Another Greg Foley written and illustrated winner is Purple Little Bird (2011, Balzer + Bray). In this story, Purple Little Bird loves everything purple. One day, he feels he’s missing something and he goes on an adventure looking for what it could be. No other place he finds feels like home, but he finds what he was

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Do You Know Which Ones Will Grow? by Susan Shea (2011, Blue Apple Books) is simple, delightfully fun picture book for the discerning child. Using windowed lift-the-flap pages, Shea asks which things around us grow, using familiar growing progression as a comparison. For example, my favorite one was this, “if a kit grows and becomes

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In a fantastic dream, a young boy travels to the moon in a plane in the picture book Moon Plane by Peter McCarty (Henry Holt, 2006). Once there, he walks and jumps on the moon, which feels like flying. There is little science in this book, since of course airplanes don’t fly out of the

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Leslie McGuirk’s “discovered alphabet” in If Rocks Could Sing (Tricycle Press, 2011) gives life to rocks by discovering everything from birds and dogs to kicking and noses in the rocks themselves. Although my son loves alphabet books, I must admit that I usually find them rather tiresome and redundant. Leslie McGuirk’s alphabet is anything but

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In a simple rhythm and using bright and realistic paintings of animals, Nadia Krilanovich introduces animal and their sounds to the young reader in Chicken Chicken Duck (Tricycle Press, 2011). The animals are all stacked on top of each other in silly ways, and they are also painted on a plain white background, which is

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Previously by Allan Ahlberg, illustrated by Bruce Ingman is a different type of fairy tale. It goes backwards, showing that each nursery rhyme or fairy tale characters came from somewhere else. showing the effect of the action before showing the action. It begins, for example, with Goldilocks: Goldilocks arrived home all bothered and hot. And

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The story of Goldilocks and her visit to an unoccupied house of three bears has inspired a plethora of picture books, retellings, and rewritten accounts of the story. Robert Southey first recorded the folkloric story in an 1834 collection. (See Wikipedia for a rundown of the story’s history and reincarnations). As I mentioned when I

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From the moment he awakens in the morning, my four-year-old son’s best friends are by his side. They live in Busytown, which is sometimes directly above our house and other times underground, where it snows in April. Goldbug is his best friend (sometimes he is my son’s brother), with Huckle, Sally, and Hilda Hippo frequently

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