Shaping Up! Round As A Tortilla A Book of Shapes by Roseanne Greenfield Thong

ROUND ARE THE CAMPANAS THAT CHIME AND RING.

ROUND ARE THE NESTS WHERE SWALLOWS SING.

I CAN NAME MORE ROUND THINGS. CAN YOU?

Books about shapes are many and varied, essential for preschool education when youngsters learn all the usual geometric shapes--round, square, triangular, rectangular, and sometimes more, done in varying styles of art and in degrees of complexity.

Roseanne Grenfield Thong's Round Is a Tortilla: A Book of Shapes (Chronicle Books) includes all the usual shapes with a twist--some engaging lessons in Spanish along the way. Most kids know what a tortilla is--a  round form of bread made from corn or wheat, crisp or soft, and often wrapped around some sort of filling, as in a taco or quesadilla. But many other things have something round to them, a trumpet's bell, a bird's nest, a sombrero's brim, and the top of a stew pot. And within the jolly rhyming lines, students are challenged to come up with other things that they know are round, and artist John Parra's folklorish illustrations provide many examples of the featured shape on each page.

Other shapes included are the square (cuadrado) illustrated by windows and photos and even the town's central square downtown. Rectangular flags fly from on high. Triangles turn up as chips for dips or sails that move sailing ships. And ovals--they can be seen in the shapes of solid things, like eggs, (huevos), olives, and lots of beans!

HOW MANY MORE DO YOU KNOW?

With a glossary of Spanish words used in the text and clever rhyming lines, this book is a novel introduction to shapes with illustrations featuring to puzzle out while picking up a few new words. Share this one with Thong and Parra's companion book, Green Is a Chile Pepper: A Book of Colors.

Are You My Mother? Hello, I'm Here! by Helen Frost

I'm out in the world--
I don't know where.
Mama! Papa!
Hello, I'm here!

Hatching is hard!

The baby sandhill crane has a lot of work just to get out of his shell. But then, what does he do?

He tries to stand up. One leg, then the other.

Hey, who's this?

Are you my brother?

The two chicks try their long legs and start to wander toward the water. There's something they're supposed to do there. Should they wade in to see?

No! Snapping turtles!

Stay close to me.

Mama strides swiftly over to head the twin chicks off before they wade in. She spreads her wide wings protectively as she quickly diverts their attention with something to eat...

... a snail for a treat!

One chick admires a group of cranes flying overhead. Is that what Mama can do with her long wings? Will he learn to fly like that, too?

The birth of two new American sandhill cranes is a big deal, but now it's time for a rest in the nest, in Helen Frost's latest nature poem, Hello, I'm Here! (Candlewick Press, 2019), which describes the first day of sandhill chicks. Despite their format as rhyming quatrains, Frost's verses convey some engaging nature science about these tall, impressive birds capable of migrating to the arctic portions of North America and Siberia on their strong, almost seven-foot wings. Rick Lieder's lovely closeup color photographs illustrate Frost's expressive rhyming narrative in a way that will help young readers identify with the little sandhill cranes' first days as they do what all little ones do--eat, explore, learn, nap, and follow their mothers. "These simple abcb quatrains scan beautifully--a good thing, since this will likely be requested over and over. Perfectly matched text and images make this a grand entrance," says School Library Journal.

"You've got to be taught to be afraid..." Friends: True Stories of Extraordinary Animal Friendships by Catherine Thimmesh

When an old orangutan at Zoo World in Florida lost her mate, she was listless and would barely eat. Workers worried that she might very well lose her will to live. So they brought a new companion--a stray tabby cat--to her enclosure, first just outside the fence, then in. The two became instant and inseparable friends.

You've got to be taught/ To hate and fear.../ You've got to be carefully taught. These words, part of the theme song from the iconoclastic 1949 musical South Pacific, began to run through my head as I paged through the amazing photos in Catherine Thimmesh's forthcoming Friends: True Stories of Extraordinary Animal Friendships (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011).

