Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Ouack, Pack, and Quack

Tilli, a faithful reader and tireless advocate for the movie The Lady Eve, has a special request.

"Could your boys do a post recommending books for littler kids? (my kindergarten nephew and first grade niece). On the topic of bookish kids: Johnny's reaction when my sister came up with craft-ideas for a rainy Sunday: "'But I thought when you said we were gonna take it easy you meant we'd just cuddle and read books!'"

Kindergarten and first grade are the best years for buying books.  Kids still love their old picture books, with the added delight of being able to read some of them for themselves, and they are ready to follow longer, more complex stories, not just the chapter books aimed at their reading level---like The Magic Tree House series---but even some carefully chosen classics.  A big favorite with both young Mannions when they were that age was Paddle-to-the-Sea.  One or two chapters a night, and they stayed with it, enthralled, from the moment the snow bank melted and Paddle slid down the hill into Lake Nipigon and began his journey to when he was finally scooped up in the net of the French fishing boat at the mouth of the St Lawrence.

And the first big book our eldest read for himself was Wind in the Willows.  He was 6 when he discovered it and discovered he could read it and he fell in love.  He's still in love with it and will still occasionally fall asleep reading about the battle for Toad Hall.

The best thing for grown-ups is that children at this age still enjoy being read to.  The books are all at once more interesting---I love Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are, but there are only so many times a grown up can stand to say goodnight to that annoying old lady whispering hush and some nights you just don't have the energy to let the wild rumpus start---and they don't need to hear the same stories over and over again.

So I asked the young Mannions, they put their heads together, and they came up with a short list of some of their old favorites from a few years back, many of which are still favorites.

These the kindergartner and the first grader will enjoy.

Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel.  Virginia Lee Burton.

The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge.  Hildegard Swift and Lynd Ward.

Burt Dow Deep-Water Man.  Robert McCloskey.  Actually, any and every book by McCloskey.

Lost and Found.  Mark Teague.  Also Dear Mrs LaRue.

Do You See A Mouse?  Bernard Waber.

Farmer Duck.   Martin Wadell.

Drummer Hoff.   Barbara Emberly.

The original Magic Schoolbus stories, by Joanna Cole and Bruce Degan.  There are a lot of Magic Schoolbus books out there, but most of them are reworkings of scripts from the TV series.  They're not bad, but they're sloppily illustrated and do not have all the interpolations, marginalia, and witty asides that are in the originals.

There's an author and illustrator named Gail Gibbons who does wonderful non-fiction books for kids, on just about any topic you can think of.  Favorites with the Mannions are Planets; Whales; Beacons of Light:  Lighthouses; Mummies, Pyramids and Pharoahs; and Surrounded by Sea: Life on a New England Fishing Island.

Another great set of non-fiction books is called Small Town, USA.  The books are by Arthur and Bonnie Geisert and cover a year in the life of small towns in the mountains, desert, along a river, and in a prairie, with lots of witty look and find illustrations.

The Junie B. Jones series.  Barbara Park.

For the first grader, but the kindergartner may enjoy them too:

The Henry Huggins series and the Ramona Quimby series, both by Beverly Cleary.

The Great Brain stories by John D. Fitzgerald.  These might be more for kids a bit older, but the 9 year old was enjoying them along with his older brother when he was in first grade.  Some time I'll have to tell you how my enthusiasm for these books got me in trouble with the 11 year old's fourth grade teacher.

The Freddy the Pig series by Walter R. Brooks.  Freddy, poet, banker, newspaper editor, pilot, cowboy, detective, politician, and catcher of spies, is in my opinion not just the most intelligent character in all of American children's literature he's the hero of some of the funniest books in all of American literature, no matter the age.

The Chet Gecko series.  Chet's the best lizard detective in the fourth grade at Emerson-Hickey Elementary.

Junie B., First Grader.  The continuing adventures of Junie B. Jones.

