PICTURE BOOK - Up in the Garden and Down in the Dirt by Kate Messner

Illustrated by Christopher Silas Neal

2015, Chronicle Books (SF)

48 pgs.

Goodreads rating: 4.1 - 794 ratings

My rating:  5

Endpapers: Beige with brown line drawings of plants and garden tools

Illustrations:  No white border, actually no white: all beige, edge of page to edge of page...

1^st line/s:  "Up in the garden, I stand and plan ---
my hands full of seeds and my head full of dreams."

My comments:  Great information about gardens, soil, planting, and seasons, this reads as a fiction book but is full of information for little ones.  It also has beautiful language, lots of alliteration, and great rhythm.  I read it aloud to eight preschoolers, holding all their attention, and will use it with my STEM "Down and Dirty" (soils) summer camp at the library.  

Goodreads:  In this exuberant and lyrical follow-up to the award-winning Over and Under the Snow, discover the wonders that lie hidden between stalks, under the shade of leaves . . . and down in the dirt. Explore the hidden world and many lives of a garden through the course of a year! Up in the garden, the world is full of green—leaves and sprouts, growing vegetables, ripening fruit. But down in the dirt exists a busy world—earthworms dig, snakes hunt, skunks burrow—populated by all the animals that make a garden their home.

Chirchir is Singing – Kelly Cunnane

Illustrated by Jude Daly

Schwartz & Wade Books, 2011

HC $17.99

32 pages

Rating:  4.5

Endpapers:  Brown earth with a few floating musical notes

Title Page:  her family, walking across the page.  Full color.

Illustrations:  cover most of page, in acrylics.  Sparse yet detailed.  Give a real feel for the setting.

Setting:  Contemporary northwestern Kenya, Kalenjin tribe

OSS:  Young Chirchir wants to help her family with the chores, but is a little too young to be able to actually help.

We meet Chirchir’s family as they are working.  Mama, who is drawing water from the well; Kogo, her grandmother, tending fire to cook chai; Ji-Bet, her sister, spreading a fresh layer of cow dung and ashes on the floor of the kitchen hut; Baba, her father, digging potatoes in the hill garden.  She sings everywhere she goes.  And so she sings to her baby brother, which keeps him entertained , as her voice travels to the rest of her family and keeps them happy, too.

Great language…simile and metaphor, with info in the back about this culture and a glossary and pronounciationguide for the Swahili words used.

The Hinky Pink - Megan McDonald

Illustrated by Brian Floca
Published 2008
Rating: 4
Endpapers: Pumpkin

Similes and metaphors: "Her stitches were straight as a new set of teeth. Her French knots were perfect roses. Her lace, why it was as wispy as any spider web in the kingdom." Alliteration and elipses: "If only she could embroider silk and satin, touch velvet and voile..." Great vocabulary: "Holy ratatouille!" "Poodle curls as plain as pennoni." Great verbs: loomed, creaked, snatched, peered,

This is a terrific folk tale, based on another but twisted and turned and recreated by Megan McDonald. There are a couple of places that I thought there was something missing, even going so far as to see if two pages were stuck together. Other than that, it was good storytelling. She might have even gone a little overboard with the figurative language, so this would be a great teaching tool for many reasongs.

Anabel, a young seamstress who dreams of creating and stitchin a ball gown, is called to the home of a princess and given one week to do so. They give her a beautiful tower room in which to live and sew, but she finds she cannot sleep. Something is pinching her and stealing her covers all night long. She ingeniously figures out how to solve this problem just before it's too late and she'll not finish the beautiful gown she's making. But, as we know will happen, all comes out perfectly, tra la!

Lots of text, very cute illustrations, good story. This works together well. I'd love to read it to kids and ask them to watch for places that it needs a few more details to get from one point to the next! Transitions, organization.....

First Line/s: 'Back when mirrors could talk and princes were frogs, there lived a girl in Old Italy named Anabel. Alas, not Anabella."

Bubble Trouble - Margaret Mahy

Illustrated by Polly Dunbar
Pub 2008 in UK, 2009 in US
$16.00
Rating: 5
Endpapers: Blue, Green, White Bubbles in the sky

"Little Mabel blew a bubble, and it caused a lot of trouble...
Such a lot of bubble trouble in a bibble-bobbly way.
For it broke away from Mabel as it bobbed across the table,
where it bobbled over Baby, and it wafted him away."

Page after page of adventure, rhyme, and rhythm, as the entire town starts to chase after the baby floating in the bubble. Nineteen four-line stanzas. What a perfect production for a class to practice tongue-twisting, alliterataive, rhythmic verse. For MY class to practice, to memorize, to perform. I can't wait!

The illustrations are definitely cute and go well with the story, but it's the words that grabbed me here.....words to love (especially the verbs....) bobbed, bobbled, wafted, quibble, dribble, reeling, bellowed, groveled, babble, hobble, squable, tattered, tartan, gabble, gibbering, goggling, vanish, hovel, cavorting, aloft, huddled, grapple, topple, clambered, nefarious, plunged, gargles, quiver, drivel, shrivel, wilt, swivel, divested, dumbfounded, rebounded, prattle. Wowee!

Stitchin' and Pullin' a Gee's Bend Quilt - Patricia C. McKissack

Illustrator: Cozbi A. Cabrera
For: Anybody who loves quilts!
Published: Oct., 2008
Rating: 5/Wonderful book
Read: 12/18/08
Endpapers: folky painted quilts-red white, and black on the left, multi-greens on the right.
With INTRODUCTION and informative AUTHOR'S NOTE.

Who Would Have Thought....

For as long as anybody can remember,
the women of Gees Bend
have stitched up quilts ---
to be slept on and under,
sat on at a picnic,
wrapped in when sick,
or covered with while reading
on a cold winter night.

Who would have thought
that one day those same quilts
would be hanging on museum walls,
their makers famous?
Who would have ever thought?

Told in free verse poems using beautiful, gorgeous, figurative language, clever conventions, and WOWZER articulation...

Gee's Bend got the hiccups from
all the excitement
of cameras clicking,
writers scribbling on pads,
people talking breathlessly,
never waiting for answers.

I saw an exhibition of Gee's Bend Quilts last year at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco. This book is full of history -- of Gee's Bend, Alabama, of the civil rights movement, of pieces of American history, the art of storytelling, the art of quiltmaking -- all coming togther in the now-famous story of the quilts and quiltmakers of Gee's Bend, Alabama.