I love gingerbread. Especially a gingerbread man, that’s soft and chewy with yummy sweet icing – but not too much.
So sitting here on a cold afternoon dreaming of gingerbread I found this gorgeous clip on Youtube of an old Peter Pan Records book and record set. I adore the illustrations…
And more gingerbread men….
Very cute little singlet by aptly named Gingerbread…
And Cookie Cutie cards by draw pilgrim…
And Tall Tales gift cards from eight sparrows…
Sweet Dreams Lullaby is a dream of a book. The perfect blending of gentle poetic text that rolls off the tongue, and stunning illustrations of a little character who children adore.
Have a look at our review of Sweet Dreams Lullaby on the funky and informative blog Mini Gaga.
It’s really, really hot here today and we are trapped inside. Ned and I have enjoyed this little book trailer immensely and we will probably watch it a couple more times before the day is out. It looks gorgeous animated so it will be really interesting to see the book.
The author/illustrator, award winning designer, Michael Hall includes 300 hearts in his stunning illustrations and readers are encouraged to try and count all of the hearts at the end of the book. It is due to be published in Australia next month and you can see inside the book more on the Harper Collins website.
Also have a look at some deleted scenes from the book on the newly created blog Under the Greenwillow devoted to celebrating the publishers 35th birthday – this will be a blog to watch.
Thanks to Fuse #8 for pointing me in the direction of this great book trailer. Also check out their review of Cosmic, an intermediate novel by Frank Cottrell Boyce – one of my all time favorite authors.
Also discovered today is this awesome new blog, this is definitely going to be one that I am going to be addicted to. A whole blog devoted meticulously to ‘recommended inappropriate books for kids’. The research, the writing and the images are just incredible and will give you a giggle as well as providing some incredible info.
This book was one of my very favorite books from childhood and I remember it vividly…
Whistle For Willie is about Peter, a little boy who really wants to learn to whistle his very long sausage dog - Willie. It is such a simple story but it meant so much to me, as it has to millions of other children since its publication in 1964. And still now I am just in love with Keats.
Just like Sesame Street did, Ezra Jack Keats and his picture books opened up a whole different world to me. I learnt about big cities on the other side of the world, urban landscapes that I had not experienced but they fascinated me.
The illustrations in this book are as vivid as my memories of it. The colours are loud and happy, the sky bright blue and the pavements gritty grey. There is funky graffiti on the streets and gorgeous 60s floral wallpaper on Peter’s walls at home. Keats used a spectacular technique of blending gouache watercolour with collage in his illustrations that gives the book an illusion of texture.
I don’t remember ever questioning the fact that Peter is an African American child and I was interested to find this quote by Keats on his Foundation website…
“…None of the manuscripts I’d been illustrating featured any black kids—except for token blacks in the background. My book would have him there simply because he should have been there all along. Years before I had cut from a magazine a strip of photos of a little black boy. I often put them on my studio walls before I’d begun to illustrate children’s books. I just loved looking at him. This was the child who would be the hero of my book.”
Peter is every child; he struggles with learning to whistle, he plays, he skips and he explores. His enthusiasm and joyfulness in life is infectious and irrepressible. His expressions and his movements are just delightful and just looking at this book makes me want to give him a big kiss.
This animation of Whistle For Willie was filmed in 1965.
Whistle For Willie was the second book written by Keats about Peter, the first being The Snowy Day for which he won the Caldecott Medal. The Snowy Day is also gorgeous; for me imagining a city covered in snow is still a dream and of course this book also taught me the art of making snow angels. Peter goes on to feature in four other books growing up to be a teenager. You can see that lucky Katie found a second hand copy of Goggles starring Peter in this photo from her loot at Booktown. The Keats books are actually hard to find in Aus.
There is a beautiful clip from a film made about Keats on the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation website. Watching it brought me to tears today as I discovered so much about the man who created these amazing stories from my childhood. Overwhelmingly what comes from this piece and the rest of the information on the website is that Keats just adored children. Although he never had a family of his own he respected children and really believed that all children have a place in the world and should be loved and treated well.
On this Mothers’ Day I feel very lucky to have had a mother and grandmother who instilled such a love for reading and literature in me. I know that I want the same for Ned and the best way to do that? I think I’ll share some stories about Peter with him.
||The Snowy Day is currently available from our online store||
When people – especially non-book people – visit my house for the first time, they invariably say, ‘Wow, so many books!’ And then if they make it to our playroom or Rowan’s room, they say, ‘Gosh, more books!’
I love buying new books. There’s something special about selecting a new book, making it yours and finding a spot for it on your shelf.
But I also love borrowing books from our library, and over the last few years I have increasingly had lots of fun buying thrifted or secondhand books. To help give a framework for sharing our favourite ‘non-new’ finds, Lou and I have decided to start a new semi-regular themed post, ‘Borrowed and Thrifted’. We hope you like it.