Junie tells her own stories and she's a poet.  A poet of nonsense verse and malapropisms who's re-invented conventional grammar to make it more expressive of her particular world view, which is, to say the least, somewhat eccentric, even for a little kid.  Here she is on buying a costume for Halloween in BOO...and I MEAN IT!  She's decided to be the scariest thing she can think of.  A clown.  And not just any clown.  A particular clown she met at the circus.  Squirty the Clown.   But Squirty scares her so much she can barely face picking out her costume.

I looked down the clown row real nervous.

And oh no!  Oh no!

There were scary clown parts hanging everywhere, I tell you!

I quick jumped behind Mother's skirt.

Then very slow, I peeked out.

There were round clown noses.  And creepy clown hair.  And big white clown gloves.  And giant, baggy clown pants with s'penders on them.

I did some deep breaths.

Then finally, I came out from behind Mother.  And I looked all the way down the aisle.

"Yeah, only here's the problem.  I don't actually see the Squirty suits," I said.

Mother patted me.  "Yes, well, I didn't think we'd find a real Squirty costume," she said.  "But with all of these clown parts, you can be much cuter than Squirty, Junie B."

She took a wig off the shelf and plopped it on my head.

"Here, how 'bout this funny, frizzy red hair?" she said.

I quick took it off.

"No, Mother.  No!"  I said.  "I don't want to be frizzy.  I want to be Squirty!"

I stamped my foot.

"Squirty!  Squirty!" I said.  "I have to be Squirty!"

"Shh!  Honestly, Junie B!  What has gotten into you?" she said very snappish.

Just then a boy walked by.  And he saw me getting snapped at.

I asked Mother to tone it down a notch.

I will not be saying that comment again, probably.

Her face turned steamy mad.  And she talked through closed teeth.

"That's enough out of you, young lady," she said.  "Not one more rude word!  Do you understand me?"

I rocked back and forth on my feet kind of nervous.

Then I did a gulp.

"Yeah, only that is really going to cut down on my end of the conversation," I said kind of quiet.

There, that ought to get Tilli and her niece and nephew through quite a few rainy afternoons of cuddling and reading.

Anybody else have more suggestions, I'm sure they'd be appreciated.

Oh, and 10 points to whoever emails me first with the name of the book the title of this post comes from.

That's a great one!

Comments

[Elsie]

Drum roll............The answer to your 10 point question is "Make Way for Ducklings" by Robert McCloskey. That's always been one of my favorite books. I, like you, have a soft spot for Boston. Every time I read that book, it brings me back to many happy times spent there.

Tell your sons they made some great reading recommendations! As a former Kindergarten teacher, my classes enjoyed many of the books they mentioned. As for some of the newer books, I try to keep up with children's literature, and have purchased a number of books for my own enjoyment. Some of us never want to grow up.

[pareader]

Funny that you reference Make Way for Ducklings today. I read it to my son for the first time on Sunday evening and he took several minutes to recite the ducklings' names over and over so I could commit them to memory as he had. Clearly, Ma Reader had beaten me to it and shared this delightful book with him many times, and he obviously is a big fan.

[Lance]

Ten points, Elsie. Now for 20. What was the name of Mike Mulligan's steam shovel?

Pa, Mothers are sneaky that way. I can't remember the first time we read Ducklings or which of us read it first, but I remember one particular reading very well. We were in Boston. Matt was 6 and Jack was 3. We went to the Public Garden and took a ride on the swan boats, and were followed by Mr and Mrs Mallard and all their kith and kin of course. You can buy a copy of the book right there at the dock, which we did, and we took it over to a shady spot in the grass and read it together right there in sight of the Mallards' island.

[Bill Altreuter]

A Robert McCloskey fan, and yet you omitted both "Homer Price" and "Centerburg Tales" from your otherwise excellent set of recommendations. You did, however, include Freddy, who is simply the best. The Freddys have been in and out of print, and I have always made it a practice to pick them up whenever I see them, even before I had children. For some reason they do not seem to have found the sort of wide audience that they merit, but many an Outside Counsel dinnertime conversation has been enlivened by reference to bankers who are startled by sums over five dollars, boastful ducks or grandiloquent roosters. (Indeed, I have been compared to Charles the Rooster on more than one occasion, an illustration of exactly how finely drawn the characters in the Freddys are.)

