Feed Me Books Friday: So Long Summer

Good to the Last Salty Drop

Last week I shared my pick for a Labor Day book to share with your sprout, if you’re inclined to share the explanation behind the long weekend. Labor Day weekend is marked by pool-side cook-outs, warm nights around a campfire, and trips to the shore to enjoy one last day of barefoot. Unfortunately, these activities are often book-ended by snarls of traffic on the highway, so my family typically spends Labor Day at home having a casual barbeque with local friends and family. We made our escape to the seashore last week to soak in the summer sun, breathe in the salty air, and wiggle our toes in the sand. B is starting to grasp the concept of seasons, and he wished the beach a forlorn goodbye when we packed up our things, evidently aware that it would be a while before we return.


Keep a Little Summer on the Shelf

Just like we enjoy reading our souvenir books to remind us of vacations past, who doesn’t enjoy an out of season book now and then to conjure up fond memories? Grandma found it pretty funny when B picked a Santa book from her shelf to read before his nap at her house last month, but the novelty was fun – Christmas in July! My recommendation for you this week will bring that grit between your toes sensation right back to life even in the chills of December. Honestly, whether or not you go with my pick, try mixing it up with an out-of-season story now and then. A little cognitive dissonance is good for us all, and it’s a great way to talk about seasons and the passage of time with your child as you recall memories and anticipate coming excitement.


A Fleet of Feet

Lynn Reiser’s Beach Feet is my end-of-summer pick for several reasons. I love the focus on the experience of feet at the beach, I love the whimsical illustrations that invite poring over, I love the combination of simple text with more detailed and complex “footnotes,” and I love Reiser’s back-flap statement that “on beach days I exist in my feet.” The main text of the book is a long string of descriptive foot phrases such as, “claw feet, paw feet, flat feet, fin feet…” that can also read as a free verse poem (printed on a single page at the end). Most pages include several “footnotes” which explain either the descriptors used or the animals in the illustration in a sentence or two. So you not only get a fun beach frolic of a read, but some cognitive development with language and vocabulary. Regular beach visitors could almost use this as a amateur field guide to shore creatures. We prefer to enjoy the rhythm of the main text and the adventures of the feet in the pictures, pausing to peruse a footnote when B requests extra information. The final line of the book is “Good-bye, feet,” which I found especially poignant after our beach visit punctuated by B’s good-bye.


Appropriate for toddlers, preschoolers, primary grades.


What are you doing to enjoy the end of the season? What are you looking forward to in the coming one? Please share in the comments and link up a book pick if you have one!

Read more...

Make a Splash with Ocean Books, Crafts, and Activities

Waves of Reading Fun

Have you signed up for the summer reading program at your local library? This year’s theme (at most public libraries) is Make a Splash – READ! We got signed up last week and we’ve been enjoying all the activities our local branch has to offer. We attend children’s story hour on a regular basis, but it’s exciting to see so many new families making the library a part of their summer vacation. Our library staff is really playing to the theme.


Sparkly Fish Decoration


This week’s story hour craft was a cute and easy fish to hang in your window or on your patio. Materials include: 2 CDs or DVDs (out of style or a little scratched are just fine), craft foam in the color of your choice, glue, thread or floss, and optional googly eyes or stickers.

• You’ll cut two triangular fins, fishy lips, a tail, and a center fin shaped like an eight from the craft foam.
• Glue the edges of the triangular fins, tail, and lips just inside the edge of the label side of the first CD.
• Glue second CD on top, label sides together.
• Push center fin through holes of CDs. Punch a small hole in top fin and thread hanger through.
•  Add eyes to CD with stick-ons or markers.

I don’t have the templates as all pieces were precut for us, but if it gives you fits, contact me and I’ll trace the pieces from B’s.

