9th March Napping Day

In America today it is Napping Day and in Britain for the whole month of March it is Bed Month. What fun celebrating these two occasions is with children's books! There are so many books to choose from. Today I had such fun with my preschool classes. We read The Napping House by Audrey Wood. We listed all the words she had used for 'sleep' ... doze, slumber, nap, snooze...we sequenced pictures to show who was on the bed and what order they hopped on. We talked about why the bed broke and the children had lots of good ideas. And then we used Penny Dale's Ten in the Bed  to sing and act out the song. (Of course there are other picture books of the song that you could use instead.)  The children were then keen to borrow another 'bed' book from our large display of bed and sleep books. I love it when something I plan works well!

8th June Judy Sierra (1945) Penny Dale (1954) Best Friend's Day

I wrote about American author Judy Sierra's birthday last year, but this week I purchased Mind Your Manners, B.B. Wolf! for a unit of work on 'wolves and fairytales' which I have planned for a Year 1 enrichment program and I was so excited by it that I had to write about Judy's birthday again so I could tell the world what a good book it is! B.B.Wolf visits the library (any book with a library in it is worth reading...) and resists all temptation to eat anything. It is such a giggle. Now I need to order Tell the Truth, B.B. Wolf! which is also illustrated by J.Otto Seibold and which I didn't know about till now when I looked at Judy's website.

It is also British author illustrator Penny Dale's birthday. She is well known to the children in my library because of Ten in the Bed and Ten Out of Bed which are on the Premier's Reading Challenge list. She has several other books though which are just as worth reading and her most recent one, Dinosaur Dig is sure to be a hit because it has preschool boys' three favourite things, dinosaurs, diggers and building sites.

And thirdly, it is Best Friend's Day, a good day to search out all those best friends in literature such as:

• Frog and Toad by Arnold Lobel

• George and Martha by James Marshall

• Houndsley and Catina by James Howe and Marie-Louise Gay

• Dog and Bear by Laura Vaccaro Seeger

• Gossie and Gertie by Olivier Dunrea

• Benny and Penny by Geoffrey Hayes

• Bear and Chook by Lisa Shanahan and Emma Quay

• Cat and Fish by Joan Grant and Neil Curtis

24th May Brother's Day

It is interesting that today is designated as Brother's Day because with my enrichment group today the word 'brother' was a topic of discussion because one of the group had read Gerald Rose's book How St Frances Tamed the Wolf and in the text St Francis called the wolf, Brother Wolf and she wanted to know why. A very fruitful discussion followed about how words could have meanings other than their literal one or common one and that they could also have 'shades of meaning'. I thought this of particular interest because the group of children were all five or six years old.

On the subject of brothers, in the more regular sense, my favourite books are Penny Dale's Big Brother, Little Brother and Margaret Mahy's The Seven Chinese Brothers. None of these three books are new, but all are well worth searching a library for.