[Nance]

If you haven't discovered Poppleton, you haven't lived.

[Elsie]

Okay Lance...for 20 points...Mike Mulligan's steam shovel was named MaryAnne. Isn't it pathetic that this is my area of expertise in life?? :) When I was teaching, I always made certain the children knew the name of the author of every book we read. Just the other day, I bumped into a young man I had in my Kindergarten class a number of years ago. He greeted me by saying, "Hi..."Caps for Sale",...by Esphyr Slobodkina." Warmed the cockles of my heart!

[Linkmeister]

I used to be in a Yahoo History/Biography book club which had as its founder the author/illustrator of the Akiko books, Mark Crilley. I've looked at a couple of them, and they seem to be pretty good for the munchkin set.

[grishaxxx]

You devil - 7 and down, eh? I only really got to do 7 and above (when they start to tell good stories on their own, it's time to say to Mom and Dad - "Hey, they can follow a narrative - READ TO 'EM!"
So I got to.
More a primer for the parents than for the kids, of course; kids know it all.
It was a great thrill for me to see that Public Garden, the year I lived in Cambridge and went across the Charles. There are even more ducks (and their families) who wander around the exurban wetlands of my current county - also geese, also herons. McCloskey brings a bird's life and POV close enough to make you start everytime you see one; puddles and ponds matter.
Up from 7, anything is possible - I'll wait for the next tier for that.
And the caption - William Steig, maybe?

[Tilli (Mojave Desert)]

Big Thanks to Alex, Matt and Lance!

I'll go down to our little village library and check 'em out before I order online. I miss city-life bookstores!

I bought the Junie B Halloween book for the kids last year and they loved it.

Happy memories of my dad reading to us from "the elephant book" (so-called because it had lost its cover and the end-pieces featured a sort of wallpaper of elephants. It was a collection of stories. I wonder what its real title was. It may have been one of my dad's childhood books.); another book with a cover illustration of kids on a book-raft sailing down a river; Uncle Remus (with my dad's southern accent and funny faces! 'Please don't put me in the briar patch.'); A. A. Milne ("When we were very young" was a great favorite and I've never forgot:' James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree took great care of his mother though he was only three', and, of course: Bad Sir Brian Botany!); Babar; Charlotte's Web.

Like my dad, I'm a bit of a read-aholic. It's funny talking to my husband's niece about books. She's a university research librarian and very, very smart. My contribution to book-conversations with her is pretty much limited to: It was a good read!

What do you think of the Harry Potter series? I think I enjoy them because I think I'd have enjoyed reading them as a kid.

Thanks, again.

[David Parsons]

Don't forget _Katy and the Big Snow_ (Burton); I started reading that to my eldest son when he was about 3. And the Thomas books (the real ones, not the television spinoff ones) are very good, if you're willing to spend 30 years in advance doing research on railroads, and are willing to footnote your storyreading with long discussions on how railroads work and about which of the Thomas prototype engines still exist.

Laura Wilder's _Little House_ books are also well worth reading. I started reading the entire series to Russell when he was about two, and we read through the entire series (modulo _Farmer Boy_ and _The First Four Years_, which he didn't like because it wasn't about the Ingalls family) about three times. Those books aren't quite so good for footnoting as the Thomas books are, but since I grew up about 60 miles south of Lake Pepin, I do the best I can.

[Connie]

Some years ago at a library show I stood in line for over an hour to get an autographed copy of "Make Way for Ducklings." I have always thought that we parents of a certain age owe our fondness for "Ducklings" and "Mike Mulligan" to the fact that Captain Kangaroo frequently showed those wonderful Weston Woods movie-ettes for these and other great picture books. (Ferdinand). They were made by panning the actual book art, and are still out there in video form. These days my 17 year old serious reader is recommending books to me.

[Connie]

Oh, and Tilli, Garrison Keillor read James James Morrison Morrison etc. on Writer's Almanac on NPR a few mornings ago, and I was chanting along in the car.