Vacation-Inspiring Learning Activity


Another fun feature this week was a presentation on tide pool life. The kids listened to a short presentation on the animals that inhabit different types of seashells while they passed around examples. Then they got to practice their matching, detective, and map skills as they looked for creatures matching their handout in gridded tide pool model boxes around the room. B was not really ready for the grid skills (the octopus is in B7), but we treated it like a game of Eye Spy: he looked at the pictures on the handout, pointed them out in the boxes, and I recorded. After looking at all the seashells and listening to the conch, I’m longing for the beach!

Oceans: Fiction and Non Fiction

We couldn’t enjoy these activities without taking home some ocean-themed books, and I decided the combination of the fish craft and the shell demonstration was a good bridge to the concepts of fiction and non-fiction. Preschool is the age to differentiate the cognitive concepts of fantasy and reality, and all it takes is an explicit mention of which stories are true and which are imaginary. We brought home Life in an Ocean, by Carol Lindeen, and Over in the Ocean, by Marianne Berkes. Life in an Ocean introduces several sea creatures with simple text and photo illustrations. It also includes a short glossary and additional ocean facts at the back. Over in the Ocean is a variation on the traditional Over in the Meadow poem, and you can count sea creatures and enjoy the rhythm and rhyme.

Appropriate for: Toddlers, Preschoolers

Linking up With:

Read Aloud Thursday

Feed Me Books Friday

Meme’s the Word (on Saturday)

Wishing Janna at The Adventure of Motherhood an enjoyable, well-deserved break as she takes July off from Feed Me Books Friday. Each week will be “guest-hosted” by some FMBF regulars, including ME! I’m excited to be part of one of my favorite memes. Hope you’ll come back here July 23 and link up!

Read more...

Souvenir Books

What do You Bring Home?

When you are lucky enough to find the time and money for a family vacation, the most important things to bring home are happy memories and strengthened family bonds, but beyond that, what makes the best souvenir? I’m a photo junkie, with big dreams of vacation scrapbooks. Right now those look more like vacation scrap-piles, but it’s a start. Kid’s souvenirs can be tricky… A T-shirt? A theme-park toy? Something local and authentic they’ll break before you get home? Something made in China they pick out in the gift shop? The answers depend on the kid, the parent, the trip, and the moment, but I’d love to hear what you think. We have established two traditions in our travels with child(ren) thus far: We write a postcard and send it home to each child (cool photo, written memory, local postmark) and we look for a book that is either about the location or about an activity we enjoyed there. In choosing and buying books, I’ve sometimes waited until we’ve returned from the trip to gauge what was memorable for B and seek out a book that will help him recall those memories.

My Lucky Toddler

Due to a serendipitous combination of circumstances, including my teaching schedule, an invitation from my parents, and a Christmas gift, B’s first vacation was a trip with my extended family to Hawaii. My lucky 18-month-old got to experience a plane flight, a Hawaiian holiday, and irreplaceable family memories. We got to introduce our toddler to the warm tropical ocean waters, see the sights, and have some help from the family along the way.

I wonder how many of those memories will stick with him – he still talks about it now, and I hope that by talking about it and jogging the memory with our souvenir book, he’ll continue to treasure those early vacation memories as he ages.

Take a Board Book Tour of Hawaii

If you read my post on Good Night America, you already know I’m a fan of Adam Gamble’s Good Night World Series. After returning from Hawaii, I ordered Good Night Hawaii from Amazon because experience told me that it would be full of references to the tourist stops we enjoyed and pictures that would help B remember and articulate his experiences. I was not disappointed. While not every location featured in the book was familiar to us (no volcano exploration on that trip), it gave us a springboard for our memories of the places we did visit and has also generated some talk of plans for other trips (much like Good Night America).

Appropriate for babies, toddlers, preschoolers, on up!

Better than a T-shirt?

So am I a nerd for thinking books make great souvenirs? Or are there other bibliophile travelers out there? I never bought books as souvenirs before my kids were born, but I’m starting to wish I had!

I’ll be linking up with Ginny Marie’s Where in the World Wednesday at Lemon Drop Pie.

Read more...