Children's book reviews, all age comic books, Kidlit, mglit, movies, entertainment and parenting
Young audiences love chaos and dogs. In real life, chaos isn’t something we want. It’s not something that anybody encourages from young children. Adults want kids to have the illusion of control, but without the inherent threat of physical danger or damaging material goods. Claude is a lovely, almost wordless book about three things that kids love. Dogs. Chaos. Unpredictability. It could certainly be argued that those final two go together, but let’s deal with why kids will dig Claude.
No bones about it, full immersion is the best way to learn a second language. Full immersion is also a luxury. If you don’t live in a country where your native tongue isn’t the primary language or can’t afford a school where that’s the modus operandi of teaching, it’s also not an option. This is where you’re thankful for those relatives who still speak a second language fluently or need to seek out books that start at a very young age. My First Seek & Learn: At Home, Mi Premer Busca & Apprende: En Casa is the same either way you say it. It combines the curious element that toddlers have hardwired into their brains and adds a bi-lingual element that will pay dividends for years to come.
Jazzy is a witch who likes to ride bicycles. She likes to ride real bicycles. These are the pedal-powered bicycles that depend on centripetal force for their turns and are 100% reliant on people to move forward. Jazzy is also a lot like most kids in elementary school. Friend Fiasco is the second book in the Jazzy the Witch series and is just the charming, low-key, comfort reading that kids in mid through upper-elementary school want to read.
One of the popular tropes for parents of high school seniors is to purchase a copy of Oh, the Places You’ll Go. Many of their influential teachers will sign the book. It’s meant to be a look back at what they’ve accomplished, and a glance forward to their post-high school life. What the Road Said, by Cleo Wade, with illustrations by Lucie de Moyencourt, channels the same vibe. It does that, but it’s also a read-aloud parable about the situations and challenges young people will encounter. The book asks realistic, yet vague enough questions that allow any kid to realistically see them asking it. They’re the things that kids secretly fear or openly wonder if they’re weird for thinking about it.
File under: adult ADHD. As I look at Relic Hamilton, Genie Hunter on my desk it mocks me. The book knows that it was read many months ago. The book knows that the praise I thought about it stood true and was higher than most upper-elementary and mglit releases. The books also knows that it’s one of the few releases that speaks to boys more than girls. The educator in me knew that I needed to speak from the mountain top to my upper-elementary school teacher friends, that this was something they needed to be aware of. Yet, with all of that wind in the book’s sail, it sat on my desk, silently judging me. It was doing this while all the time boys, aged eight through twelve, were tilting at the literary windmills looking for a book with action, yokai, and a twist.
The rabbit hole is a metaphor that I use in class a lot. It’s really fun explaining that to a group of elementary school students. The older students more readily understand it, but are less likely to enjoy the thrill of following it. Lonely Planet Kids Let’s Go Rock Collecting is the best kind of rabbit hole for mid-elementary through mid-middle school ages. The content, as well as, the enjoyment in Rock Collecting can demo much higher, but that’s if audiences are able to look past its young-skewing illustrations.
Show me a book that makes someone care about something that they don’t care about, or know much about, and you’ll show me a great book. Lionel Messi’s World Cup Triumph: History’s Greatest Games #1 takes that challenge and enthusiastically says “Goaaaaaal”, with as much enthusiasm and energy as fans would expect from the game. Yes, but the surprising part about Lionel Messi’s World Cup Triumph is that it takes one game from his career, the 2022 World Cup Finale, and infuses that, as well as his life, and the evolution of football itself into a graphic novel that entertains and makes you care.
Why do I need to remind our 14-year-old of his multiplication tables? He’s “on level”, got a B in eighth-grade math, but I’m still reminding him of what 8 x 8 or what 64 divided by 8 is. Something is amiss in the state of middle school mathematics. Lot and Lots of Ocelots: A Skip Counting Book does not have this problem. If anything, Lots and Lots of Ocelots is the pre-school and early-elementary school- kryptonite to a problem that could vex kids in four-to-seven years.
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