With its glorious photos of improbable animal pairings--a macaque and a pigeon, an wild owl who flies in to snuggle nightly with a Bassett hound, a squirrel monkey and a capybara, the famous wild polar bear and the sled dog, a tiger cub and baby orangutan, and most improbably a brief friend-in-need relationship of a mouse floating to safety in a flood on a swimming toad's head---this book cheers the soul while bringing into question what we think we know about nature and nurture.

Such improbable friendship stories are legendary through literature, from Aesop's fable of The Lion and the Mouse, right down to the best-selling books of Isabella and Craig Hatkoff, Owen & Mzee: The True Story of a Remarkable Friendship,(and sequels) the tales of an inseparable orphaned baby hippo and an ancient land tortoise, Carol Buckley's Tarra & Bella: The Elephant and Dog Who Became Best Friends, and of course the classic, Francine Patterson's Koko's Kitten (Reading Rainbow Book). These cross-species friendships, defying all our common wisdom about natural instincts, show that even the customary predator-prey relationships are primarily learned, nurture learned from parenting more than hardwired by nature, and most hopefully, capable of being transcended even by mature animals well beyond the pliability of youth. There is a lot to be learned in the brief verse, explanatory prose, and above all, the touching photos in this little book.

If an owl and a dog, an orangutan and a cat can transcend their different morphologies to see into each other's hearts, maybe there's still hope for us!

Friends can be different--
with stripes on their face:
or friends can have
fingers
to touch and embrace.

But it doesn't matter--
not in the end--
because deep where it counts,
one knows a true friend.

Oh, Christmas Tree! I Spy A Christmas Tree by Jean Marzollo and Walter Wick

I SPY A TOP AND A CHRISTMAS TREE.

I SPY TWO BIRDS AND A PRESENT FOR ME!

What's Christmas without a Christmas tree? And what's Christmas without a new I Spy book for the younger set? In their new offering for this season, Jean Marzollo's rhymes and Walter Wick's engaging photo compendia combine to give youngsters' brains an age-appropriate workout. Easy stuff for the middle elementary I SPY expert, but just right for preschoolers just sharpening their visual discrimination skills, this and the Mazollo-Wick team's junior I Spy Christmas books make great pre-Christmas or stocking stuffers.

In this outtake from their earlier captivating volume, I Spy Christmas: A Book of Picture Riddles, the verso (left-hand page) provides Marzollo's rhyming clues and enlarged picture versions of the objects. On the facing page these objects reappear, slyly concealed in the collage of colorful items on the right-hand side, a helpful device which helps kids zero in on the correct objects to be found in the photo. Christmasy items such as tree ornaments are mixed with toys such as race cars and polar bears.

As a bonus treat, like the chocolate kiss in the toe of the stocking, the authors provide an appended craft project which involves matching both sides of preprinted, punch-out ornaments, the picture side and the text side. Minimal adult help is required, but most four- or five-year-old children will be able to match both halves of the text and both halves of the picture to make their own sturdy tree ornaments for their own Christmas trees. For kids who blaze their way through the initial puzzles, there is also an appended picture dictionary of many of the other objects to be found on all of the pictures pages of this little book.

I Spy A Christmas Tree (I Spy (Scholastic Hardcover)) (Scholastic, 2010) provides a jolly way to deck the halls before the big day.

Others in the junior I Spy genre include I Spy Little Christmas, Can You See What I See? The Night Before Christmas, I Spy Merry Christmas (Scholastic Reader Level 1), and I Spy A Candy Cane (level 1) (Scholastic Readers), all great stocking stuffers for young listeners or beginning emergent readers.

All Ye In Free! Hide! by Jeff Foxworthy

On a Saturday morning
Like many before,
The kids were all restless.
In fact they were bored.

It had finally stopped raining
After nearly a week.
Then they had an idea:
"Let's play hide-and-seek!"

