Bear’s Birthday by Stella Blackstone and illustrated by Debbie Harter (Barefoot Books, June 2011) lets us celebrate Bear’s birthday with all of his friends. Apparently, this is part of a series about Bear and his bear friends; I’ll be first to admit this is the first I’ve found. I’ll have to keep an eye out for the others. We greatly enjoyed reading it. Bear and his friends play all the fun birthday games that my son loves and couldn’t wait to play at his own party. They have cake. They open presents. What’s not to love?
Each page also has one less balloon than the previous page, since they kept popping. My son loved looking for the popping balloons, and he loved counting how many were left. A fun book for birthdays1!
Because I have the wonderful honor of being a Round 1 Judge for the Fiction Picture Books, I get to read about 200 books (so far, at least) published in the last year that have been nominated. To help me keep track of my thoughts on the books I’ve read and in order to share the love of books with each of you, I’m going to try to post on a few of the fun books each week.
This week, since my son just had his fourth birthday, I thought it might be fun to look at some books somehow related to birthdays.
What birthday picture books have you enjoyed? My son still wants it to be his birthday, so I’m sure he’d welcome more books on the subject!
- Since my son’s fourth birthday was last week, I actually used it at the party. (We had a reading/Super Why theme.) I added the word “birthday” in key places as I read the story and the kids were to blow their noisemakers whenever they heard that word. Let’s just say they loved the game! I’m pretty sure they didn’t hear the story at all because they were too busy making noise again and again! But then, isn’t that the point? ↩
