Miss Nelson is Missing

by James Marshall

Seriously, is there anyone who hasn't read this book yet?  

Remember your teacher as the end of year approaches.  He or she is such a big part of your child's formative years.  Thank your teacher.

We've been getting together everything for the end of the year, making things for the end of year gift for my kindergartener's teacher.  We're doing things a little different this year because of what happened this winter.  The day before Christmas break it snowed over a foot.  School was cancelled, so of course the class Christmas party was cancelled, and our gift to the teacher went undelivered and moldy (I'm lying.  It never got moldy because I ate it the same day I found out there was no school.  I needed it.).  The teacher really gets a hefty load of gifts at Christmas, and school being out meant she really missed out (on the appreciation and the tasty treats).  So we really put some extra effort into this end of year gift to make up for it.

This isn't exactly what we did, but it's the closest picture I could find.  Our flowers weren't frosted quite as ornately.  I know she likes scrapbooking, so I tucked in a gift card to JoAnn's.  

To let my sneaky side show through, part of the reason why I liked this gift so much is because it was actually our church's young women's camp fundraiser.  Dads could buy the "flour bouquet" for Mother's Day, or moms could buy it as an end of year teacher gift.  We also sold individual cookies on a stick.  All thanks to my good friend Kristin, who got the good idea together with a useful purpose.   

It was a very successful fundraiser, especially because we would have otherwise been selling hotdogs in front of Sam's Club with the Boy Scouts.

images via lee-knight.com and T-Woods through flickr.com

The Tale of Three Trees

retold by Angela Elwell Hunt

illustrations by Tim Jonke

Sometimes things don't always work out the way you'd planned.  Three trees on a hill had great visions for their futures.  One wanted to become a beautiful chest to be filled with treasure.  The second wanted to become a great sailing ship to travel mighty waters and carry powerful kings.  The third wanted to remain on the mountain and grow so tall, people would see her and think of God in heaven.

But all three met a woodcutter's ax and turned out to be something far different from what they had dreamed.  One became a feedbox, the second became a fisherman's boat, the third became a beam, tossed aside in a lumberyard.  But that wasn't the end for those three trees.

Like I said before, sometimes things don't always work out the way you'd planned.  However, when we fashion ourselves to be useful to God's purposes, we can become so much more.

Have a wonderful Easter.  

image via ebooknetworking.com

Parts

by Tedd Arnold

Soliloquy... oxymoron... onomatopoeia...          Jibberish?  Or do they linger somewhere with your vague memories of sort-of paying attention in English class?  Plain old memorization of terms doesn't work with me, but show me a cute book like this and I've firmly planted the definition of "idiom" in my brain (and no, I didn't mean "idiot," thank you very much.)

 

So what's an "idiom"?  The boy in this book doesn't know an idiom isan expression that doesn't literally mean what the words say.  See how disturbed he becomes as he thinks about his coach "jumping out of his skin," his friend's baby sister "screaming her lungs out" and what his grandma wants him to do when she tells him, "hold your tongue."  (All idioms...see, you're getting it already!)  Don't worry, this isn't a grammar book.  You won't find the word "idiom" anywhere on it.  It's just a fun book that's apparently good enough to have a sequel...  

and another....

Great book for any age--even if your child doesn't understand the common phrases in the book, he will spend countless hours loving the pictures.

images via imperialbeachkids.webs.com, and vanillajoy.com

Bean and Plant

by Christine Back and Barrie Watts

Are you getting a garden ready right now?  Even if you aren't, this is a fantastic book for showing kids what's going on under the dirt with plants that produce our food.  The pictures are excellent quality and very close up, so you can see exactly what's happening.  

The book can be read by a beginning reader if they just read the top line of each page.  If you want to learn more about what's going on in the picture, you can read the smaller print.

The end of the book has 6 pictures for your little one to put in a sequenced order:  first the seed, then the root grows...

I highly recommend this book.  I like it so much I'm going to go ahead and recommend the book "Tadpole and Frog" by the same authors, without even reading it.  I'm sure they will not disappoint.

*update: I've read Tadpole and Frog---and LOVE it!

images via images.albiris.com

Big Al

by Andrew Klements 

illustrated by Yoshi

You couldn't find a kinder fish than Big Al, but he still had no friends.  The problem was Big Al was a very, very scary looking fish.

Big Al really wanted friends, so he tried disguising himself, changing how he looked and even  hiding himself in the sand.  Nothing he did made any fish get close enough to find out how great Big Al was on the inside. 

Big Al finally gets through to the fish not by hiding his ugliness, but by using it to protect them.  But the story doesn't end there...

I thought of this book while grocery shopping this week.  I found my 3 year old intensely staring down a woman who was missing all fingers on both hands.  Later reading this book helped us talk about how we will never know how beautiful people are on the inside if we treat them like they are scary (like the fish did).  Just because some people are different on the outside it doesn't mean they are different on the inside. 

images available for purchase as giclee prints through yoshikogo.com

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