Suddenly it's a kid paradise--a sunny day, a comfortable neighborhood with lots of cluttered garages and greenery with tons of intriguing hiding places, and the kids are off to find their own places while the unfortunate girl who is "IT" counts down to the final call--"Coming, ready or not!"

Jeff Foxworthy's Hide!!! (Beaufort Books, 2010) is no great shakes as a work of poetry, but it is a barrel of fun for young readers. Not everyone lives in an old-fashioned neighborhood where kids range free to find the perfect hiding place anymore, but Steve Bjorkman's captivating illustrations not only conceal the kids but offer an expanding list of other things to seek out in the illustrations, beginning with 1 raccoon, 2 spoons, 3 mops, 4 flip-flops, and 5 monkey eyes.

Most of the kids' hiding places are to be found easily enough, with the possible exception of one ingenious (and strong) girl who hangs out literally, only her tightly gripping hands and dangling toes in sight, on a clothesline behind rows of laundered sheets blowing in the breeze:

Cindy saw places
That her friends ran right by.
It's not easy to spot her.
Want to give it a try?

But the real challenge is in finding, not the kids, but the other objects. Steve Bjorkman's riotous cartoon illustrations leave no stone of the scenery unturned in concealing these items, never in the same place twice. The monkeys are a comic story on their own, even appearing as a carved pedestal for a birdbath; the illusive flip-flops flop all over the place, hanging and flapping everywhere; and the seven trucks appear as real dump trucks parked on the street, tiny Matchbox-sized models dropped in the grass, Tonka-type toys in the sand, and parts of pickups just visible inside garages. When the count gets up to 14 cupcakes, the curious reader will have quite a mental exercise just keeping up with which ones have already been counted in the busy double-page spreads.

Foxworthy and Bjorkman, whose Dirt on My Shirt: Selected Poems (I Can Read Book 2), celebrated in rhyme the joys of boyhood, here offer some I Spy-type fun for young readers not quite ready to take on Walter Wick's complex photographic picture riddles. A great backseat book for car trips or rainy days when it's too wet to start your own game of hide-and-seek.

Color Me Outrageous! I Ain't Gonna Paint No More! by Karen Beaumont

Kids and cans of paint don't mix (as I found out when, decked out in Easter Sunday finest, my cousin and I, er, redecorated a neighbor's garage). In the case of I Ain't Gonna Paint No More, however, this combination produces one of the most exuberant, all-around joyous picture books in a long while. Karen Beaumont reworks the old ditty "It ain't gonna rain no more, no more" into bouncy, charming, and just-right rhymes, and David Catrow lets it all hang out with his rip-roaring illustrations of a preschooler who creates riotous body art with house paint and a brush.

The story begins as a small boy is caught "red-handed" painting his mama's floor and walls with, shall we say, bold brush strokes. Mama snatches up the paint and dunks the recalcitrant tot into the tub with a definitive "You ain't gonna paint no more!" Well, this kid is obviously driven by his muse. He finds the hidden painting supplies and sings,

So I take some red,
And I paint my head.

followed by,

Aw, what the heck
Gonna paint my neck!

Catrow skillfully uses black and white backgrounds to set off the multicolored splashes as the boy works his way down to his feet, wielding the paint brush with delicious abandon, until finally he has only one swatch of unpainted skin left, and, gleefully sings,

But I'm such a nut,
Gonna paint my---- WHAT?

just as Mama hoists him up and again plops him into a bathtub as brightly bedecked as he is to soak off all the fun.

As an example of proper behavior, it's over the top, and the grammar is nothing to brag about, but, oh, the good times to be had by reading and singing this one out loud! The illustrations are arranged so that listeners get to predict what body part gets the paint job next, and the ending will have everyone guffawing long after the splendidly splotched and splashed endpapered covers are closed. This book should be around to delight generations of giggling kids.