On a Wing and a Wish: Salt Water Bird Rhymes by Al Pittman

As April is Poetry month I figured this is a good time to feature On a Wing and a Wish: Salt Water Bird Rhymes, written by Al Pittman and illustrated by Veselina Tomova.  This book contains wonderfully silly rhymes featuring salt water birds of all kinds!  Anna and I got a kick out of some of the rhymes and pictures in this book, even if some of the poems didn't make a lot of sense to us.  At the back of the book is a list of the names of the different birds featured in the poems.

This would be a great resource to use to add some fun to a science study of salt water birds.

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Daniel and His Very Good Friend by Sunny Griffin

We borrowed Daniel and His Very Good Friend, written by Sunny Griffin and illustrated by Linda Welty, from a friend.  It's just a tiny book that tells the story from the Bible of Daniel's close friendship with King Darius.  Each double page spread has a picture on one side and text on the other.  Just enough to keep a little one interested.

One thing I found interesting about this book is that it focused on the friendship of Daniel with King Darius instead of just on Daniel being saved from the lions.


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Wild About Books by Judy Sierra

Wild About Books, written by Judy Sierra and illustrated by Marc Brown, is a fun rhyming story about a librarian that brings her bookmobile to the zoo and introduces the zoo animals to reading and writing, and before you know it, all the animals are wild about books!

The author and illustrator dedicated the book to Dr. Seuss and there are three hidden references to Dr. Seuss in the book.  You can find out what they are, and also information on how the story came about, on the Wild About Books page on Judy Sierra's website.

Anna got a great kick out of the book.  She loved looking for the animals mentioned in the text.

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Stanley's Little Sister by Linda Bailey

Stanley's Little Sister is another book written by Linda Bailey and illustrated by Bill Slavin.  These are fast becoming favorites of ours.  In this book Stanley the dog is not impressed when his owners get a cat.  He tries very hard to make friends with the cat but keeps getting into trouble for it.

Anna got a big kick out of the book but she was kind of upset that the owners didn't understand that Stanley was trying to be nice.  She wanted to get in the book and set them straight.  :)


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Mother Hen's Canada by Kenneth M. Mercer

Mother Hen's Canada, written by Kenneth M. Mercer with illustrations by Clara (Maher) Dunne & Danielle Dunne, is an interesting fable.  Mother Hen wants a family so she sets about gathering eggs from all around the farmyard, not noticing if they are all chicken eggs or not.  Once the eggs hatch she tries to make a happy family of the little creatures, differences and all, but soon gets upset with the difference and the squabbles and tries to enforce some rules.  The little creatures are  none to happy and poor mother hen wears herself out and becomes quite sick trying to keep them all together.

Little ones will enjoy this story simply for the simple little story, but adults will realize the bigger story.  I thought this would be an interesting book to feature at this time while our country is gearing up for it's 41st General Election. While it's not a terribly well written book, it is kind of an interesting look at Canada and I'm glad we read it.

I found this book at our local library and the only information I could find online about the book is on the book illustrations page of Clara  Dunne's website.  Clara and her daughter co-illustrated the book.

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Carry Me, Mama by Monica Devine

Carry Me, Mama, written by Monica Devine and illustrated by Pauline Paquin, is a wonderful story for little ones about growing up. When Katie was little her mother used to carry Katie in her hood with her wherever she went.  When Katie got too big for the hood she had to walk, but she really wanted to be carried.  Her mother gradually took her on longer walks until finally Katie got used to walking, but she still liked to be carried to bed.

Anna and I loved this book.  One thing that Anna wasn't impressed with was the fact that there were no facial features on the characters in the book.  That gave us the chance to talk about how different artists have different styles and why artist do what they do.  I suggested that maybe the artist didn't give the characters facial features so that you could imagine that they looked however you wanted them to look.  Anna decided she still would rather that the artist draw the facial features.

Monica Devine is a retired speech therapist living in Alaska and this is just one of four children's books she has written.  Pauline Paquin  is a self taught artist from Quebec.

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Mwakwa Talks to the Loon by Dale Auger

Mwakwa Talks to the Loon: A Cree Story for Children, written and illustrated by Dale Auger, is a great book with an important lesson.  Mwakwa is a great hunter but he becomes proud of his ability and loses his skill.  He thinks he can get it back anytime but he soon realizes that he needs to humble himself and show proper respect before he can regain the skill.  The illustrations in this book are beautiful!

There are Cree words interspersed in the story and there are pronunciation guides in the back but it's a bit bothersome to skip back and forth and I still wasn't quite sure how to pronounce some of them.  I simply skipped over the Cree words and it didn't affect the story in the least, but I do still wish that we could hear the story with the Cree words included in it.  I was hoping to find a place online where you could hear how they are actually supposed to be pronounced, but I haven't come across it yet.


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