A couple of years ago I discovered a GREAT thing about our library, which is the online process of putting books on reserve. Often when I’m on the internet, trundling around all the gorgeous blogs, I find a book that sounds like one I need to read. I just hop straight across to our online library catalogue without leaving my chair. Our library has several branches, and if a book is on loan or at a different branch, the system allows you to put the book on reserve through the online catalogue. When the book comes in to my branch, I get an email, and then all I have to do is go to the reserve shelf, and grab the book(s) with my name on them. It’s so efficient, I can be in and out of the library in about 2 minutes. I do love browsing the shelves of the library too, but when I’m short of time, this (free!) system is much appreciated.
I found this treasure at the library recently: What the Sky Knows by Nina Bourke and illustrated by Stella Danalis.
I want to know what the sky knows
How to be blue
Or grey
Or pink
How to make clouds …
Sparse text and abstract collage illustrations characterise this picture book by Australians Nina Bourke and Stella Danalis. I love how the narrative gets you to think about what it means to be the sky with all the responsibilities it entails. But I especially love the mixed media artwork because I always try to expose Rowan to different styles of illustration in the books we read.
The illustrations themselves ask as many questions as the text: fish with legs and wings, flying carpets and ladders to the moon. The concise text does not mean that this is a book purely for younger readers; there is lots of room for discussion in this book and older children would be able to engage with questions about the illustrator’s interpretation of the author’s words, and would be able to use the illustrative style as inspiration for their own artwork.
In the next post in this series I’m planning to list some ways I go about tracking down secondhand books online… Stay tuned!
There is no other series that transports me instantaneously to my childhood like that of Beatrix Potter.
My main BP memory is of being tucked up in bed at my grandparents’ house, in flannelette sheets and with a feathered pillow and eiderdown. My Papa is reading me and my sister one of the small format Beatrix Potter books…
Once upon a time there were four little Rabbits, and their names were––
Flopsy,
Mopsy,
Cotton-tail,
and Peter.
They lived with their Mother in a sand-bank, underneath the root of a very big fir-tree.
Papa had a unique storytelling style, and he used lots of dramatic tonal variation in his renditions of these stories. Sometimes he would make up new narrative and dialogue. (I remember that I would get quite annoyed when he did this – I just wanted him to read the story ‘properly’!) But what is obvious to me now is that he got an enormous amount of joy from reading these books to us.
A little shelf of the Peter Rabbit books were kept on a dresser in the room that we always stayed in at my grandparents’ house. As much as I remember being read the stories, I also remember reading the books myself, selecting different volumes from that little shelf.
Mum later told me that BEFORE these books were at my grandparents’ house, they lived at my mum’s grandmother’s house. By my calculations this makes them at least 50-odd years old. First read by my mum and her sisters, then by me, my sisters and cousins, this is one well-loved set of books.
After my Nana died, just 6 days after Rowan was born, my Mum passed on to Rowan the set of books, still enclosed in the same set of shelves.
So Rowan is now the lucky guardian. At some stage, we will have to see if we can get some preservation work done on the books – undoing the well-intentioned scars of sticky tape. Hopefully we can ensure they last long enough to be passed on to his grandchildren too.
Beatrix Potter first self-published The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 1901, based on a story she’d written in a letter to the five-year-old son of her governess. In that story she invented an exquisite and believable world of animal characters and the stories of their interactions with human characters. She broke many conventions of her time, and – I think – she inspired many other great pieces of children’s literature. The first book was later picked up by publisher Frederick Warne & Co, and by the end of 1902, 28,000 copies were in print. It’s hard to believe, but a soft toy of Peter Rabbit was produced just a year later, in 1903, which makes Peter the oldest known licensed character!
The joy of Peter Rabbit lives on – there are countless editions of the series now, in every available format. For me, it represents the most timeless children’s series of them all. It seems like perfect reading for the lead-up to Easter, and I will be sharing the tales of Peter Rabbit, the Flopsy Bunnies and Benjamin Bunny with Rowan over the next couple of weeks – and I might not be able to resist an imitation of one of Papa’s dramatic renditions.
||A selection of Beatrix Potter books and soft toys are available in the We Heart Books store||
Don’t miss checking out this trailer from UK outfit, aka Studios.
It’s a film adaptation of Oliver Jeffer’s picture book, Lost and Found. Lucky UK residents will have the chance to see the complete 25-minute film on Christmas Eve at 2:30pm and on Boxing Day at 4:30pm on Channel 4.
The colours, movement of the animated figures and music evoke the themes of the book so beautifully. An independent crafter, Karine (whose blog can be found here), was commissioned to knit the main character’s outfit – how cool is that?!
Studio aka has done some amazing stuff. I have previously blogged about Helen Ward and Marc Craste’s book, Varmints, which Studio aka made into a film, directed by Marc. If you haven’t seen it already, Jo Jo in the Stars, their multi-award-winning production is also must-viewing.
(Via Babyccino.)
Follow Us!