he eats field mice as well as fish and frogs. And we learn a lot about his competitors for the fish — Rattle the Kingfisher (who I’ve not met before in the pages of Burgess books), Billy Mink, and Plunger the Osprey, to name a few.

As in Lightfoot the Deer, the predatory habits of humans are front and center, and contrasted to those of the “little people of the Green Meadows and the Green Forest,” who are not careless but skilled and who never take more than they need. In this book, it takes the moral courage of Peter Rabbit (who plays a heroic role twice in the story) and Sammy Jay, as well as the intervention of Farmer Brown’s Boy, to save a young heron caught in a trap that someone has set for mink and then forgotten about. Longlegs has a couple of speeches about the unjust hunting habits of humans as well.

I remember this theme making a strong impression on me when I read Lightfoot the Deer as a child, and I think my daughters come away with a sense of what it means to be a good steward of nature — and the cost of being a poor one. In any case, they loved Longlegs and were there at my side like glue, pleading for extra chapters, at every reading session.

Adam of the Road

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Every now and then, I have a dream. I’m supposed to be playing the piano somewhere, but I can’t find my music. I search and search, each effort leading to new delays. I hear the performance starting, and the piano seat is empty, but I’m still searching for that music — and have to deal with the ten or twelve other emergencies that have bubbled up as I’ve been looking for it. It’s always a relief to wake up… I don’t think I’ve ever actually gotten to the piano bench.

I felt a little like that reading Adam of the Road, a classic Newberry winner from 1943. Adam Quartermayne, an eleven-year-old son of a minstrel, loses his dog. Then in the course of searching, he loses his father. Father and son search all over 13th-century England for one another. “The road is home to the minstrel,” says Adam’s father, “even though he may happen to be sleeping in a castle.” The road is certainly the organizing metaphor for this tale of a boy’s journey toward adulthood.

It started out a bit slowly, but by the end I was completely involved. The illustrations by Robert Lawson are filled with his typical tall, lanky, striding people in detailed garb. It’s a style I always have to adjust to, but once I’ve done so I’m able to appreciate its charm.

This is a novel I started reading aloud to my older daughter a few years ago, but it didn’t work out; we couldn’t find the time to read “just the two of us,” so I ended up going with a different book that both daughters could enjoy. But this year as we study medieval history, I think my older daughter will be able to read this for herself and enjoy it thoroughly. It’s loaded with historical detail, but carried so fully by the plot that the learning is effortless.

Read-Aloud Thursday: Herons

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We’re into herons around here this week. We saw no less than 6 of them at a nearby pond we visited the other day, and it sparked enough interest to read every word of this book by Bill Ivy, one of a series the girls are in the habit of selecting from every week.

Because of the opportunities we’ve had to observe herons, we found this book to be interesting, though it’s pure nonfiction. It even gave me something to look forward to about the fall, which is approaching all too quickly: when the leaves come down, we can look for heron nests. With as many of them around as we saw the other day, I’m pretty sure we should be able to see at least a few nests.

Another heron story is in Thornton Burgess’s The Adventures of Grandfather Frog, in which Long Legs the Great Blue Heron almost catches Grandfather Frog for breakfast. There we learn all about his patience as a hunter and feel the thrill of the drama! Long Legs actually has his own full book (pictured here), but we haven’t gotten ahold of a copy.

We sat down together to draw some herons in action, using photos we’d taken on our recent field trip. Here are the fruits of our labors, based on the sight of a heron coming in for a landing.

Younger Daughter's drawing

Older Daughter's drawing, modeled after a slightly different photo

My drawing

I like that we drew together. It’s something I always mean to do but never get to.

For more read-aloud posts, visit Read Aloud Thursday at Hope Is the Word.

Wild Wings

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We discovered Gill Lewis’ Wild Wings on the new books rack at the library yesterday. “Hey look,” I said, handing it to my 10-year-old, “it’s about an osprey.” She checked it out, and because I was curious myself I read furiously last night and this morning, burning delightedly through all 302 pages.

Wild Wings is narrated by 11-year-old Callum McGregor, a Scottish boy whose friend Iona shows him a rare thing: a pair of ospreys nesting on his farm. Ospreys haven’t been sighted there in a century, and in an effort to keep them safe from egg thieves and hunters the two try to keep them secret. Over the course of their story, others are drawn in, and subjects such as wildlife management, death and loss, friendship, and even international cooperation come into play. The tale is skillfully woven, contains plenty of naturalistic detail, and is told convincingly from Callum’s perspective.

One interesting aspect of the story is the positive role of technology. I have been free with criticism around these parts when it comes to the incursion of the technical and the digital in human affairs, but in this story texting, email, a tracking device carried by the female osprey, and Google earth all play very useful and even life-enriching roles. One neat feature at the end is the discovery of a website where interested readers can track a real osprey, nesting in Scotland, on its migratory journey to Africa.

I’m glad to have read Wild Wings, partly because I enjoyed it very much, and partly because it will give us something to talk about. Unlike the kids in the story, my daughters don’t have their own computers, nor do they have the kind of space and freedom the children in this small Scottish town have (more’s the pity). Our faith plays a different role in our lives than it does for these characters. But mostly I think it’s the ospreys that will be the most compelling conversational fodder. The story reminded me of a modernized Wheel on the School, both in its subject matter and in its idea that “sometimes when you begin to wonder, you begin to make things happen.”

On a personal note, one of the reasons ospreys interest us is that we’ve just returned from the Adirondacks, where ospreys have nested on a particular island in a particular lake for years. But this year, they weren’t there. Only their nest was. “They’ve been hounded,” my father says indignantly, “by a hundred little kayaks on the lake.”

But happily, they are still in the area. As we swam in that lake, a huge bird flew over and disappeared in the trees beyond the lake. If they’ve moved, they haven’t moved far — only to some other little lake rimmed by rugged white pines and stocked with plenty of fish. Wild Wings reinforces the wonder of these great birds and provides evidence that many people feel the same way about them.